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The Russell Brunson Show
Struggling to Focus While Writing? Adam Leeb’s "Freewrite" is the Solution | #Marketing - Ep. 118
00:36:42
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- [00:00]
A
Do you have a funnel? But it's not converting. The problem, 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com podcast. That's sellingonline.com podcast. This is the Russell Brunson Show. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to the show. I've got a really interesting special guest today that I'm excited to introduce. This is actually the first time I had a chance to meet him personally, but I've been a fan of his products for a long, long time. In fact, you can see a couple of them here on the. On my desk. If you're watching on YouTube or, you know, Spotify, whatever, if you're audio only, you can imagine I'm holding something that looks kind of like a typewriter, but there's no monitor. And it's this interesting little thing that I'm kind of mildly obsessed with. And so we've got the. The founder and the creator and Adam Lee, who's here today to talk to him about what he created, why he created it. He's got a really fascinating story as an entrepreneur, but also this is a product that I think a lot of us entrepreneurs need to be using to help you to done to be a better writer and a whole bunch other stuff. So, Adam, how are you doing, man?
- [01:09]
B
I'm awesome. Thanks for having me on, Russell. I really appreciate it.
- [01:11]
A
Yeah, I'm excited to get to know you a lot better. I heard that before you built this whole thing, you were like, one of your earlier entrepreneur journeys was like actually creating supplements and things like that. Is that correct?
- [01:22]
B
Yeah, that is. I. I've had a. An interesting route on my entrepreneurial journey. We can talk about that more if you're interested. But, yeah, I started. Yeah, I mean, I actually studied engineering and product design and always knew I'd come back there, but I ended up going into corporate finance. So I worked on Wall street as a banker. I quit that job after four years. That was during the recession. But this is kind of shocking to people. I actually really enjoyed that job. It was an incredible experience and wouldn't trade it for anything, but I knew it wasn't going to be my career. And, yeah, I started my first real company after that, a little bit after that. And it was a nutritional supplement brand, but it kind of. It did okay. But really it was. That was my sort of like business school, almost the test. Yeah, that was. I think it cost about as much as business school and learned maybe better lessons, I'm not sure, but definitely less partying than business school. Yeah. And the result was that I kind of. That business stalled. And the funny thing is that I really just wanted to make something with my hands. And so I had come back to this idea that I had had just coming out of a conversation about making a distraction free writing tool. And I was never thinking that I would turn this into a company even. It was just like, oh, this is kind of a fun concept, kind of marrying an E ink screen and a keyboard, a really nice mechanical keyboard, and then focusing on the drafting process so that people could just kind of get their words out. Kind of like a Kindle for writing almost. And that was just like stuck in my head. And I'm like, I should just make this. It'll be fun to make. That was it. That was as far as I thought about it. And here I am over 10 years later after, you know, many successful crowdfunding campaigns. Almost a billion words written on our. On our products worldwide since we started. And yeah, it's just been a wild, wild journey.
- [03:15]
A
So interesting when you said, you know, that you had a conver. Do you remember, like, the conversation you had when you first had the idea who you were talking to or when that situation? Or is it more like a lot of conversations over time where the idea kind of sprouted up from?
- [03:27]
B
It was one specific conversation with a friend of mine named Patrick who ended up being my co founder. He was telling me about some software that he used to help him stay focused while writing. And so he's a software developer. He liked to write essays in his free time about political subjects or whatever he wanted to write about. And he was telling me about some specific software that not only did it, like block out distractions, but it actually disabled the backspace key. And I thought I just was like, what are you talking about? Like, why would you do that? And it was just so frame breaking that you would want to write with something that was purposefully limited. And so he, he educated me on a writing process that I never heard of, which is really write and edit, or write first and edit later. And so you do your drafting process in a separate session than editing. You don't edit as you go, and that way you can kind of optimize for the creative portion and the critical portion. And so I was like, what are you talking about? Like, I can't believe that I never heard about this before, how come nobody told me this? Like, when I was writing in school? Exactly. Like, it was so painful for me and so many others, of course, like to be writing in high school, you know, writing these essays or learning about these like five paragraph things. And so I was just like, wow, there's another process out there. I wish I learned about this. And so that's really where that conversation is what got the idea going. And then even in that same conversation, I sort of put the pieces together of like the hardware components. And that's just, I mean, that's the weird part about me.
