Episode 174: Bringing Transparency And Real Savings To Everyday Grocery Shoopers | Andy Ellwood, Founder and CEO of Stretch

Welcome to the next in time podcast where we explore the fascinating depths of how people have the potential of impacting the world with a mission and vision of their project. Join us on this audio journey as we uncover the hidden gems of one's vision. Delve in the thought provoking discussions of why they're pursuing it and see how they're going to make an impact. If you're a curious person, this podcast is your go-to destination. Welcome to the next in time podcast. I'm a host, ST and today are guest as Andy Lwood, who is the founder and CEO of Stretch, launching the first shopping intelligence platform to bring transparency and real savings to everyday grocery shoppers. He's a Texas upbringing as the oldest of four started started is where he started a bunch of businesses and he's looking to really solve the issues of shoppers. So Andy, welcome to show. I think so. What's around me? Yeah, great to have you on and really just I'm really kind of curious like what is your what is the mission of vision behind stretch. I think that every good founder, every good entrepreneur I know finds a problem that they kind of fall in love with eradicating. Yeah, and you know, I, you know, I am a person who cannot believe that in 2026 in the richest country and the rest of the world that we have citizens of all country that have food insecurity. And that's the big problem right now. I was like, we no matter what we do, we just have insecurity about of over resources. Like we are supposed to be like, alright, and we have so much wealth and we have so much wealth that like all everyone can just live a little live a more comfortable life than what we're supposed to be. Yeah, yeah. And so it just drives me nuts that you know, people are stressing out about how am I going to feed my family. And that's basically that's what you call third world way of thinking is like, okay, how can I feed my family? No, it's like when you get into the first way of things like how can I live life. Right, right. And there's so many people that are literally struggling, you know, month over month to make sure they have had enough food for their for their kids, for their family for, you know, for their parents that moved in with them now. It's just, you know, it's just crazy to me. And so, I think that lack of transparency and lack of visibility into how much things actually cost is a piece of the puzzle. And so that's what stretches is started off the tag team is is bringing visibility to this week's shopping list. You know, if you tell me what's on your grocery list this week, I'll tell you every store close by it carries those products and then what the total price is for your higher massive goods. And I think it's, you know, it's pretty wild and that still does not exist for grocery. Yeah, we have it for we have for most of the things that we buy. If you want to buy a home, you go to Zillow, if you want to buy a car, you know, an auto trader, if you want to buy a flight, you go to speedy, but to buy this week's grocery was I just hope that the store that I'm, you know, parked that and walked into a cart carries everything and they're going to charge me a fair price. But there's no real way to know until you actually go to the store. And then once you go to the store, there's no real way to compare for this basket, you know, for these 40 products, how much would it be at the store that's a mile away. And so we think that there's a big opportunity to serve shoppers that way. And what was like, you know, the thing about shopping is that it's I have, you know, inflation is gone is going out of control. So. Yeah, that's kind of where we're at. But yeah, where are you, but before we go into what you're doing, look, before we go into where you're building, tell me more about who you are, what you're trying to get into. Yeah, so you mentioned the oldest with four kids, group in the Dallas area, studied finance and college and have always had a bench towards towards building things and trying, trying what new solution in place. And, you know, I think that growing up building Legos, you know, made me a curious person like, yeah, you could build it the way the instructions tell you to, but what happens if you take it all apart and you combine it with another Lego set. You know, what could you build something even cooler. And so I think that, you know, I'm okay with taking things apart and rebuilding them if you can make it matter. And so that's what I've been doing with the companies that I've built and hope that that's what we're building a stretch. So, so how many businesses have you started prior? Seven. Seven. It's like, like, what did you learn in each of these and each of these better than these experiences. But you can't ever rest on what's always worked that every every time you sell to build something new, you still have to do step one, you still have to do stuff to do stuff to do stuff to do. I think that's, you know, probably the, you know, the thing that a lot of repeat. Founders a lot of repeat entrepreneurs. Sometimes, you know, there's a mistake made that they're saying, oh, yeah, we'll just do it again. But, you know, for this idea for this product or, you know, this year. And so I think that's where, you know, I'm always looking looking to, you know, kind of a beginner's mindset. And if you show up with a beginner's mindset and don't assume you know how to do anything. But you really just double check your work and, you know, pretty, pretty strenuous with. And you're not struggling with the vision, but not strenuous with the way in which you do it. You can learn a lot and, you know, the whole way to find a new level of success. Yeah. And so your vision is like a long tail equal. Sorry, sorry, before we go into it, you say you move, you were from Texas, but then you moved to New York. So, what was that journey like? I was working for a New York based company in Texas. I was working with them. And so I kept going to New York for for work. And when I did, I was