Elon Musk’s Starship paired with the Super Heavy was just a terrific sight. As someone who watches the Saturn 5 launches on loop, watching this massive ship achieve its objectives was amazing.

The ingenuity, complexity and sheer persistence it took to build it inspires me.

I want to speak to a more important lesson I learnt. It’s Musk’s notion of an idiot index. He has been fairly transparent about how he pushes his engineers and managers to drive down the cost of each component in his cars or rockets while maintaining functionality and quality. The excerpt below from 2013 alludes to this. And his biography is more explicit about this. The gist of it: if the raw materials cost Rs 100 but the product sells for Rs 1000. Try and figure out where that 900 bucks goes. It also helps to question if the 100 was too
much or the right material choice.

Rather than use Musk’s rocket analogy, let me speak about in terms of how barbells are built.

A barbell costs 16000-20000. Some of the better ones cost up to 60000 (not factoring for local Indian taxes).

A barbell weighs 20 kgs. It’s usually made of mild steel. Sometimes stainless steel. 20 kgs of mild steel costs Rs 1300. Stainless steel costs around Rs 4500 (stainless steel barbells cost around 35000-50000).

Barbells aren’t complicated compared to rockets (putting it mildly). But they take a serious whacking. You can’t afford to use a grade of steel that snaps if you drop it a couple of times. Or fractures if you load it with enough weight.

But those grades of steel (stainless or mild) aren’t much more expensive. The milling, bearings, welding, knurling can be achieved for less than the raw material cost. This is even without producing barbells in bulk. And having to provide some of the tooling.

And Madras has all those capacities within a few kilometers of each other. So why would I pay 20,000 for a mild steel barbell poorly coated with chrome that would rust in a year when I could make my own barbell for Rs 7500 out of stainless steel that would last much longer. I could improve the knurl. Pick superior grades of steel. And still come out on top. Our barbells have been in action since 2015-2017. They still spin smoothly, the knurl grips and look just as good as they did when we made them.

We have since applied the same logic to sleds, plates, squat racks, pull up bars, trap bars, swiss bars and many other tools. And we now make tools that are not available in the market but we know through coaching and client feedback are much more comfortable than analogues available in the market.

And we do this at a fraction of the cost of what it would cost us to import this or ask someone else to make it for us. And I am not a trained engineer, welder or machinist. But I applied Musk’s ideas for my much smaller and less complex problems. It works and it made my life better, gave my business a small moat and makes it more profitable.