- [05:02]
A
Is that the engineer side of you?
- [05:04]
B
Yeah, that's the engineer side. Right. And so, you know, I'm thinking like, oh, I've been reading about mechanical keyboards. They're really cool. They're very niche. I love my Kindle. I'm like obsessed with the Kindle and I have been for years and years and years. I give them out as gifts to everyone I can find. If I, if I hear that you don't have a Kindle, then I just buy you one.
- [05:26]
A
You must have this.
- [05:28]
B
I just think it's one of the best products ever made. And yeah, just kind of like it just formed in my head. I'm like, oh, Kindle screen, mechanical keyboard. Oh, we need to like be able to get the documents out. We'll sync it to the cloud, you know. And then it was like these, those three components, which was the essence of it. And I'm like, okay, if my friend is using this software to kind of dumb down his super expensive laptop for this very specific writing experience, maybe we can just make a dedicated thing that's just for that. And it's not really dumbing it down per se, but it's like a tailored experience just for this drafting portion of the writing process. And yeah, that was it.
- [06:05]
A
Interesting. When I first discovered you guys, it was actually through one of my friends and I've written three books. I can't remember where it was in my writing journey, but somewhere when I had that realization, like, the reason why I write so slow is because I'm like, I'm right, you know, creative brain writing. And then, and then flipping to like left brain editing and back and forth and back and forth. And then I was sort of getting a flow and things like that. And I found that the times I got the most and the best writing was I was stuck on an airplane where like, I couldn't research, I couldn't Google, I couldn't. I was just there and it was uncomfortable. So like I was just. I would just write and write. I'm like, I'll figure out how to edit this later. And I write. And then I get to the hotel or whatever that night, and I open up. And then, you know, all of a sudden, all of the. You spelled spell check correct. Things would pop up because they weren't there when you have no Internet access. You know, all the red squigglies. And I edit it all. And I was like, oh. And I was telling my friend this. I'm like, I found out, like, for me to be the most, like, to write really good, like, I have to, like, not edit. And he was like, oh, dude, have you ever heard the free write? I'm like, no. What's that? And he started telling me, and he's kind of an artsy guy, so he was just like, oh, it's this most beautiful thing. It's like this typewriter. He's like, tell me the art of it. And then. And I remember he was like. He's like, I want one. I'm trying to save up to get one. So I remember googling it that night, and I saw it, and I was like, oh. And so I bought it right out of the gate, and it showed up, you know, a week later. And then I showed him. He's like, you got one? I'm like, well, you sold me on. I had to try it now. And that's why I first got introduced to it, because I'd found that same problem in my own writing. And then all of a sudden, you had created this interesting, beautiful, different solution for it. You know what I mean? Because I was kind of going down the same path. I'm assuming your co founder did like, how we could do this with software. Maybe there's some software I could buy to do this, but I hadn't really figured out a process yet when I found this. I'm actually kind of curious. I mean, obviously you're more of the engineer side, but there are people that have created software for similar things. Like, was. How did you beat out your co founder where he software your. Your physical product? In the debate to actually decide to go this direction, was there a. Was there a debate about it or just kind of let's do it together?
- [08:04]
B
No, no, there was no debate about it.
- [08:06]
A
I.
- [08:06]
B
He also liked the idea of having a dedicated tool. I think there's a. A hidden benefit of having something dedicated is that, like, your brain is triggered based on its environment, right? So when you have this device in front of you, your brain subconsciously Knows, oh, this is like my writing device. Right. And unfortunately, like our computers are, they actually work against us in that way. Because this is like, it could be whatever's in your mind. Right. Because your computer can do anything. It's like, oh, there was that YouTube video that I really wanted to check out, or like, I really need to check my email, or there's these pictures that need. There's just this constant stream of temptation that your computer brings. And so there's no pure association. And so that's part of the problem with trying to work at your computer. And also something that we very easily solve because it's a product that's only designed to do one thing. And so it actually, it's a bit of a mind trick, the whole product.
