John Rush

curtailing the dopamine fueled infinite scroll apps and not allowing those onto the platform and i think parents would buy this earlier i think parents will eventually be beaten down by teenagers and just wind up buying iphones but for the middle schoolers i think a lot of parents would be happy to buy something that's like

you know decent quality kind of ruggedized kind of fun cool style doesn't look like an apple product doesn't look like a status symbol couple hundred bucks basic features and it's something that can maybe help the kid with homework or questions or learn about the world keep them connected a little bit but not overwhelm them with the dopamine fueled apps and i think that

for these hardware companies, they always run into this problem where, I mean, this was a case study with Humane where it's ex-Apple people. And so all their investors are like, you have to beat Apple. And it's like, Apple's a multi-trillion dollar company. You have to full send it at that point. And so they made a lot of decisions that only make sense if you are fundamentally prepared

rejecting the idea that Apple just has a monopoly on a lot of things in the mobile device world. And so the Humane AI pin, it had a separate phone number. It wouldn't interact with your phone because they were like, oh, well, we don't want to link into the phone because then Apple will have control over us. We want to make the new platform.

And you see this a lot with like the Oculus device that Zuck's been working on. Like it's always kind of clunky because it's like, wait, why doesn't this just pair with my iPhone? Because like my iPhone's great, but it's like, yeah, we can't because he needs to go to war with Apple. Like he does not want to lose. And so, but for this, it wouldn't really matter if it like,

was set up through the the parents phone or whatever because you're you're not trying to do this crazy thing where like you need to get the 30 app store fee and you need to own the the relationship forever and you also need the the device metrics and you need the tracking in the ads network and you need all these things like because maybe with this one you're not immediately targeting a trillion dollar business you're just thinking like okay i'm gonna put this on instagram

advertise it to parents and every time that there's like a new school year right at summer and maybe christmas i'm doing a big push and yeah i'm gonna sell like a hundred thousand units for a hundred bucks each or something that's 10 million dollars like this is a pretty sizable business but it's not going to be hyper scale and then and then over time maybe you do iterations maybe you add features and maybe this does turn out to be a way to attack apple and really take part of their market share because

Maybe eventually people do get sick of the crazy phones with all the addictive apps and stuff. But I don't think you need to have that happen in order to be successful. So you don't need to raise quite as much money. You don't need to go quite as crazy.

And I think you can constantly be counter positioned against Apple with like really quirky designs, just stuff that completely breaks their design language, where if they tried to launch something like what you're making, it would be very weird and antithetical to their brand. They've done this before with...

with the Tile app, which was a little tracker, a little Bluetooth tracker that you put on your keys. That business was doing phenomenally because everyone, no one wants to lose their keys. But the problem was, is that then Apple saw it and they were like, oh, we want that money. And so they launched the AirTag and the Tile is like the square white, it looks like an Apple product.

And so the AirTag is circular and white. It looks like an Apple product. And so all the Tile customers just moved over immediately. The same thing happened with the Pebble watch. It was designed with an Apple brand language, so it was very easy to just be like, well, I'll just get an Apple Watch.

But if you design something that is explicitly anti-Apple from the ground up, they're going to have a harder time being like, well, actually, the Apple brand is sleek. titanium and it's also like quirky pink plastic with a bunch of ruggedized stuff on it. Like it'll be a little bit harder for them to make that pitch.

And then they're also never going to be in a situation where they, where Apple says, Hey, we're launching a device and we deliberately nerfed it so it doesn't have an app store. and you can't install TikTok or Roblox. They're just never going to do that.

And so you have this kind of counter-positioned value prop where, sure, you might not be able to ever get that big and win over the business guy who's going to buy the latest iPhone every year, but you're not in a category where Apple's going to come and just destroy your business one year.

Um, so I think that there's something there that's like an interesting tidy business where you could just create like a lot of delight and you have a lot of room to play and experiment. And look, if, if some of the features are a little rough around the edges or a little wonky, as long as they're safe and they're not putting the kid in harm's way and

it's really not that big of a deal if it's miscategorizing a dog and a cat or something. But as long as it's not showing them something offensive. So I think that's a really fun place to play. And I think it's underexplored. And I think that increasingly, there are more and more millennials who are tech consumers. Some of them are prosumers.

Like, you know, you and I, we have like professional cameras and professional microphones and stuff. Like we know how to buy like, you know, electronics at a higher tier. And a lot of millennials have kids now. And so they're thinking about the same thing. It's not the boomer generation where you need to really do all this education. It's pretty easy to sell a millennial on that.

The problem is that if you sell it and the millennials, the end user, they're going to be really, really rigorous and be like, are there any problems? It's very similar to starting a company that targets animal owners. So like dog food companies have been one of the few categories in direct-to-consumer that have done fantastically.

And the reason is because your dog doesn't tell you if they're sick of their food. Like, if you start a human food company, the human will be like, you know what? I'm sick of that particular brand of beef jerky. I'm trying something new. But the dog will eat the same dog food for 10 years. And so the churn is just super low.

And the kids, you know, the kids will say, oh, you know, I don't like this or whatever. But it's a lower bar. And so I think there's just more room to play more room to experiment. It's fun. I, I, I miss, I fundamentally miss the era of gadgetry.