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Lessons - Start-Up Struggles | David Wachs - CEO of Handwrytten · Success Story with Scott Clary

• 0:00
  What are some lessons that you've learned building, perhaps handwritten, or even, you know,
• 0:17
  sell it?
• 0:19
  What are best practices for building companies that you perhaps didn't realize when you
• 0:22
  first started?
• 0:26
  Yeah. So obviously, don't be afraid to pivot. That would be, which I, you know,
• 0:33
  was pretty obvious, but with, with, sell it, pivoting out of real estate and into Abercrombie
• 0:38
  and Fetch, and, you know, that type of thing, was a big, a big change. For handwritten, what
• 0:45
  it was, is we kind of switched our whole focus, and it was always, I always wanted to be business
• 0:50
  focused, but when we started, the tagline was quality cards, your words and pen and ink,
• 0:55
  because it was much more consumer focused with these bespoke letterpress cards and everything
• 1:00
  like that. Now it's quality cards, or sorry, your words and pen and ink, you know, we want to put
• 1:05
  the words and pen and ink front and center, and it's more business, you know, you can go on our
• 1:10
  website, create your own card with your logo on it. So it's nice, but it's not letterpress. So
• 1:15
  we pivoted there slightly. A long time ago, I had the opportunity to do dinner, and this is
• 1:23
  always the humble brag. I did dinner with Conan O'Brien, and what he said was always get in over
• 1:29
  your head, and that is like the advice that I've taken with me for 20 years. You know, you can't,
• 1:36
  you can't grow if you don't, if you don't, uh, ex, ex try to overextend yourself and do things
• 1:44
  that you didn't think you was possible. So that has, that's been, you know, something I thought
• 1:50
  about for the last 20-some odd years, and you know, I think it's universally applicable. Other things,
• 1:59
  you know, making sure, and I think it's gotten even worse today from a generation perspective,
• 2:09
  worse better, you know, whatever. How you look at this, from a generational perspective,
• 2:14
  people are very sensitive now. And I think a lot of this is COVID too, but being very cognizant
• 2:22
  of your team, the happiness of your team, you know, I used to be a grinder, and I'd grind my team
• 2:29
  pretty hard. Now I kind of bite my tongue as I, as my team plans another game and another outing
• 2:36
  and blah, blah, blah, you know, it's like, it's a lot of that. But having a team that's having fun
• 2:42
  is so important, um, just to keep the wheels moving because they know
• 2:49
  come Thanksgiving and come Christmas, they're not going to be having fun. They're going to be in
• 2:54
  this office, working their tails off, getting all the notes out the door that come with those,
• 2:59
  that cyclical period. So, you know, it's again, that work hard, play hard, but it's so important to
• 3:05
  stay so focused on that. We have tools that we've, we use to kind of do, uh, customer satisfaction,
• 3:12
  employee sat surveys, um, and we're constantly taking a pulse on that. Um, you know, when I sold my
• 3:18
  last company, the owners did like a whole survey on me with my employees. And most people really
• 3:25
  liked it, liked me rather. And, um, I'm friends with a lot of them to this day and they reach out to
• 3:32
  me, a LinkedIn saying, you know, you changed my life, you helped me help focus me in a career path.
• 3:37
  But they're like one or two that had some very harsh words for me. And, uh, that, you know,
• 3:45
  I've taken that to heart and I've really tried to adjust myself so I'm not seen in those ways.
• 3:50
  Which is hard, you know, as the hard driving entrepreneur, you're always trying to, you know, move the,
• 3:55
  move the ball forward and everything else. But, um, it's one of the reasons I have a private
• 3:59
  office. Like I'm not the HR person. I'm not the sales person always on the phone. I mean,
• 4:04
  I am on podcasts and stuff. So it makes, it does make sense for me to have an office. But
• 4:09
  one of the reasons I have an office is because I know my energy impacts people. And so I'm trying
• 4:14
  to protect them from that energy. Um, so, um, you know, so, so that's one thing I've learned is that
• 4:22
  I need to be very, very cognizant of my face because everybody's face is public property, right?
• 4:29
  Like when you walk into a space, people see it and they get positive or negative energy
• 4:35
  based off that public property. So as the head of the company, you have to be especially cognizant
• 4:41
  of that. And so I always try to come in to a lap around the office, you know, try to be super bubbly
• 4:47
  David Wax, even though inside I want to, you know, maybe I'm not so bubbly.
• 4:51
  There's a million stressors. Yeah, there's a million things out on your mind. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
• 4:55
  So that's, that's a real big one. Um, getting real technical and, you know, feel free to tell
• 5:01
  me to shut up. The, for us, what, what it was crazy, you know, no technology. I think anybody in
• 5:07
  sales needs to know technology, whether that's duck soup, bonjour, handwritten, obviously.
• 5:13
  Of course, why wouldn't you want to use that? Zapier, which is critical. I think, you know,
• 5:19
  learning Zapier and what it can do. It has revolutionized our business. If I didn't work for handwritten,
• 5:24
  I'd want to work for Zapier just being an evangelist. I think Zapier is the coolest thing ever.
• 5:30
  Um, you know, being in any job these days, you have to have a tech
• 5:36
  inclination and understand the tools that can make you a more effective salesperson.