- [08:59]
A
Right.
- [08:59]
B
Because you can do everything on this product on a laptop. But somehow everybody that uses it, they. They tell us, like we said, we get these reviews all the time. I'm writing twice as much as I used to. I don't understand how this works. Why do I feel. Why am I enjoying writing again? This is. This is incredible. And again, it's just a bit of a mind trick. It's funny that you have to like, buy one of these, but it does work. And no, I mean, my co founder was happy to get involved and he wrote the original software for the product. But yeah, I mean, part of what makes it work is that it's an actual physical, dedicated product that's separate from your computer. Yeah.
- [09:37]
A
I also think it's like, I don't know, I collect old books and I'm obsessed with like. I feel like I should have been born in the 20s, you know, back when writing was on typewriters and stuff like that. Like, I've collected some of my favorite authors. I own their typewriters now. But there's something like when I got this first one and like also sitting down and typing, I was just like, oh, I feel like the romance of writing. That makes sense. Like, it felt like I was actually writing versus on my keyboard where we're doing whatever, you know, I mean, just. It felt different. Which for me, that became really fun too. Cause it's just like, oh, I feel like I'm in that zone of like, I'm a writer now, not just like someone who's on a computer who's trying to write something, you know?
- [10:12]
B
See, it. It tricked you too. It worked.
- [10:17]
A
It totally did. So I want to ask you some questions on the business side of this. So you guys created this very first one, and I'm Curious again. I've never made a physical product. Actually, I lie. I made my very first physical product. It's like a magazine holder from China. And I had to go and get these molds built and then they, they poured them. It was like a year long process for me. This little plastic thing that holds a magazine. So that's the only thing physical I've ever actually created. I'm looking at this, I'm like, how do you know where to start? How does it. Like what was the process to create the very first prototype to be able to go. And eventually I think you did a Kickstarter campaign to launch it. But like, how do you actually create the first one? Like, what's the steps in that, in that process? How does it work?
- [10:55]
B
Yeah, I mean, there's a couple different ways of going about it, for sure. There's sort of one process where you can take advantage of existing designs and maybe tweak them a little bit here and there, or there's sort of the ground up designing yourself bit. We did the latter. And so everything on the product is designed and designed from the, from the ground up by us or by our team. And effectively what you do is you go to a contract manufacturer. In our case, we went to, you know, some of the big consumer electronics manufacturers in South Asia, where most consumer electronics are made. And you develop a relationship and ask them for quotations. And of course you gotta actually do the engineering first. So there's several different kind of core aspects that go into our products. There's mechanical design, electrical design, software and firmware. So you kind of need at least a person or someone with a skit, with multiple skill sets to do each of those things and be responsible for them. And yeah, I mean, that's what, that's what engineers do. Right? So we do each, each one of those, each one of those major components, they also have to work together, designs together. You start working with a contract manufacturer, you get feedback from them and you kind of just go from there.
- [12:15]
A
So cool. So do you create just one first or they create. You build the pieces and they build a whole bunch of first. What does that look like?
- [12:23]
B
There's a few different steps in the process. You know, the tricky thing with hardware is that you can't make one without all of the pieces. And so each one of the pieces is independently designed, sampled, tested, verified. But you can't assemble the whole thing and actually have a working unit until you have 100% of the components. And so there's a lot of different things that have to line up basically to get that working. And so there's some of these gating process like dvt, evt. This is some industry speak for what are the main kind of phases of the development process. But essentially it's like you validate your design and the engineering and then you put the whole thing together. You make 50, you make 300, then you go for mass production, something like that.
- [13:20]
A
That's cool. So when in that cycle? Well, first off, when you got the first one, I think about like when I got my first book, after I wrote my first book, I had a box open and holding the first book, like, what it was like for me. I'm curious when you got the first one done. After all the work and effort you put into like actually having and typing on, like, what was your experience the first time?