like, you know, at the seas, this is the energy that I want. This is the energy that, you know, that I'm excited about being a part of at least for a little bit. And that was, that was 16 years ago. So, obviously, kind of found found my people found my crazies. Most other places in the world are easier to live than New York, but you love New York. You love New York. You know, it's kind of like blue cheese. Yeah, not every like blue cheese, but if you like blue cheese, you love blue cheese. Yeah, how do you compare New York to Texas? The thing about both New York and Texas is there, if you're from there, you're very proud of being somewhere. And I think that's what I love about those. You know, I live on an island in New York, Feldman Hatten, that is, you know, which part of West part of Manhattan. Branch Village, West to Washington Square Park. Right. That's where all the crew. That's where I all the the creatives and entrepreneurial folks live, right? Yeah. Yeah. And then our often very union square. So, you know, it's, I'm grateful to it. I'm grateful to look pretty, pretty centrally located, but you know, it's, yeah, if you, you know, if you love New York, it's, it's a better place on earth. And so where do you, so now it's fast forward to now when you got this company started. So what is it about stretch that you found fascinating? I know you, do you tell me about you trying to solve the issue of growth from dropping? What was the personal thing? The pain point that you solved that you're trying to solve? Yeah, I, you know, growing up as the eldest of four, you know, my parents were always getting treated with the way, you know, that they bought groceries to feed all of us, you know, for growing kids in the house. And so, you know, so I saw kind of the mental mask that they did, you know, to, you know, try and fail to go to and which store was going to have the best best options for them on any given. And when I think about, you know, what technology has evolved to and what it can do for us now, you know, it's, it seems like the right way to to be using this technology to help real people. Right. And so, and we, so this is more like what you're trying to do is solve like re-imagined growth, we're shopping, right, helping people solve my problems in a way, right? Yeah, interesting, interesting. So, so telling more about like, how were you able, so you started this in last year. And so what was, how were you able, what was that journey like? I'll be in 2025, 2026 is wild, you know, I'm really grateful, you know, to have a play a barometer to use on on whether it's worth, you know, learning the new technology or not. You know, I would be overwhelmed if I didn't have a focus right now, you know, a certain place to be putting, you know, the new tests and the new technologies that are coming out, you know, the speed with which, you know, you can build things these days, it was pretty incredible. But also, you know, you have to be discerning, right, about what is worth your time and what's not. But, you know, I'm a non-technical founder, but, you know, I, I used cloud code. I used cloud code work all the time to, you know, to do things faster. Definitely, cloud is like the big thing now with, you know, trying to make this is make trying to build an application from scratch. Yeah, yeah, it's, and it's, you know, the, the, the speed with which you can test the things, right, you can build a project in, you know, a couple hours. And, you know, then you can test that project and you can say, hey, what would it look like if, if we did this way, what would it look like if we did this way. instead of having drawing it and then sort of having to figure out what's it and then you know, say that to a developer to code it, you know, you can, you know, the AI will assist you and you know, just give you the ability to be like, is that actually what you meant? No, it's not really what I meant. You know, this is, you know, here's where I wasn't clear on my, you know, on my instructions, you know, like, you know, the number one code in language now is English, right? It's not, you know, it's not any of the things that, you know, that, that, uh, like the authors used to have to have to use it, you know, it's just, can you very clearly describe what you, what your vision is? And then, you know, the, the the code takes, takes care of us. Interesting. So you just like write it all up. You know, you don't have a technical co-founder for this or you just doing, I have technical team members. We did just hire our CTO. And so I'm grateful because we're building a huge platform. But for you know, for concepts, right? For, you know, if I'm working on, you know, something that, you know, a client or a feature partner, you know, some that would help, you know, help people are excited about well, we're building, being able to code that and, you know, show them a prototype, you know, in a couple of hours and suppose to, yeah, you know, we'll put it on our roadmap. And six weeks from now, people will show you something. It's a big difference. Right. Just, and I know something had, I don't know, there was like a tragic story that happened, like, you know, you lost your lead investor in a plane crash. Or something. Yeah, for a past couple of weeks. Yeah, those wild. So what, what happened there was like that kind of was that as like you lost really, it was like, okay, you're supposed to, that investor was supposed to put in all his money. And then for some reason now with that plane crash, everything just like fell apart. