David Wachs, CEO of Handwrytten | How to Overcome Saturation by Going Analog

Welcome to Success Story, the most useful podcast in the world. I'm your host, Scott D. Clary. The Success Story podcast is part of the HubSpot podcast network. The HubSpot podcast network is the audio destination for business professionals who seek the best education and inspiration on how to start and scale a business. HubSpot podcast network hosts act as on-demand mentors to entrepreneurs, startups, and scale-ups through practical tips and inspirational stories. Listen, learn and grow with the HubSpot podcast network at hubspot.com slash podcast network. Today, my guest is David Wax. David is a founder and CEO of Handwritten. It is a tool for direct mailing. You can use it for networking. You can use it for marketing. You can use it for sales, whatever it may be. I'm going to let David explain the nuances of what Handwritten does. David is a serial entrepreneur. His first company sell it. He sold that off. He never had to work again. Sell it was on the ink fastest growing company's list. Now, David's actually a contributor on ink as well. He has his own column. He jumped back into entrepreneurship. We're going to unpack the entrepreneurial lessons as well as his origin story and some of the things that he's learned starting multiple companies. We also go into some lessons that he's learned at Handwritten. So why in an oversaturated market, sometimes going analog is the solution. We spoke about some myths about entrepreneurship. We spoke about some emerging trends and outbound. We also spoke about how you have to have certain mindsets as an entrepreneur and things that you can do to gear yourself, get yourself ready to build your own things so that you don't fall into common traps than many entrepreneurs fall into. David is an incredibly talented individual and I'm really happy I got to sit down with him and unpack some of his entrepreneurial as well as sale and technical insights. He's a very processed driven and technology and software driven individual. He likes to build things that basically take the workload off of his shoulders, something I'm a big fan of as well. So we speak through some of his tech stack and hopefully it'll give you some ideas for your own company. Let's jump right into it. This is David Wax CEO founder of Handwritten. Thanks Scott. It's really it's really cool how our paths kind of crossed and thanks for our manager show. Yeah so I'll get into Handwritten in a second but I think there is a story to be told about the whole entrepreneurship thing. I always wanted to be an entrepreneur and then after school I went to school for engineering and business so I always kind of thought well I'll be an entrepreneur and intact. I specifically chose computer science because it doesn't take much to start a computer company versus you know a software company versus a hardware company. Now I'm in hardware which I'll get into but the whole idea was let me start a software company coming out of school and then I came out of school had a crap ton of debt. I went to work for consulting from did that for a few years work for an investment bank for a few years. Then I worked I moved out to San Diego and worked in venture capital for the flat you know a blink of an eye. It was a really short period. I actually turned down the job the first time I got it because the partner there seemed kind of loony tunes turned out he was and four months after signing after going there the following year so that I said no I'm not interested. They followed up with me a year later instead of you're still not interested I'm like well okay I'll come out I took the job four months later I was fired without cause. I had moved across the country from Chicago to San Diego spend all my money on you know up until that point paying down school debt which I don't recommend always keep a nest egg you know in Canada I think it's a little better in the states yeah and up which is the ton of debt. So anyway so I had no no safety net I relatively low debt at this point but no safety net and nowhere to go in San Diego so I actually moved home to Phoenix and started my first company which was sell it and was sell it this was back in 2004 the whole purpose of sell it was to provide information on real estate so you would drive by a house you text in you get info on the house and then the real crew would capture a lead we were kind of the first ones doing that there was a product called house for sell soon after starting house for sell I realized I wanted sell it to be much bigger and then we started a service called coupon zap which was really for restaurants and bars to send out drink notifications you know hey come in for half price drinks or happy hour whatever that is coupon zap started attracting Abercrumbian Fitch and Toys R Us and Sam's Club and really really large brands not interested in sending out drink coupons you know come in for a sale whatever whatever that is and then house for sell that market kind of commoditized quickly there were a bunch of little players doing real estate but where we took it was we started doing text for information for Marie Claire magazine where you would see an ad and Marie Claire magazine one information text in or in fast company you'd want information you text and you get info back so we kind of turned it away from real estate which I found to be just a bear of a business if you want we could talk about that and we turned it into something that was much bigger by the end of sell it we were doing over a million messages a day for these big brands and then we got acquired by Hello World which was a well used to be called E Prize based in Detroit and then that changed its name to Hello World and then it got acquired by Merkel which is a big marketing automation company on the east coast when I left Hello World Merkel I thought you know geez this was back in 2014 I thought you know text messaging is kind of run its course I kind of always felt that way even when I started the company it kind of started selling out of desperation but I wanted to do something so I thought you know texting is kind of run its course people are now inundated with thousands of text messages a day emails people are getting 140 emails a day they're spending like the average office worker spends about a quarter