- [13:37]
B
Yeah, it's, it's a crazy experience as. Yeah, I, I, I spent a lot of time in Asia at our factory partners. I think the biggest, even, even more impactful than getting the first one was actually seeing a whole production line spun up, building them. You know, there's 20 plus people on the line, plus 5 to 10 maybe production engineers, QA people, QC quality assurance, quality control people, sort of the peripheral machine that goes into making things. Not just the people that are like literally physically putting stuff together. Then there's also procurement, there's finance, there's a whole company on top of it that's sort of supporting you. And you just start thinking about, like, how many people actually had their hands on this project. It's sort of astounding. I mean, there's like hundreds of people, right, that go into actually making it. And then you see your design that started on maybe a napkin sketch and that went into the computer and then over the course of a year or two, gets refined into actually a physical, you know, giant block of steel that they make injection molds out of or injection molded parts out of. And yeah, I just remember like the first time seeing a line spooled up and all these people that I didn't know, they're like meticulously like making these things literally by hand, you know, and I'm like, wow, this is crazy. And it's, it's so funny. The best, the best experience is if you try to actually like take something off of the line and they're like, they like, look at you funny because they're like, what are you doing? Don't touch our parts, bro. I don't care who you are. Yeah, no, it's a, it's an incredible experience.
- [15:14]
A
I can imagine. That's so cool. Okay, after you got these done, then walk through the launch campaign. It was through Kickstarter, I understand, right? Or Indiegogo, which, which platform did you launch?
- [15:24]
B
We've done both over the years. The first, the very first one was on Kickstarter.
- [15:28]
A
Okay. And. Well, walk us through that. Like, I'm curious, was it hard to get people to. Yeah. To buy into it or it was an easy proposition or is it, you know, because it's a new category. Like, I feel like there's enough explanation has to go into it. And I'm curious the process and how you guys first launched it. What?
- [15:46]
B
Yeah, you know, our first campaign was. We launched it December 10, 2014. This is already a long time ago. We had the great fortune of having some viral moments ahead of the campaign, which is what led us to even have having the idea of making the campaign. Because remember I just said like, the reason I worked on it was because I want to make it, not because I wanted to have a whole company again. And so we, as opposed to what I was doing before with my nutritional supplement startup, it was the complete opposite experience with the supplements. I was pushing them into the market. I was trying to find someone that cared. It was a struggle with this. We had a render online and a concept like a name and we had like a tag and that was it. We had a terrible single page one WordPress website and it went super viral. Everyone was just so pumped about this thing. I mean, there was, there was people that were excited about it negatively. There was tons of people excited about it positively. We had over 100,000 people come to this little website from just this viral press moment or a couple of viral press moments that happened in the fall of 2014. And so we did a couple things, right? I mean the main one being we had a couple of good opt ins. So, you know, you're the funnel master. We had like the simplest funnel possible, right. We literally just had a couple opt ins on this like 1 1/2 page WordPress site. I knew enough to do that. And we gathered something like 8,000 emails just from that. Those viral press moments. We had no other outbound marketing or inbound marketing or anything. It was just press that just kind of turned into this maelstrom of activity. And so yeah, when we had all those emails, we basically said, okay, like we got to do something with this. Like, what are we going to do? Like, well, we may as well see if people are really willing to pay for this or Are they just kind of excited about the concept? And so that was the beauty of Kickstarter, because that's really what it was designed for, right? Like, will people basically pre order this and support the campaign into actually making this a real thing and not just an idea? And it was insane. We shot out the gate. I mean, the numbers were just like going faster than you could like refresh the page. We did 200,000 in the first 20 hours. And we quickly shifted from like, like, you know, prototyping, like, oh, God, we gotta actually make this thing now. Oh.
- [18:08]
A
Cause they had been none of it made yet. You just had just pictures of what it was supposed to look like.
- [18:12]
B
I mean, we had, we had a prototype that was really hacky inside. I mean, no, nothing even remotely equivalent to like what would be needed to be done in production. So we were basically starting from scratch from the, the first day of the Kickstarter campaign when it came to the actual design. But that was, that was it. We didn't do any marketing, right. And then we were just like, heads down and like, okay, we got to figure out how to actually make a complicated consumer electronic in Asia, which we neither of us had ever done before. So there was a lot to figure out.
