For the past few months, I've climbed what I call Cringe Mountain almost every morning. It's the best product research we've ever done.
Stretch is a small team with limited resources compared to the giants in our industry. We don't have the luxury of long product cycles and months of user testing. We have our gut, our vision for the future we're building, and a need to talk to our end user at the speed our team ships product, faster than I've ever seen before - thanks, Claude.
So most mornings, I walk into a nondescript grocery store on the way to the office and record a video about what we're building and why it matters. Straight to camera, one take, walking the outer aisle of a sleepy store. Start in produce, past the pasta, through the beverages, and finish in frozen. Go back and watch the videos. You'll see that same walk behind me every time.
At first, not much happened. A few likes from friends. Nothing to write about.
Then it happened. And then it happened again. The algorithm found the audience, and it made all the difference.
One video last month crossed a million views. Another has over a thousand comments. I've been invited to appear on more than 35 podcasts since January. All told, since Stretch launched, my videos have racked up 2.3 million views and 7,400 comments.
Views and comments are vanity metrics for a noisy internet. Not the thing I'm proud of. What I'm proud of is that Stretch made people stop what they were doing to tell me why they cared, that they'd been wanting a product like this, and how we could make it better.
Groceries are up 35% since the pandemic. A weekly trip costs what a flight home to see my family used to. Feeding a family is a full-contact sport now, and loyalty to any one store has never been lower. Shoppers want their most expensive chore of the week to get a little easier.
None of this was new to us. Last summer, Stretch ran a survey of over a thousand shoppers, and the picture was already stark. Nearly half said groceries cost more than they can afford. Almost 1 in 5 were leaning on credit or borrowed money to cover the bill. Most were splitting trips across stores to hunt for a better price, and half would drive an extra ten minutes to bring the basket down. We built Stretch because the shopper was already telling us, in the data, exactly what they needed.
So I read the comments. Every one of them. The internet is not always kind, but a pattern showed up anyway.
First, thank you for building something like this.
Second, here's how it can be better for me and the way my family shops.
And it wasn't only shoppers. I've been fortunate to hear from C-suite executives at some of the biggest retailers and CPG brands. There are good people across this industry working hard to serve their customers and hit their numbers. What they're telling me is that AI is handing shoppers real power in the equation for the first time, and it's making everyone rethink how groceries get marketed and sold. Shoppers having a seat at the table is new. The old playbook is shifting under everyone, all at once. And the question at the center of it stays stubbornly hard to answer: How much do my groceries cost this week, and what are my options?
Every month since we started, I've sent our investors an update, and I ask them to push back on it. Many of them are executives from huge retailers, brands, and consumer tech companies, and they bring much-needed perspective and the right amount of rigor to my founder optimism. They're on this team too, and their feedback has shaped as many decisions as anyone's.
All of this feedback is a gift. It's also a lot of pressure. Stretch has tapped into something, and our team has never been clearer about what comes next or why it matters to both shoppers and the industry. The team is shipping insanely fast. The pressure isn't that we're behind. It's that the people on both sides want this so badly we feel the pull to get it into their hands sooner.
That's what makes launching Stretch 2.0 this week feel less like a product announcement and more like proof that the feedback loop works. We listened, and everything in this release is built on what shoppers told us they needed. Faster search. Better recommendations. Personalization that serves them.
The world has never been noisier, and it has never been easier to build something new. Distribution and finding real signal, paired with a team that has taste, is the whole game. The next chapter of Stretch has started, and I can't wait to see what our shoppers and partners think of what we build next.
If you haven't experienced Stretch recently, check out Stretch 2.0.
And please, let me know what you think. Feedback truly is a gift.