of their time just managing their inbox right like they're just overloaded with with emails nobody has any time to read them anymore and it's all just kind of becoming noise back in 2014 this is kind of before Slack and teams and you know all that so it's only gotten worse since then and I when I left I wanted to send my employees and my customers thank yous for sticking with me helping us grow this business that type of thing I didn't want to send them an email I wanted to send them a handwritten note because when I walked into my salespeople's offices they had handwritten notes on their you know on their desks that type of thing so I sat down with pen and paper I started writing these handwritten notes and of course my hand cramped my writing sucked I didn't have enough stamps didn't have enough stationery you know on and on and on so I thought gee there has to be a better way there has to be a way to scale handwritten note outreach so that's it's as easy as sending an email it'll get noticed it's easy for me to do and even better if we could automate it and platformize the whole thing that's that's where we wanted to go with it so pretty very very shortly after starting after leaving sell sell it I started handwritten pretty much the next day and now what's handwritten is is it's a software platform where you can use handwritten.com our iPhone app or Android app our integration into Salesforce.com hubspot soon to be Shopify so we have all these ways to get data in including Zapier and Integromat which are really big ones those are all ways to get the orders in and then what we actually do is we have custom robots here in Phoenix that actually write the notes out in pen so I could grab my laptop and show you around the office but we have 115 robots currently each robot is custom built I wrote the software that actually does the writing but they all can and you can see pictures of these on handwritten.com or go to YouTube and see them there but each robot holds a real pen and writes out the handwriting and the most realistic handwriting available on the market today there's just nobody that comes close and now we have 115 of them so we're doing about five to ten thousand notes a day on average for everything from realtors again we can't seem to escape realtors all the way up to luxury brands car manufacturers car dealerships you know any large sales organization like we do a lot with solar panel installers our biggest client is actually a solar panel install company that sends 15,000 notes a month to their customers so so yeah when you kind of came across us it's interesting because we play in the same realm as like companies like Bonjouro that do video email and stuff like that it's this whole notion that email is just junk at this point and you know sending somebody a text doesn't really say I care about you but when you receive a handwritten note in the mail it's really like it's so unique now that what's old is new again right you know by everybody's pivoted digital so we pivoted analog and that really stands out so when you're going through your mail and it's just bill bill bill bill and then the last thing you see is this nice handwritten note you save that you open that last and not only do you read it which is pretty much a 99 to 100% read rate because everybody wants to know who took the time and effort to write me this note often you keep it we actually have a company I love this example they're a piano tuner in Pennsylvania and they've set us up through Zapier where after they tune your piano it automatically sends you a thank you notes saying hey you know thanks so much for allowing us the opportunity to tune your piano you only need to get your piano tuned once a year you know that's it's you don't need it every three months or anything so when he's in your home a year later that handwritten note is often still standing up on the piano you know it's it's a folded note so it's standing there right on the piano a year later is that going to happen if with an email you know if somebody sends you an email are you going to print it out never a text message or you're going to take a screenshot of the pronoun stick never handwritten notes are totally unique in the in the durability of them they just stick around so we'll send out samples kits to people and we won't hear from for six months and then they'll contact us and they'll say you know I've had your kit sitting on my desk for the last six months looking at it and I've finally determined it's the right time to do it so there's this just you know they have this lifetime of their own and people really treasure them with our service you can obviously send gift cards and business cards and all that too if you want to kind of make it a whole gift but we think the handwritten note is a real gift because what a handwritten note and pardon me for doing all the talking here but a handwritten note really in this day and age is the gift of time because people think it takes you a long time to write it and nobody has any time anymore right like everybody's responding to 12 emails at once and their slacks going off with their teams are is going off their email and nobody can sit down to focus and concentrate try to handwritten notes so when you receive one you realize time went into it and that's the gift that you're receiving no well I'm going to be quite honest you you knocked off a whole bunch of points that I wanted to go into anyways so I really appreciate that yeah I know it's good um I want to I want to also just highlight if people do check this out and at the end of every show we do talk about like links and whatnot but it's handwritten with a why not an eye so that's so if you're trying to just google handwritten you're probably not going to find their company the traditional way it's spelled so make sure that you hit it with an eye but so my question is you've discovered you know hindsight is 2020 everything's working out now but when you first started this business yes you're writing us by hand it's a nice thing to do but almost everybody would say who hasn't needed that level of authenticity real estate agents I get it from them all the time but I work in B2B that's how I discovered a use for for your tool that's actually how we connected and I found it to be one of the only ways that you can connect at