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was early 2019. And, you know, we were, we were counting on that investment coming in. And three days before he was supposed to send the money, he was firing himself and a friend from San Francisco up to their vineyard. And they crashed the time and he passed away. And so, you know, it, it was, was a very, very significant moment. How are you able to bounce back from that type of scenarios, the stitches, that type of situation? Yeah, well, we did our best. But unfortunately, been the pandemic happened in 2020. And so that ultimately was why that company, you know, ended up failing. It was kind of a combination of things. But, you know, I think that, you know, in hindsight, there's a lot of, a lot of things that I wish we would have been able to be more intentional about. You should have been talking, we should have, you know, talked to a lot more investors and had, you know, a deeper bench in our network of people who knew about what we were building, knew about the power of what we were building. It was that, you know, that company, but, you know, it took me a lot of recovery from it. I'll just go to that one. Okay. And I'm looking at your platform. So what, it, so how do you put, how are you trying to frame this application where your groceries, like when you're trying to purchase groceries, it should be a seamless process. Absolutely. Yeah. Well, I think that, from the moment that you think I need milk, to the moment that you're putting milk away in your fridge, you should be in control the whole time. And right now, you know, you're not really in control, right? You don't know which stores carry those products. You don't know if they're in stock. You don't know how much they're going to charge you. And that's, you know, that's just across one item, but they'd imagine it across the entire shopping list. And so I think that, that's, you know, where, you know, we think that technology is empowering shoppers in a way that they've never, they've never felt before. And so, it looks like we're excited to be a part of it. I mean, let's, let's, for example, if I go to Trader Joe's, right? I won't go there. Like, how would you, how would I imagine myself trying to organize my shop by shopping list? So the platform it does is just, you know, it gives you the list of, listen, groceries. And then you just kind of like milk it. Like you just put it all in one go and then you kind of do like, pay it up front or do you pay it when you just like, pay it over there or what's the, what's that? Yeah. So I think Trader Joe's really interesting example because Trader Joe's only carries Trader Joe's brands. So if you wanted to say, hey, this is my, my usual Trader Joe shopping list, what our platform is able to do is actually show you what are, what are those products at every other store also. So if you know, Trader Joe's has, you know, tie dumplings. Yeah. So there's dollar general and so there's Whole Foods and so does Walmart. And so being able to actually compare similar products, even that are not the exact same at their stores, you might be able to find a store that's closer to you. You might be able to find a store that has a better price for your whole basket of goods. I think that's something that that shoppers have never experienced before, but we're really hopeful that stretch is going to be the first thing that they do and that they will come back again and again afterwards. And why is so how is it that you're trying to set yourself apart? Because I've met several people who are in the similar, who are trying to reimagine growth for a shop and trying to make the whole, the shopping experience seem seamless. So how are you trying to stand up from the rest of the crowd? Yeah, we are the, we're the only platform that is connected to prices and to inventory. And so having that, you know, having that as, as we're the beginning point, you know, we're retailer agnostic, right? Every, every other shopping experience in, you can only shop at the specific store, which you pick. We're saying start with your list. Don't start with a store. And I think that's a really big big difference for us. Well, and why is it that? Here, what, so what, let's say for example, I am someone who is a, like I say, like a retailer, like so basically, I'm, we're trying, what you're trying to do is also serve as both the customers and the retail owners, right? Is that what you're trying, is that what you're saying? We're focused on shoppers first. We're, we're focused on shoppers to be able to, or is it like a two front platform, like, you know, one section for the shoppers and the other for the retailers? We, we, we have a lot of potential partnerships with retailers and with brands. But we're focused on building for the shoppers first. All right. And so, okay, I'm just trying to look, I'm like looking around, I'm trying to, like, I'm just trying to like imagine the product myself, and I'm trying to deal with it. But let's say, if, let's say, if you have like a personal shopping assistant, right? And just, so how are you, how are you able to really give the recommendations, to recommendations to the customer? Yeah, because of your shopping history, we learn a lot about you pretty quickly. And so we use that, you know, the personalization to be able to know what products to recommend, and also which stores recommend. You know, loyalty discounts, coupons, promos, you know, all play into, into pricing, all play into, you know, how, how a shop and make stainless systems. And so we do our best to make sure that we're, we're incorporating all that into the feedback that we get. And the more that you use stretch, the better stretch becomes that gives you and finding finding the best deals and waste being the same time and money. So where do you see this going the next couple of years? I think that they, you know, we have a lot of work ahead of us, but we're already launched nationwide. You know, the app is available for download at both the iPhone and Android stores, just search stretch groceries. And we will be very successful when we are saving every family in America over $1,000 a year on their groceries. Cool. I think we're just going to wrap this up, Andy. I think thank you so much for coming on the show and wishing the best of luck with stretch. Thanks so much. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Next and Time podcast. We hope you enjoyed diving into the intriguing vision of our guests today. Don't forget to subscribe and follow us on social media to stay updated on future episodes. If you have any suggestions or feedback, we'd love to hear from you. Until next time, stay curious and keep exploring.