- [18:42]
A
Thanks. 200,000. The first 24 hours. How much did it go? How much did it sell before the, the Kickstarter ended?
- [18:53]
B
I feel like I, I used to know this number off the top of my head as like I said this number so many years ago, 10 years ago, and we've done four campaigns now. And now I'm like getting blurry. I'm gonna say the wrong number, but we did pretty well. That's all I'll say. I can't remember exactly the number.
- [19:09]
A
Was it enough then to cover the, all the manufacturing for the first thing, or was any profit involved in you guys or that just to cover you guys making the first batches, you know, because we had.
- [19:17]
B
So we didn't spend any money on marketing. Yeah, it definitely covered tooling. I mean, tooling itself was, I think about $100,000. And so tooling in the manufacturing world, like refers to anything that you need to actually, like make the parts. So the big things being like an injection mold or a die cast mold. So that hemming, right, that you have in front of you, that's actually a die cast aluminum piece. And so that means there's giant pieces of steel that come together and molten aluminum is injected into these, these, these molds. And so you actually have to make the mold and then you have to make all the molds for each plastic part as well. And so, yeah, we had to spend about $100,000 on tooling. And then again, that's. That's to make the first. The first one. Right. You can't spend 95,000 and. Because then that's not enough. Right. So you have to spend the entire amount or the entire. The entire cost of tooling to even get just one out of the gate, you know, plus far, plus firmware, plus software, plus all the engineering.
- [20:22]
A
Interesting. When you first launched, it was the comp. I think I read this. But the company was called Hemingway initially. Right. Or just the product was. What was that?
- [20:29]
B
Yeah, we. We gave ourselves years of confusion in that. Initially the concept was called Hemming. Right. And that was my clever idea because Hemingway had this. He was well known for sort of telling people to be concise in how they wrote. And so we like this idea of. There was also, like, some, Some. I think they're actually misattributed quotes about, like, you just have to sit at your typewriter and bleed and, you know, write drunk, edit sober. There's like a bunch of different quotes that are from Hemingway, supposedly from Hemingway. Some are, some are, some aren't. But there was just like this great Persona. And yeah, we came up with this name Heming Rights. And turns out the Hemingway family still manages the rights to the Hemingway estate. And they reached out to us and they're like, hey, by the way, you know, the Hemingway states here. And actually we did sign a license with them initially, but we eventually decided, like, maybe we don't want to have our whole company on just this one Persona. And the idea was that we'll change the name to Free Rite, and then hopefully one day we'll make a special edition. And long story short, that's what we did. And so that's what the product is in front of you. That's the officially licensed Hemingway edition of our Freeride product. And so we've kind of gone through this, like, naming confusion. It's a bit tricky because it was like it was Hemingwright and then Freewrite, and then freewrite became a brand, and now there's the Hemingway branded product, which we still call Hemmingright, but Freeright. Yeah. So we haven't done ourselves anymore any benefits by changing the name a bunch of times, but here we are.