scale the same way a whole enterprise account-based marketing team would try and connect with you know a fortune 100 decision maker where you're sending them things you're sending them things that are not an email not part of a marketing campaign you're not retargeting them so they see your ads you're sending them something tangible something physical and in my experience I've never found a way to do that at scale that's why you only ever did it for customers that were your largest most prolific customers that could have you know what were your whales so to speak so now you can have that authentic touch with multiple customers including you know all of your customers really if you'd like to which differentiates in a big way in the B2B in the business business sales and marketing space but you know how did you how did you know that going analog would be a solution to this over this over saturation of digital email text messages on LinkedIn how were you aware of this and how did you feel comfortable jumping into this because you from my knowledge didn't actually have experience in any of the verticals that are actually using your product at at any sort of scale right so I'm curious what your mindset was like when you did this it was truly just something that I wanted to use at the moment you know I just knew handwritten notes you know I sat down I ordered custom stationery off you know some digital print shop online it came I loved it it was really high quality I wanted to send all my clients and employees handwritten notes and I just realized I couldn't I didn't have the attention span you know and I want to I thought wouldn't it be cool if we could do this and include business cards or include gift cards and I just thought you know nobody else is doing it so what happened was of course somebody else started doing it um there was a company for a brief time called Bond and what happened was I came out with this idea and then my girlfriend at the time like two weeks later says look what just happened a company popped up doing exactly what you want it because it's funny like in the zeitgeist or whatever in the ether people have ideas at the same time I was still kind of locked in to um e-prize or hello world when when I started forming the idea and I couldn't really count on it this other company did they got venture funding and all that and what happened to them they basically spent all their money on marketing and none of their money on technology and they ended up with a 3d printer with a pen and the way a 3d printer works is it moves xy and z you know move up down left right and so you can get it to right um we could talk about a inertial mass it moves fast with this heavy gantry so it creates very jittery writing and they got around that with a felt tip pen so that you could kind of cover up all the jitters but they got this thing to right but what they did not get it to do was paper feet so we spent years and year we came out we started with the same off the shelf robot that they were using which is crap um then they moved to 3d printers and we moved to developing our own actual handwriting robot so we were on a much slower path they built a ton of these 3d printers holding pens and when you do that what you end up with is a room of people walking around changing every page there's a competitor of ours right now and I go to their website and I'm like how the heck are they going to stay in business because they're doing the same thing they have a pen writing on a clipboard and then somebody's going to have to calm and move the paper off the clipboard and do the next one it's just not scalable so we spent years building our own robot and it's not an easy thing to build a robot it turns out it's it's even harder to get the darn thing to feed paper than than it is to get it to write so to get something to feed paper reliably and shoot paper off the end of a conveyor reliably is is actually quite difficult so while they were blowing their their money on marketing we were spending our money on on engineering eventually they got acquired and then they got shut down so I it was very strange to me but now so now we're the big dog in town you know still a very small industry but we're the big dog in town doing this and we're the only ones that I know of that have this robot technology that's that's proprietary that allows us to do it at a speed and cost and a quality that's unbeat so I don't know if I'm answering your question but basically I saw the need I wanted something like this it didn't exist so I thought okay well you know I was what in my late 30s I thought I'm not ready to retire I sold my last company let's find potentially arguably my wife would now say a bad use of my funds but I started he had written with with the money I'd made off the last company and kind of just went in you know sought as my next adventure so but as far as how do you identify something you know just think about what do you need what unmet needs do you have and that's I think a pretty good place to start you know I didn't want to start another email service or another CRM there's enough of those I think it's no that you answered my question exactly and that's what I was trying to draw out now I think that for many people that would be at least listening to this podcast the use case is quite obvious for again that authentic interaction that can completely differentiate how you do your outreach is mostly because you know I'm coming from a sales perspective or marketing perspective I'm going to ask you some some entrepreneurship questions I think you have a lot there that I'd like to go into the one I guess outbound question that I would like to ask you you mentioned Bungero we both know you know we both know Bungero you're living in this in this industry of of differentiating how you do outbound what are some other best practices or potentially emerging trends in conducting outbound in a way that's meaningful and it works it could be with writing it could be with video it could be something that else that you're looking into or you're trying to maybe even build into your own company I don't know you're not going to like the answer for us the answer is not outbound it's inbound and inbound marketing and I define that it's not my definition I learned it from Joe Paula she learned it from somebody else