HubSpot: 🍽️ Pay what you want

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👋 Good morning. Does it sometimes feel like your child is controlling the family’s piggy bank? It’s not your imagination: Kids and teens ages 8-15 directly control $95B and influence big-picture household spending, according to a study from marketing firm DKC. The study of 1k parents of Gen Alpha kids found that 90% have modified their spending behavior based on their child’s preferences and 41% feel all household spending decisions are impacted by their child. Heads up, we heard from your CFO and she's bullish on Starbucks.

NEWS FLASH

👁️ Seeing is believing: Longevity startup Life Biosciences began human clinical trials of ER-100, a drug it claims can reverse age-related vision loss. The company said the drug has successfully restored sight for monkeys, and could one day be used for patients with glaucoma and NAION to rejuvenate cells and reverse optic nerve damage. If successful, the startup might one day try to reverse other age-related diseases across the body.

📈 Oh, you too? OpenAI filed for an IPO, which seems to be the cool thing to do if you’re a big, buzzy company like Anthropic or SpaceX. OpenAI hasn’t announced when it’ll go public and a post on its newsroom page said “it may be a while because there are things we want to do that are likely easier as a private company.” OpenAI's most recent valuation was $852B.

🏋️ Getting toned: Peloton has acquired Skōp, maker of a smart Pilates reformer that tracks users’ form in real time. Peloton says engagement with its current Pilates offering increased 48% YoY in Q3, and noted that Pilates is the fastest-growing fitness trend in the US. A Skōp machine isn’t cheap, retailing at ~$8k, nor is it the only smart reformer on the market. Dua Lipa is such a Pilates fan that she became a co-founder of Frame Fitness.

MORE NEWS TO KNOW

Makes sense: Best Buy is launching Meta Lab @ Best Buy, a shop-in-shop where customers can peruse Meta gear including AI glasses and VR headsets, across 50 locations this summer. It has a similar partnership with Ikea.
Paging Dr. Bot: Startup OpenEvidence says 50%+ of US physicians now regularly use its AI chatbot trained on medical journals and other research data.
Lovable indeed: Vibe-coding startup Lovable said it surpassed $500m in annual revenue and is used to build 1m+ new projects every week.
Keeping watch: Watch Duty, the app that helped millions track the Los Angeles wildfires, is rolling out flood tracking to give users information on precipitation, active warnings, river gauges, and real-time hazards like dam failures and downed bridges.

EMPLOY MORE AI

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THE BIG IDEA

Two customers at restaurant clink wine glasses over an array of food while a hand brandishes several paper bills.

Can pay-what-you-want restaurants work?

Paying what you feel like doesn't often work.

Buying a home? Ha. Paying taxes? Lol. Buying clothes? Hey, come back with those.

Some restaurants, however, are finding success with the idea.

L'Oca d'Oro, an Italian-inspired restaurant in Austin, Texas, is experimenting with a pay-what-you-want concept that may expand, per NPR.

"The Golden Goose"

As menu prices increase — along with, well, everything else — fewer Americans are dining out. Per LendingTree:

84% of people have cut back on restaurant spending
39% are eating out less
22% are choosing cheaper restaurants
13% eat at home and only go out for drinks, apps, or dessert

To entice budget-conscious customers, L'Oca d'Oro (or "The Golden Goose") offers Pay What You Will (PWYW) Tuesdays:

Customers order from the menu and pay however much they'd like.
Drinks are full price, and a 20% service charge and CC processing fees remain.
Guests who can pay more help subsidize others or can contribute to a GoFundMe.

Co-owners Adam Orman and Fiore Tedesco III created PWYW Tuesdays to welcome more Austinites regardless of budget to enjoy a level of hospitality drive-thrus can't replicate. While they admit PWYW upends conventional business strategy, they take heart in a generous, loving approach.

Most diners pay about two-thirds of their actual bill, a couple pay far less, and many pay the full amount.
Most nights the restaurant earns less than the full menu price.
But there's an average increase in traffic and revenue for a normally slow weekday.

The owners are now considering expanding PWYW over the summer.

PWYW successes and failures

Mark Bittman's Community Kitchen uses a sliding-scale model.
At Raleigh, North Carolina's A Place at the Table, diners pay the suggested price, donate a minimum, volunteer for a meal, or pay it forward.
Jon Bon Jovi's JBJ Soul Kitchen offers a similar approach.
At Taste Project in Texas, guests pay what they can.
At SAME Cafe in Denver, customers can pay what they can, volunteer for 30 minutes, or donate produce.

But PWYW hasn't worked for everyone. In 2010, Panera attempted the concept — inspired by SAME — but by 2019 shuttered all locations.

While a corporate chain may not be the best platform for PWYW, the ongoing success of other restaurants experimenting with the concept is worth celebrating.

Just don't start dining and dashing everywhere you go.

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HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

The economics of amusement parks: It’s a wild ride twistier than your favorite roller coaster.

NEWSWORTHY NUMBER

Characters that make up the national ID numbers of AI-powered humanoid robots in China. Framed as a safety measure for tracking bots, 28k+ have already been assigned digital IDs since the national program launched in late May. Why, you ask?

Given the country’s aging population and shrinking labor force, China is betting on embodied AI to eventually fill in the gaps in its society “wherever it is needed,” per Fast Company.

HOW YOU HUSTLE

Our readers are always cooking up cool ideas. Here’s our weekly spotlight on a Hustle reader working on something big.

Who: Allison Bantz

What: HeyDay

The elevator pitch: “HeyDay is a personal relationship management platform designed for human connection.”

The problem they’re trying to solve: “The mental load of keeping up with people has outpaced our ability to show up for them... If you're tracking even the basics about the people in your family and social circles — a birthday, a preference, a hard season they're going through, that favorite coffee shop they mentioned once — you're carrying thousands of individual data points in your head with no system.”

One truly innovative thing they’re doing: “We’re developing a novel, identity-based relationship intelligence engine designed to help people maintain and strengthen personal relationships through timely, context-aware actions. Existing solutions offer basic reminders, task management, or generalized recommendations, but fail to synthesize the emotional, relational, and contextual dynamics that drive authentic human connection. HeyDay centers the relationship itself — combining insights from both people to understand how individuals want to be acknowledged, supported, and remembered.”

What are you working on? Tell us here.

AROUND THE WEB

📅 On this day: In 1752, Benjamin Franklin famously flew a kite amid a storm to show how lightning and electricity were connected.

🌪️ That’s interesting: How real storm chasers compare to those seen in movies.

🗞️ Newsletter: Futurepedia is the Wirecutter of AI. Learn how to ship work with worthwhile AI tools.

📚 That’s cool: A visualization of all English Wikipedia articles.

🐦‍⬛ Aww: A clever bird.

SHOWER THOUGHT

There are probably hundreds of thousands of people who achieved an obscure world record but were lost to time because no one ever knew it. SOURCE

Today's email was brought to you by Juliet Bennett Rylah, Danny Jensen, and Singdhi Sokpo.

Editing by: Sara "Put it on my tab" Friedman.

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🍽️ Pay what you want

Plus: Humanoid robots get IDs, real storm chasers, and more.