- [22:10]
A
Yeah. So cool. That's such a cool story. So after you launch Kickstarter, then you go manufacturing, you know, done. And then now you're in the next phase where it's like we've created them, we've pre sold a bunch, shipping them out. And then how did, how did you turn this into a business as opposed to just a campaign? Right? Yeah, because again, my world is like when I look at businesses like we're selling digital products, paying a bunch of ads, trying to make the spread, and it's like with a physical product you have so many costs involved. I'm curious what it looked like to turn it from a promotion into an actual business. For the last decade,
- [22:44]
B
I think it's been a progression. Part of it is just learning, part of it's going through even some market cycles that we've had in the last 10 years, which has been interesting. Not just consumer market cycles, but even on the supply side as well. You can remember, I mean Covid was a crazy time. There was like the chip shortages because they were all going into cars. Now there's like RAM shortages because they're all going into AI clusters. I mean we've, we've been going through all these crazy experiences and I think like going from just an idea to company or just initial product to company and a brand with a suite of products, I tried to take it very conservatively. I always, I was reminded by many other harbor products that went bust that they all go bust for the same reason, which is they run out of money. Right. And so it's almost impossible to run out of money if you don't over buy on inventory. Whereas if you overbuy on inventory, that's a really good way that you can run out of money. And so, you know, there was some very high profile companies that, hardware companies that have died over the years. And I always paid very close attention to them and tried to learn my lessons without doing it the hard way. So we really just did it methodically. Right. We had one product, we tried to tweak it a little bit to make it even better because the first version's never as good as the second version. We launched a second product, we launched a third product. But each product, each one of these electronic devices, they take one to two years in development, plus I mean it takes quite a long time. And so, yeah, I mean that's, I don't know, one step, one one foot in front of the other. That's the best answer, I think. And just trying to be really conservative in terms of how much inventory we buy, how much we spend on marketing. I mean, at the initial, it took us a long time to actually get confident enough to spend really any money on marketing. And I think. I don't know. I look back at a little bit and I'm like, probably should have been a little more aggressive. But then I'm like, well, we're still here and it's fine. So I don't know. We'll never know, right?
- [24:51]
A
Yeah. That's cool. How big is the team behind you?
- [24:54]
B
We're about 10 people. I'm based in Detroit. We have a bit of a Midwest cluster, but we have folks from all over the country and also some. Some folks all around the world. We've kind of always been distributed in a way because we work with factories in Asia, we work with engineers in Europe, and so we've kind of always been a bit of a hybrid, and that's worked well for us.
- [25:18]
A
Yeah, that's really cool. Okay, so walk us through the. The current. The current products in your product line, number one. Number two, I'm curious, which one is your. Is your personal favorite of all the different ones you guys have so far?
- [25:30]
B
Yeah, for sure. So we have sort of the og, which is the Smart Typewriter, which had all those other names at one point. It was the Hemingway, it was the. It was the Free Write. And now we're just calling Smart Typewriter because Freeride is the brand. So that's really the product that this hemming.
- [25:43]
A
Right.
- [25:44]
B
That you have in front of you is based off of. It's the same electronics that's the original product. I mean, improved over the years, but it's the original model, effectively. Then we have the Traveler, which is our smaller folding portable one still with the E Ink screen. All the same features, but super portable, basically.
- [26:04]
A
That's the second one I bought, which I don't have with me here because I left it in my travel bag. So I do travel with that one all the time. It's cool. If you guys. I'll send pictures online, but like. Oh, opens and shuts and it's like this little tiny thing you slip in your backpack and you can write with.
- [26:15]
B
Yeah. You know what you give up from going to the Traveler? It's got a little bit smaller battery, it doesn't have a front light, and it has a scissor switch keyboard. The scissor switch keyboard that we designed in there is like fantastic. I think it's as good as any scissor switch keyboard you can get on a laptop, but it's still not a full size mechanical keyboard like you have on the Heming Rider, the Freeride or Smart Typewriter. So. But it's super small and folding, so you Know, that's kind of the trade off. And then we have Alpha, which is the other product that you have in front of you. That's a, it's really a nod to this product called the Alpha Smart, which was very popular in schools and still very popular with writers as a collectible, effectively because they haven't been making them in over 10 years. It's a slate style device. It doesn't have an E ink screen, so the screen is like super fast and you can still write outside, but it's a little bit different orientation or aspect ratio. And it has the best battery life out of all of them because it is a very low powered computer inside. So it's sort of really just preference. They all can do the similar things. I think it's mostly about sort of the form factor that whatever your preference is, I think if you have like, if you, if you have the space and you want the full quote unquote experience, I mean the original Smart typewriter or the Hemingway version or one of the special editions of that Smart typewriter is really like still the best, the best experience. Yeah, but I mean they all, they all can do the job. Right. So again, it's sort of up to your personal preference. Then we have a new product called WordRunner, which is very exciting, which is our first mechanical keyboard that actually connects to your computer. And so this product is like, think about like what is a mechanical keyboard for writers in sort of the freewrite world. It's got some very unusual features on it, including an embedded word counter that we're calling it a wordometer that actually has rotating wheels that count your words as you, as you type them. And so that product, we did another crowdfunding campaign last year and that's going to get shipped in the next couple of months. So we're super, we're super pumped about that. It's been a crazy ride. It made no sense at all that we made it, but we did it anyway because it's just, it was just
- [28:29]
A
a keyboard hooked your normal computer.