but marketing is just really selling in advance and we don't know who our customers are going to be we didn't know our biggest customer was going to be a solar panel installer but what we know how to do is to create an inbound funnel to attract people and then set them up in a drip campaign so and that drip consists of email and it consists of handwritten notes and it consists of phone calls and it consists of banjuro and all these different ways to get in touch with people so what we do is we have a very strong content marketing strategy for SEO we certainly do add words we do Facebook marketing but really what we try to do is we try to get people to our website and then for them to get free samples free samples is our lure so always have something of value you know whether that's a white paper don't just have a contact for them if you have a contact forum you know good luck somebody may or may not use that but create something of value to create you know it to create a lead capture it has to be I don't think booking a demo is even you know that great is something so our item of value is the sample kit because it's physical it's in the mail it has a bunch of stuff in it people find that useful and they want to see it so we drive everybody to the sample form once you fill out the sample form then it's a whole zappier flow of the same handwritten notes go out all powered by zappier you're assigned in our pipedrive CRM system we've created custom code that round robins and assigns those to individual sales reps it puts out a team's notification saying you know so we've created this whole flow to really track that lead from start to finish I think that for us has really been a game changer just creating this inbound marketing lead machine really based off samples request where we could get better as probably like like audiences like I think that's what it's called on Facebook yeah like really targeting or look alike yeah little like audiences that's an area we could get better we could probably get better at linked in marketing but that's too expensive for us we could really get better by having that's crazy expensive we could get better at having like webinars and stuff like that that would be an area of growth kind of like what Bangeros doing we kind of want to create like like handwritten con or communication yeah something like that yeah well you're going to be that category creator for this yeah right whatever this is yeah yeah yeah I handwritten note con I don't know but but really have kind of a community around it that's about handwritten notes and alternative ways to reach out like Bangero and you know whatever else to kind of round out round out what you're doing so what what you're doing and I appreciate that because I'm also a huge proponent of of inbound and I think that what you're doing well is the tools that traditionally could be very effective at outbound like I mentioned like you know you could use this to to do outreach to somebody and really a list solicit a response right a list of the response using you're just using those in your inbound funnel to have higher conversion rates on the leads that you're already bringing in so you're sending out video as opposed to if somebody is spending time sending a video and cold outreach or sending a handwritten notes and cold outreach you're sending them video when there are already so many steps into your funnel you're sending them handwritten notes or free samples when you're so many steps into your so you're just basically optimizing your inbound which is pure like you know marketing qualified leads that you don't have to you're not worried about hitting that wrong customer profile you're not worried about hitting people when they're they're not at the right buying stays there's no meaningful event in their company's life cycle whatever you're not worried about that because that's all sort of accounted for when you're optimizing this inbound funnel that's driving all your business and then you just layer on those things all those additional components like you said booking a demo is not meaningful but perhaps sending them a video or or sending them some free samples that's meaningful enough to actually get them the in bound leads to care and to convert and if you can kill that then you have a a very strong repeatable inbound lead generation system right yeah we we're in a unique position where we've had to hire more people to spread the leads out because what's been happening for years honestly and it's really shame on me I've been we've been fully automating that process so you go to our website you fill out this thing we send you the samples then you get a whole bunch of persist IQ which is our email platform of choice you know remind did you get the samples the samples are almost there what do you think the samples you know and we are closing you know a really small percentage of that because the sales reps are getting so many it was only spread over a couple sales reps of the time they weren't following up on it so now we just had another sales person yesterday we're spreading those lead those leads much much thinner to make it more of a scarcity so that they really have to harp on you know and I apologize for anybody that asks for samples requests now if they're if they get too many calls or whatever but we want to make it a scarcity so that they're really paid attention to and we're trying to raise our percentage close there we actually do on our website if you go to handwritten.com and that's handwritten with a Y and you go to the resources tab we have the outbound marketers playbook where we walk through everything we do to reach out to somebody with a handwritten note I mean it involves using upwork and collecting their address you know having somebody in Indonesia scrape their address and then they send the address back we put it into handwritten and then it'll send them a handwritten note and then will follow up the email you know so it's a long process so that is on handwritten.com slash resources if you want that but for us the big thing because doing a lot of you know if your product is very very you know is expensive like you're a consultant or something like that sending out 10,000 cold outreaches maybe isn't a big deal but when our product costs $3.25 quantity one it gets expensive to send