NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

These Discounts Are a Personal Finance Goldmine Hiding in Plain Sight

Individuals who ignore savings opportunities from businesses such as GoodRx and Jewel-Osco do so at their peril.

EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1

MAR 3, 2026

Photo: Getty Images

Before the pandemic, my visits to our neighborhood grocery stores were few and far between. Much like most of our Presidents over the last 30 years or so, I couldn’t tell you the price of anything in the store, including the CPG items that I consumed daily.  When I was forced on occasion to venture into one of these arcades of consumption, clutter and confusion, I didn’t have a clue as to where various items might be or which of the dozens of brands, sizes, and flavors I was supposed to buy.

These days, every trip to my nearby Jewel-Osco store is an adventure and contest to see how much I can save by using my Jewel phone app, as well as by scrutinizing all the deals plastered all over the store. While I must look like a phone-obsessed teenager as I wonder through the aisles with my nose stuck in my cell, the truth is I’m scanning and selecting and saving money with every click. Honestly, I feel bad for the people who don’t take advantage of this free app.

My savings from each session are displayed at the bottom of my receipt, and it’s clear that this simple process will save me more on an annual basis than the $1,200 that Trump’s costly tariffs are costing me and millions of other Americans every year. You might ask yourself why the store can afford to sell me a product at half the price that others are paying at the same time for the identical item. Are the “retail” prices just so artificially inflated that they make up their margins by ripping off all the folks who don’t use the app and take advantage of the discounts?

Speaking of discounts and being ripped off, have you filled a prescription lately for just about any drug and had the sinking feeling that the experience was very similar to playing a slot machine, where you had no idea what numbers might be coming up when the spinning stopped? Big pharma has paid doctors for decades through various incentives to push their particular premium-priced drugs. The “usual and customary” cash price you’re asked to pay at the counter (without insurance) for a drug is typically an inflated number compared to what insurance companies or the pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs) pay for the same drug.

There’s no practical end in sight for the average consumer regardless of what new lies we might hear made by our president—price reductions of 800 percent and 900 percent are his latest absurd claims—but much like the story in the grocery stores, there turns out to be some relief which seems almost magical in its application and once again demonstrates the shameless price gouging of the uninformed and disconnected consumers that goes on every day. GoodRx is basically an information middleman which contracts with large PBMs like CVS and OptumRx to provide its members with free coupons that permit them to receive the same discounted drug prices that are typically negotiated by insurers and large employers.

You can check the GoodRx price on any drug right on your phone using their free app and it will immediately tell you (for almost any typical prescription) which nearby pharmacies have the drug and will honor the discounted price for it. Here again, the discounts are simply amazing. You’ll often see the price of a given drug cut by half or more. How any rational human being isn’t taking advantage of this program is beyond me. And amazingly, in most cases it’s even more beneficial for uninsured folks who don’t have to deal with deductibles. How and why does it work?

(1) Retail prices for drugs are a sick joke – very much like the MSRP used to be for many years on automobiles – which no intelligent person should expect to pay.

(2) Pharmacies are willing to participate because they assume most of their customers will have insurance anyway which reduces the price and they are happy to have additional customers, more recurring traffic and ancillary sales.

(3) Drug prices in the U.S. (as a result of paid-for politicians) are not regulated in most cases and the entire pricing scheme is opaque at best so no one knows what a realistic and fair price should be.

Bottom line: whatever you do at the grocery store, don’t wait another minute before you sign up (for free) for the GoodRx program because, while money doesn’t really care who makes it, it makes much more sense for it to end up staying in your wallet than watching it be wasted paying inflated and pretend prices at the pharmacy. The money’s always there, but the pockets can change. As Kevin O’Leary says: “It’s a sin to kill money.”

New INC Magazine Blog Post by Kaplan Institute Exec Director Howard Tullman

Why Mr. Wonderful Banks on Female Founders

He's heard a zillion pitches on Shark Tank. The startups that are most successful do three things well, are more likely to be led by women--and more likely to get his investment money.

By Howard Tullman

Executive director, Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship, Illinois Institute of Technology

@tullman

We hosted Kevin O'Leary from Shark Tank, aka "Mr. Wonderful", at the Kaplan Institute for a talk and a fireside chat last week in front of about 400 of our student entrepreneurs. He shared some important and serious thoughts about the entrepreneurial journey in general and about his own education as a successful investor in so many different startups (more than 50 in his portfolio as of now). He covered both things he learned through the TV show and, more importantly, some lessons for anyone looking to start or invest in a new business.

Here are a few of the most interesting notes and comments.

1.  It's all about sales and the costs of customer acquisition.

Kevin likes to meet the CEO of a potential investment and ultimately the main players on the management team, but the person he wants to meet first is the head of sales. Because if you don't have sales, you've got nothing. And, if you don't understand what the cost is for your business to attract (CAC) and retain new customers, you're doomed. So, he likes to meet the person who's putting the meat on the table right off the bat.

With the World Series under way, I'm reminded of an old baseball truism: "pitchers in baseball can never win a game, they can only lose it." It's the hitters who get it done. Raising money is easy for a lot of people -- they're great storytellers -- selling customers is much harder because when you make them part with their rubles, that's where the rubber really hits the road.

2.  We're much more brand loyal to consumer products than to tech products.

We may use a favorite laundry detergent or shampoo our whole lives, especially if it's what our parents used, but that kind of loyalty doesn't play in the tech world today, where everyone only wants the latest and greatest. If you show me something that's better, cheaper, faster, easier and available today, I'm yours.  And no one worries a bit about changing horses in midstream as long as switching costs like equipment replacement, re-training, etc. are modest.  

In the software business, it's certainly important to take care of your existing customers. But as I always tell our portfolio companies, the real measurement of your long-term success isn't simply the size of your installed base, it's your ongoing share of installations of your products on new machines and new technology implementations because those are the customers who'll matter the most in the future.

3. Winners on Shark Tank do three things well.

After Kevin had watched zillions of presentations and studied exactly who won and which deals got funded on Shark Tank, three specific attributes of winning pitches emerged.

1.     They could convincingly tell their story in 90 seconds or less.

2.     They demonstrated that they had the right team to execute their plan.

3.     They knew their numbers (backwards and forwards) and they had a full understanding of the economics of their business model.

Everything else was fixable especially with the vast benefits of the exposure these companies received on TV which often drove their customer acquisition costs close to zero.

4. Women make the best startup CEOs.

He said he was a little worried about being accused on being a reverse sexist because such a huge percentage of his investments are made in companies with female CEOs. But here again, he has consistently observed a set of skills and attitudes among these leaders that he even goes so far as to suggest to the other male-led companies in his group. The four skill sets that were most important were:

1.     They have great time management skills. They didn't run around trying to do everything at the same time or taking on too many projects or challenges all at once. They are focused and centered and consistently triaged and re-proritized what they needed to get done in the moment.

2.     They set goals that are achievable and hit those goals far more often than their male counterparts. He said that he encourages this strategy of manageable and somewhat modest targets even at the cost of some rapid growth, because it makes for successful employees, which leads to the third differentiator.

3.     They build company cultures that have lower overall employee turnover, which in turn dramatically reduces their operating costs. Happy workers are healthier, more productive and stick around.

4.     Women executives are simply better listeners.

There was a lot more in the conversation, but these seemed to me to be the key items.