- [28:31]
B
Yes. I mean we, we int. We kind of reintroduced the concept of a mechanical keyboard to a lot of people because they were sort of, they sort of went out of fashion for a long time and really only people that were using them were sort of hardcore gamers. This is again 10 years ago and so we brought this, this mechanical keyboard style keyboard back and again reintroduced it to writers and they're like, wow, this is the best keyboard. Like, we love this keyboard.
- [28:57]
A
How do I get a writer now?
- [28:59]
B
Yeah, I'm a Real writer now, like, how do I get this on my computer? Right. Because we accept that people are still using their computer. Like, we don't. Our products are not designed to replace your computer. Right. Like, we understand that you're going to still need your computer not just for, you know, video editing or whatever you want to do, but also even for parts of the writing process that require editing. And so we wanted to bring that, like, same great or even better mechanical keyboard experience and let you have it on your computer too. So that's, that's what the concept with Word Runner.
- [29:25]
A
And we're.
- [29:25]
B
Yeah, we're super pumped about it. It's pretty wild, wild product.
- [29:28]
A
That's really cool. I'm excited to try that one out. Okay. For those who are listening, they can't see this. I'd love you to explain just kind of like how it works, how it gets pushed to the cloud, like just that concept. Cause I think the very first time, like, I didn't understand how it works. I bought it, I sat down, I was like, okay, this is how it works. I write here, then I push the cloud and I can grab it. Like, can you just walk through that process? People understand how this works inside their workflow?
- [29:53]
B
Yeah, absolutely. The, the thing that's real, the most important thing is to understand that there is a prescribed workflow. I think that's what catches people up that are confused about the product because, excuse me, they see it almost as if a. It's like a replacement for a typewriter or replacement for an old school word processor. And it's not really one of those things. It is, it's kind of its own thing that's designed to be part of this draft first, edit, later process. And so we wanted to make that, we wanted to bridge that gap as easily as possible. And that's why we have WI Fi and how it syncs to the cloud. And so the idea is that you use this product, you turn it on, it instantly opens the writing canvas, you start typing, you do your drafting, and then in the background, it's syncing in real time back to our backend called Plug, called Postbox. And you can grab documents out of there if you go log on to postbox@postbox.com or you can have it sync to one of the cloud providers that we sync to. So we sync to OneDrive, Evernote, Google Drive and Dropbox, sort of the big, the big four, so to speak. So once you set that up, it's really just meant to be set and forget. The idea is you do your drafting on your freewrite. You can literally just rotate to your computer and if you have those, one of those third party cloud services installed, you just like open your draft in Dropbox on your computer. That was sort of the magic that we were trying to, we're trying to give people and so yeah, it's really just like draft, open the open. Once you're done drafting, you open the file on your computer and you're good to go. Now a lot of people just download it from Postbox or they do some other things that like it makes more sense to them and that's fine. But the prescribed workflow is sort of how I describe how I, how I described it using, using one of these cloud services.
- [31:44]
A
Yeah. So cool. Yeah, I think it's, I think we just created really cool. Like I said, I've been a big fan of it for a long time and using. I got the one in my office, I've got one in my, in my backpack when I travel and I've got this new one you guys sent me. It's really fun that I'm trying to figure out my workflow with that one, but it's just been really, really fun. I'm curious like the people that are using it, is there a certain genre that folk. Is every writer all over the place or do you guys have pockets of where you're getting most of the customers? I'm curious about that.