handwritten notes to all these people if you don't know if they're going to use it or not so you know I would say handwritten notes aren't always the best outreach but they are or the best outbound platform but they're a very good outreach platform so once they are your client to get them to repeat by to notify them of special sales a win-back opportunity is a huge one we have a client they're a snack box so they every month or twice a month they'll send you a box for your office full of snacks we actually use them here and what they learned was if they screw up and they send you the wrong snack box they forget to send you a snack box they send you another snack box with extra snacks and they include a handwritten note saying you know so sorry that we screwed this one up obviously the extra snacks goes very far but the handwritten note doesn't hurt what they found was their consumers that received a screw up note and a screw up box actually have a higher lifetime value than those that never screwed up in the first place so then the next logical step is just screw up with everybody send everybody and that's what they're doing so it's crazy but but that's an extreme example of win-back and that's that's what some of our clients do know very very good advice so you you know you're operating at a level that would be more in line with like a smaller SaaS or smaller like the same monthly recurring service it has a small a small price tag associated with that sale so that's I appreciate the insight no it's just something that some people can take into consideration so it doesn't matter whichever market you're playing in or whichever market you're selling to if it isn't a prize or a high ticket item maybe you can do upbound but if it's too expensive then just you said build it into part of your your inbound funnel and it's still it's still it's still there's something it's gonna differentiate your company so much more than just sending them that six email asking them if they want to book a demo yet or if they have if they want to come to a webinar or if they've or just a reminder here's the link to download your white paper it's again just as impactful right just use it in an inbound funnel instead okay so a couple very very helpful thank you so questions about lessons building companies because a lot of a lot of individuals on this on this show they are entrepreneurs they've built companies have had failures have had successes so what are some what are some lessons that you've learned building perhaps handwritten or even you know sell it what what are best practices for building companies that you perhaps didn't realize when you first started I just want to take a second and thank the sponsor of today's episode HubSpot HubSpot is the CRM platform that is easy to implement and is even easier to get your team to a doc and ask anybody that's implemented new technology in a company the biggest issue is not finding it or buying it it's getting your team and your company to actually use it and adopt it and when it's a piece like a CRM one of the most critical pieces of your business infrastructure and your tech stack if people don't adopt it and use it that means you're getting incomplete data you're getting missing data you're getting garbage data it could impact quite literally everybody in your company as well as it could negatively impact your customers and your revenue so how does HubSpot solve for this with their CRM platform there's two components that they focus on that allow for organizational wide adoption this is the contact timeline as well as the mobile app so the contact timeline gives a historical context for all of the data that is associated with a certain contact in the CRM that means that anybody across the organization can see all the actions and all the interactions that have taken place against that particular contact you can also use that timeline to make calls to these contacts and roll them in sequences put them into marketing or sales campaigns schedule a meeting open tickets the historical timeline makes it easy to take action as well as to track the action that's been taken against all of your contacts and it's not a pain to enter the information which means that it doesn't take somebody a long time to put in great data which can again positively impact your whole company the second piece is the access from anywhere meaning if I have a phone and I'm on the road the world's opening up a little bit more now people are traveling again I can use the HubSpot app to access my CRM anywhere on the go on the fly doesn't matter so I have complete access to the CRM I have access to my spreadsheets my calendars my notebooks all of my contacts I can send messages across my team with the HubSpot keyboard I can access my contacts call them through the HubSpot app I can take quick notes I can take contact information I can all log it into my HubSpot app so that I can pull it up later on my desktop when I'm back at home it's simple it's intuitive it's meant to make it easy frictionless so that your team sees the value in properly using the CRM to the fullest of its capabilities and gives them the tools and the tech to allow them to do it without spending too much time and causing them more headache the best thing about HubSpot is that it can be set up for any size of business and it will scale with you if you're just starting out you can take advantage of certain features and then as you scale your business you'll notice that HubSpot will support almost anything you need as you grow so if you do want to learn how to scale your business without scaling complexity go to HubSpot.com yeah so obviously don't be afraid to pivot that would be which I you know it's pretty obvious but with with sell it pivoting out a real estate and into Abercrombie and Fitch and you know that type of thing was a big a big change for handwritten what it was is we kind of switched our whole focus and it was always I always wanted to be business focused but when we started the the tagline was quality cards your words and pen and ink because there's much more consumer focused with these bespoke letterpress cards and everything like that now it's quality cards or sorry your words and pen and ink you know we want to put the words and pen and ink front and center and it's more business you know you can go on