Lessons - Start-Up Struggles | David Wachs - CEO of Handwrytten

What are some lessons that you've learned building, perhaps handwritten, or even, you know, sell it? What are best practices for building companies that you perhaps didn't realize when you first started? Yeah. So obviously, don't be afraid to pivot. That would be, which I, you know, was pretty obvious, but with, with, sell it, pivoting out of real estate and into Abercrombie and Fetch, 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 tagline was quality cards, your words and pen and ink, because it was 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, ex, ex try to overextend yourself and do things that you didn't think you was possible. So that has, that's been, you know, something I thought about for the last 20-some odd years, and you know, I think it's universally applicable. 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 COVID 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 outing and blah, blah, blah, you know, it's like, it's a lot of that. But having a team that's having fun is so important, um, just to keep the wheels moving 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've, we use to kind of do, uh, customer satisfaction, employee sat 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, a LinkedIn saying, you know, you changed my life, you helped me help focus me in a career path. But they're 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 the sales person always on the phone. I mean, I am on podcasts and stuff. So it makes, it does make sense for me to have an office. But 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 stressors. Yeah, there's a million things out 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, bonjour, handwritten, obviously. Of course, why wouldn't you want to use that? Zapier, which is critical. I think, you know, learning Zapier and what it can do. It has revolutionized our business. If I didn't work for handwritten, I'd want to work for Zapier just being an evangelist. I think Zapier 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 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. 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 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. But you went into it and you figured it out. You figured it out. You figured it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love surrounding myself with people with a figure 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 out gene. They, she probably has the figure out gene more than anybody else had 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 some more people in your 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. How did you know that, um, going analog would be a solution to, uh, this over, this over saturation of digital email, text, messages on LinkedIn. Um, how, 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 stationary off. I, 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, 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 into, um, e-prize or, hello world when, when I started forming the idea. And I couldn't really counts 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 3D printer works is a moves x, y, and z, you know, move up, down left, right. And so you can get it to right. Um, we can talk about 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 in here. 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. 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 come 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 even harder to get the darn thing to feed paper than it is to get it to right. So to get something to feed paper reliably and shoot paper off the end of a conveyor reliably is actually quite difficult. So while they were blowing their money on marketing, we were spending our money on engineering. Eventually they got acquired. And then they got shut down. So 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 proprietary that allows us to do it at a speed and at a 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 handwritten 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 are 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. you