- [32:10]
B
Yeah, it's so interesting. The way I describe it is that if you write more than 300 words at a time, you should probably consider a free rate. If you don't, then yeah, probably not. Creative writers are definitely our biggest segment. People that are authors or writing books. But we also have, we have all kinds of people. We have lawyers, we have academics, we have journalers, we have journalists, bloggers, of course. And we even have songwriters. Like I just, we just saw today, Janelle Monae was posting about us and like we, we had no idea. Right. And she's literally, she has pictures writing on a. Hemming right on her floor and writing some music presumably. I guess so I, I, you just, we have all kinds. We. There was a, a surgeon in South America that was like taking notes in the operating room, which I'm not sure if that's a good idea, but notes in the operating room with his rewrite. So you know, anyone that needs to write and be focused and values that type of experience, you know, they're, they're a great candidate for, for this product.
- [33:10]
A
That's so cool. And how many words you said have been written so far on across the platform.
- [33:14]
B
We're about to cross a billion.
- [33:16]
A
That's crazy.
- [33:17]
B
Yeah, it's a lot.
- [33:19]
A
It'd be interesting when someday it's like a billion a year and then a billion a month as it keeps growing and more and more people use it, you know.
- [33:26]
B
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it is growing quite quickly as we. As we get more products out there and also improve the products. We release new firmware updates and are constantly improving the product. So, yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing that people are actually using the product. We love it.
- [33:42]
A
It's so cool. All right, well, this has been really fun hearing your story and the backstory behind it all. For those who are listening or watching this and they want to go invest, where's the best place for them to go to check them out and figure out which one's going to be the right one for them?
- [33:54]
B
Yeah, I mean, you can. You can check your. You can go to getfreewright.com you can ask your favorite AI about distraction free writing tools. Name free writes. But yeah, anything. Go to get freeright.com.
- [34:06]
A
check it out. And then you should get the Hemingway and get a travel one. That's what I say. That we got one at the office. One to travel with. Need at least two? That's my thought. But you can get one.
- [34:15]
B
At least two. Yeah. You need at least two.
- [34:19]
A
Well, the one that's like, again, it's so cool. Like. Like, it's like a typewriter, but way cooler. And the other one's just nice because I don't want to carry a typewriter on a plane. It was funny the first time I brought it on a plane. I popped it out, and I'm on this thing and everyone's walking past, and I see people staring at me, and everyone's like, what is that? And the person next to me is like, is that a calculator? I'm like, no, I'm trying to explain. It's like a typewriter that's hard to edit on, but then you can write really fast. And they're like, why would you want that? I'm like, because I'm trying to explain the whole thing. The person next to me, I'm like, can I just write Leave me alone. But it's definitely a fun conversation piece as well when you're traveling.
- [34:56]
B
Yeah, I've heard that a few times.
- [34:58]
A
It's awesome. Well, Adam, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast. I appreciate you, and thanks for creating such a cool product. I Can't wait to see all the updates you guys keep doing. And hopefully all of our people will start writing on these as well and get people, I think writing more creatively. And the biggest thing for me has just been isolates me when I'm doing my creative work. Right brain not editing to actually come out with really cool stuff versus normally I'm flipping back and forth and editing it just enough. You know, it takes so long versus this. I can write so fast and then like you said later edit and clean things up and it's just. It's really cool. So thanks for being here and I appreciate what you guys have created.
- [35:32]
B
Awesome, man. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate that you're highlighting these products and that they're. They're useful for you. That's like. Just makes me so happy.
- [35:39]
A
Yeah. So awesome. All right, get freerite.com everybody get your. Get your free write right now and let us know. Post pictures and tag us all in it. Want to see them anyway? Thanks, man. Appreciate it.
- [35:49]
B
Awesome. Thanks, Russell.
- [35:52]
C
You guys know I've written a few books and people always ask me, how do you stay focused long enough to actually finish? Because let's be honest, writing isn't hard. Staying in the zone is hard. Email pops up, texts come in. You open one tab, and 45 minutes later, you're watching something random on YouTube. That's why I use free write. It's a distraction free writing device built for one purpose. To help you get words out of your head and onto the page. No notifications, no Internet, no browser tabs. Just you and the draft. When I sit down with my free write, my brain knows it's time to create. If you've got a book in you or a sales letter or the next big idea you've been putting off, go to ww.getfreewright.com Russell and grab yours. Turn off the noise. Turn on the words. Your future bestseller is waiting.