our website create your own card with your logo on it so it's nice but it's not letterpress so we pivoted there slightly a long time ago I had the opportunity to do dinner and this is always the humble brag I did dinner with Conan O'Brien and what he said was always get in over your head and that is like the advice that I've taken with me for 20 years you know you can't you can't grow if you don't if you don't uh it's try to overextend yourself and do things that you didn't think your was possible um so that is that's been you know something I've thought about for the last 20 some odd years and um you know I think it's universally applicable um other things you know making sure and I think it's gotten even worse today from a generation perspective worse better you know whatever how you look at this from a generational perspective people are very sensitive now and I think a lot of this is too but being very cognizant of your team the happiness of your team you know I used to be a grinder and I'd grind my team pretty hard now I kind of bite my tongue as I as my team plans another game and another routing and blah blah blah you know it's like it's a lot of that but having a team that's having fun um is so important um just to keep the wheels moving because because they know come thanksgiving and come Christmas they're not going to be having fun they're going to be in this office working their tails off getting all the notes out the door that come with those that cyclical period so you know it's again that work hard play hard but it's so important to stay so focused on that we have tools that we we use to kind of do uh customer satisfaction employees at surveys um and we're constantly taking a pulse on that um you know when I sold my last company the owners did like a whole survey on me with my employees and most people really liked it liked me rather and um I'm friends with a lot of them to this day and they reach out to me linked in saying you know you changed my life you helped me help focus me in a career path but there were like one or two that had some very harsh words for me and uh that you know I've taken that to heart and I've really tried to adjust myself so I'm not seen in those ways which is hard you know as the hard driving entrepreneur you're always trying to you know move the move the ball forward and everything else but um it's one of the reasons I have a private office like I'm not the HR person I'm not a salesperson always on the phone I mean I am on podcasts and stuff so it makes it it does make sense for me to have an office but one of either one of the reasons I have an office is because I know my energy impacts people and so I'm trying to protect them from that energy um so um you know so so that's one thing I've learned is that I need to be very very cognizant of my face because everybody's face is public property right like when you walk into a space people see it and they get positive or negative energy based off that public property so as the head of the company you have to be especially cognizant of that and so I always try to come in to a lap around the office you know try to be super bubbly David Wax even though inside I want to you know maybe I'm not so bubbly. There's a million stress zones yeah there's a million things on your mind yeah yeah yeah so that's that's a real big one um getting real technical and you know feel free to tell me to shut up the for us what what it was crazy you know no technology I think anybody in sales needs to know technology whether that's duck soup banjuro handwritten obviously course why wouldn't you want to use that zappier which is critical I think you know learning zappier and what it can do it has revolutionized our business if I didn't work for handwritten I'd want to work for zappier just being an evangelist I think zappier is the coolest thing ever um you know being in any job these days you have to have a tech inclination and understand the tools that can make you a more effective salesperson because coming in knocking on somebody's door calling somebody over and over again you know isn't gonna that's not how people interact anymore so you have to have a you you have to know how your customer wants to interact so learning about technology and for us what that meant was learning about additive and subtractive manufacturing because now we're building these robots um when we started they were all made of metal and then I brought in people that taught me how to 3d print them and then we went too far in 3d printing and now we 3d print we laser cut and I mean I could just talk to you about modern manufacturing techniques for all day long and that that was out of my mind you went into it you figured it out you figured it out you figured it out yeah yeah yeah yeah I love surrounding myself with people with the figure it out gene as I call it you know um my director of operations if you uh you know at first glance they might not you might not go wow that person looks like they have the figure it out gene they she probably has the figure out gene more than anybody else I've ever met um you know and trying to find those people that have that figure out gene and put them to work on your team it's like the greatest thing you know you don't need to it's great to have smart people in the team but a lot of smart people will give up if they don't figure it out right away but if you have somebody that just will not quit those are the best people to have on your team and I'm super lucky to have those people on the team you know very very good lessons and uh I think that that the figure it out people um I've heard it called different things but whatever that person is I think that's probably the the most important asset to a startup it's truly be successful um okay a couple more just I guess one more startup question then a couple rapid fire questions um mindset of an entrepreneur uh and you've done this for a while now if somebody wants to start their own thing what type of mindset should they should they have or what they have to set themselves up for or try a new skills I have to potentially build into their persona yeah so I'd recommend everybody read the book if you haven't already um and I know there's a lot of business books out there this one is very thin easy to read called the e-meth by Michael Gerber uh have you