Jake

OneTag: replace the barcode with cheap RFID for walk-out retail

A Michigan student pitches Aria's OneTag, a penny-cost RFID sticker that replaces barcodes so shoppers can bag items, walk through an antenna, and check out instantly like Amazon Go, while unlocking e-commerce data (abandoned cart, upsells, inventory) for physical stores.

“And so what this does, in addition to autonomous checkout, is it brings a bunch of e-commerce capabilities to retail. So now we have an e-commerce profile for a bunch of offline purchases, and this allows us to do abandoned cart recovery, personalized product upsells, uh, in-depth shopping data, and subscription reorders. There's also loss prevention built right in.”

Steal thisBring e-commerce-grade customer data and just-walk-out checkout to physical retail by swapping the barcode for a cheap RFID tag.

Tabs Chocolate: ~$2M revenue, $800K profit in year one

Jake, a 20-year-old Michigan sophomore, reveals his 'sex chocolate' brand Tabs Chocolate did about $2M in revenue with $800K profit in its first year, started exactly a year before the recording.

“It's actually less than $4 million. It's about $2 million this year. Got $800K profit and we started a year ago today.”