read that one I haven't actually that's that's what I had because I haven't read that one yeah it's an easy book and I what I like is it's very practical but um the e-meth e stands for entrepreneur not like email or not electronic but the the e-meth talks about how you have to when you're when you when you become an entrepreneur an entrepreneur gets into the business because they like often they get into the business because they like doing the thing but as the entrepreneur your job is not to do the thing your job is to build the company that does the thing so you want to work on the business not in the business so you know day one of starting your company you're going to be working every day in the business you know if you're starting a pie company which is the example in the book every day you're going to be baking pies probably the worst thing you can do in that business is bake pies you know I'm guilty of it too I still program the robot sometimes you know I've hired everybody else but programming the robots as my baby um and I should not be doing that the guy the CEO should not be debugging robot issues so it's really about how do you separate yourself from the day to day how do you define your business as a franchise even if you don't plan on franchising it so what I mean by that is creating creating a doc a book of roles and we're currently doing this at handwritten just you know who what is the job description for robot operator what is the job description for head of operations what is it you know and having everything clearly defined there and then also having everybody in place to do those jobs so you as the entrepreneur are running around doing podcasts um doing the big thinking that you can't do if you're debugging robot issues or handling like I was until like four months ago doing the bookkeeping you know you you can't do it so um I need to swallow my own advice and I just recently after seven years of doing handwritten yeah it's super tough and you know your budget constrained and you know budget constrained is the big one you know well I have two dollars to spend do I want to spend it on hiring a bookkeeper or doing a spend it on another Google ad that'll get me another client you know so um but you have to make those investments and create the team so you can scale much faster and that's what we're really working in now is working on the business and not in and my goal is to do nothing you know when somebody asks me what are you doing you know all these people are my goal is to do nothing because when you do nothing that gives you time to think about stuff and actually do the heavy thinking as opposed to the grunt work of sales finance yeah robot debugging etc and that's that's as an entrepreneur that doing nothing and that pursuing a vision is the most important thing because an entrepreneur that is in the weeds in the day that you can't have a vision you'll never get you'll never you may have it but you'll never you'll never get any any closer to it right so exactly okay let's see let's do a couple rather fire ones this is really good I appreciate this okay so um uh a myth about entrepreneurship that you want to debunk it's not an overnight success you know I think a lot of people are you know they see Silicon Valley and they think oh you know everything's popping up overnight everybody's a billion dollar company overnight you know those are the exceptions rather than the rule most businesses don't ever get venture financing you know let alone that overnight success factor so you know minimum of two years of grinding it out more like three four years probably sell it my last company did a two year ramp which was good because I was broke and I couldn't afford to keep it going much longer than that handwritten took four years luckily I could afford to stick with it but you really have to stick with something and and things typically aren't overnight successes it takes a lot of grit and you have to have a real motor to get through it all good um one lesson that you would tell your younger self same thing stick with it um especially this yeah just stick with it because I you know I'd be complaining to everybody is this worth it as it's gonna happen blah blah blah and just really stick with it the other thing is start as soon as possible because if I were to start this journey today and journey a little bit of a silly term but if I were to go and become an entrepreneur today it would it would never happen right now I have two kids I've got a wife I've got commitments left and right so you know start as young as you can there's no better day than today to start your next venture um what would be outside of that one book that you mentioned uh a resource podcast person that you would recommend somebody go check out well I gotta say I love what you're doing um I think the uh market I really do I think the inbound success podcast with Kathy Booth we were talking about this before the show not every episode is a gem uh but maybe every other episode and there's a lot to glean from that she's done a great job of creating actionable you know not just having people on that have great SEO but how did you do it you know what did you do give me the steps one two three I really admire her for that I think she's done a great job um I also do a lot of the reddit growth growth hacking groups on reddit I learned a lot from reddit um and then app sumo is it great I don't know if you know app sumo but it's a great resource finding cheap money there I know it's but it's great you know um just to talk about the different types of tools available to get in on the cheap like really cheap um it's a tremendous tool good good um and last question what does success truly mean to you for me it's about uh employee development um when COVID hit uh in March of last year I had a I they're at least two uh webinar zoom calls I had with my team where I broke into tears and it was a tough it was a very tough time and right after I shut down and we shut down for a couple weeks um one of my I don't know it was like I don't know what caused him to reach out but one of my employees from my old job from sell it contact me on LinkedIn just to tell me how I had changed his life and set him down a career he had no path before and now he was really happy and what he was doing and you know everything look like that and it just meant so much to me to play a part in my employee's lives and and really set them on career paths like my director of operations along with the figure it out gene she hasn't even finished college she was coming to me I found her on Craigslist uh which is like here at Kajiji and she has progressed just tremendously when she came to me she was operating two robots that we had store bot and now she manages a team of 10 people 15 people and manages 115 robots you know through those people so it's really it's been amazing to watch their their growth um I have other people that you know their job is to we call it quality assurance but they take a note and they take an envelope make sure they're right stuff it in the envelopes they're an envelope stuffer and it's a low-paying job but I've had people come into my office saying that I've changed their life financially taking them out of poverty um you know money if money is your end goal regardless of entrepreneurship or anything else the reason I think and I was talking about this yesterday with my director of ops or sorry with my director of finance the reason I think you see so many um drug overdoses and that type of thing with celebrities is because and and I know this a little bit not with drugs but just making bad decisions in my life after selling my last company because you think money is the end goal and then you get a pile of money that's bigger than anything you ever expected and you're still not happy right like your life's not any different um and you're like that leads to depression it's a weird you know people like oh poor little rich boy with your big pile of coin you know poor little guy but you know don't make don't make money your target of happiness because when you get a you'll never get there because there's always more money you're gonna want that type of thing and be when you do get to a point that's some threshold whether it's your first million or your tenth or whatever that is and you get there you're gonna look back and you would be like you know same people surrounding me that don't make me happy or you know whatever that is you're not gonna be happy it's the money does not make you happy you're gonna look around you're gonna think it's just the same crap going on so you gotta figure out what is gonna make you happy and do that whether that's employee development or whatever else but money in itself I think has led a lot of people to depression at the end of the day that's good that's good life advice I didn't expect that to come out that that was a good answer to a question though that was a very good answer um you hear that a lot with entrepreneurs because I asked that question everybody like what defines success and it's been a resounding 0% have said money or financial gains it's been other things it's been freedom it's been spend more time with family friends it's been build you I've heard that we're building businesses building things entrepreneurs have this gene where they just like to build things make an exit and they'll just keep trying to build new things right but no it's a very good answer and it's a it's a good point to always consider because if you grind at something for a very long time you will probably be successful at it but just don't let that one thing that you're grinding at ruin the rest of your life right yeah okay all right you know what happens is oh yeah did can I get one quick story so what happens is and I know of course yeah yeah so when you sell your company that when you when you sell your company somebody else takes it over they're gonna make stupid decisions they're just not as smart as you and they're gonna run the company in a way that you're going to disagree with and typically like I did I had a two-year urn out where I had to sit there and watch them do this for two years and that's depressing too because I had spent eight years or seven years building the thing and then I watched them dismantle it for you know it's like kind of like if you're rebuilding an old Corvette you know and you got the thing perfect and shiny and waxed and all that and then the person that buys it is your next door neighbor they park it on their lawns you see it every day and they grind at it with a you know like a like a sanding a sanding wheel or something yeah and it's just like causing cringes so you know that's the other thing is when when you do don't take too much ownership that when you do when it is time to walk away you know separate yourself just you built it all your employees are probably gonna leave hopefully they'll go on to better things um you know so just be happy with what happened and understand that they're probably gonna drive that thing into the ground you know it's it was insane to me what they did you know they spent a lot of money on the company and then they drove the thing into the ground and yeah it's just it's just you just can't place that much value in in something that is monetary and even if you built it up like it's just you know it's part of the game if you're gonna sell it you're gonna cash out like you just have to I think it's actually probably even more important just to move on but like no like expect that expect these huge emotional uh things that are gonna come your way whenever you have this level of success or whatever in in your life and again it's not meant to diminish the fact that it's not easy to achieve but if people are going to achieve at some point in a lot of people um a lot of people don't but a lot of people do as well um be cognizant of that right um anyways so the only thing that I wanted to ask you before you finished is because it's always very important where do people go to connect with you to learn more about handwritten social website your your social whatever sure yeah I mean honestly the best place to go is handwritten.com hndwryttn.com get those samples you know it can always opt out of the emails when they start coming in um you can also find me on LinkedIn uh david wax just look for david at handwritten on the only one um twitter at handwritten um i personally don't tweet too much i'll retweet stuff that handwritten tweets but at handwritten is a great place too uh but we're on all you know facebook and instagram and all the rest very good very good all right that's all I got that's it thank you