• 5:41
  Because coming in, knocking on somebody's door, calling somebody over and over again, you know,
• 5:45
  isn't gonna, that's not how people interact anymore. So you have to have a, you have to know how
• 5:51
  your customer wants to interact. So learning about technology. And for us, what that meant was
• 5:56
  learning about additive and subtractive manufacturing. Because now we're building these robots.
• 6:02
  When we started, they were all made of metal. And then I brought in people that taught me how to
• 6:06
  3D print them. And then we went too far in 3D printing. And now we 3D print laser cut. And I
• 6:12
  mean, I could just talk to you about modern manufacturing techniques for all day long. And that,
• 6:18
  that was out of my mind. But you went into it and you figured it out. You figured it out. You
• 6:22
  figured it out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I love surrounding myself with people with a figure
• 6:27
  out gene. As I call it, you know, um, my director of operations, if you, uh, you know, at first glance,
• 6:35
  they might not, you might not go, wow, that person looks like they have the figure out gene.
• 6:40
  They, she probably has the figure out gene more than anybody else had ever met. Um, you know,
• 6:45
  and trying to find those people that have that figure out gene and put them to work on your team.
• 6:50
  It's like the greatest thing. You know, you don't need to, it's great to have some more people in
• 6:54
  your team, but a lot of smart people will give up if they don't figure it out right away. But if you
• 6:59
  have somebody that just will not quit, those are the best people to have on your team. And I'm super
• 7:06
  lucky to have those people on the team. How did you know that, um, going analog would be a solution
• 7:15
  to, uh, this over, this over saturation of digital email, text, messages on LinkedIn. Um, how,
• 7:25
  how were you aware of this and how did you feel comfortable jumping into this because you,
• 7:32
  from my knowledge, didn't actually have experience in any of the verticals that are actually
• 7:37
  using your product at, at any sort of scale, right? So I'm curious what your mindset was like
• 7:43
  when you did this. It was truly just something that I wanted to use at the moment. You know,
• 7:50
  I just knew handwritten notes. You know, I sat down, I ordered custom stationary off.
• 7:57
  I, you know, some digital print shop online. It came. I loved it. It was really high quality.
• 8:01
  I wanted to send all my clients and, and employees handwritten notes. And I just realized I couldn't.
• 8:07
  I didn't have the attention span, you know, and I want to, I thought, wouldn't it be cool if we could
• 8:12
  do this and include business cards or include gift cards. And I just thought, you know, nobody
• 8:17
  else is doing it. So what happened was, of course, somebody else started doing it. Um, there was
• 8:22
  a company for a brief time called Bond. And what happened was I came out with this idea. And then
• 8:27
  my girlfriend at the time, like two weeks later says, look, what just happened. A company popped up
• 8:32
  doing exactly what you want it because it's funny like in the zeitgeist or whatever in the ether,
• 8:38
  people have ideas at the same time. I was still kind of locked into, um, e-prize or,
• 8:45
  hello world when, when I started forming the idea. And I couldn't really
• 8:50
  counts on it. This other company did. They got venture funding and all that. And what happened to them,
• 8:57
  they basically spent all their money on marketing and none of their money on technology.
• 9:03
  And they ended up with a 3D printer with a pen. And the way 3D printer works is a moves x, y,
• 9:10
  and z, you know, move up, down left, right. And so you can get it to right. Um, we can talk about
• 9:16
  inertial mass. It moves fast with this heavy gantry. So it creates very jittery writing. And they
• 9:22
  got around that with a felt tip pen so that you could kind of cover up all the jitters. But they
• 9:28
  got this thing to right. But what they did not get it to do was paper feet. So we spent years
• 9:35
  in here. We came out. We started with the same off the shelf robot that they were using, which
• 9:39
  is crap. Um, then they moved to 3D printers and we moved to developing our own actual handwriting
• 9:45
  robot. So we were on a much slower path. They built a ton of these 3D printers holding pens.
• 9:54
  And when you do that, what you end up with is a room of people walking around changing every page.
• 9:59
  There's a competitor of ours right now. And I go to their website. I'm like, how the heck are
• 10:04
  they going to stay in business? Because they're doing the same thing. They have a pen writing on a
• 10:09
  clipboard. And then somebody's going to have to come and move the paper off the clipboard and do
• 10:12
  the next one. It's just not scalable. So we spent years building our own robot. And it's not an
• 10:20
  easy thing to build a robot. It turns out it's even harder to get the darn thing to feed paper
• 10:26
  than it is to get it to right. So to get something to feed paper reliably and shoot paper off the
• 10:31
  end of a conveyor reliably is actually quite difficult. So while they were blowing their
• 10:37
  money on marketing, we were spending our money on engineering. Eventually they got acquired.
• 10:43
  And then they got shut down. So it was very strange to me. But now, so now we're the big dog in
• 10:51
  town, you know, still a very small industry. But we're the big dog in town doing this.
• 10:57
  And we're the only ones that I know of that have this robot technology that's proprietary
• 11:03
  that allows us to do it at a speed and at a cost and a quality that's unbeat.
• 11:09
  So I don't know if I'm answering your question. But basically, I saw the need. I wanted
• 11:13
  something like this. It didn't exist. So I thought, okay, well, you know, I was what in my late
• 11:21
  30s, I thought, I'm not ready to retire. I sold my last company. Let's find potentially
• 11:28
  arguably my wife would now say a bad use of my funds. But I started handwritten with the money I'd
• 11:35
  made off the last company and kind of just went in, you know, sought as my next adventure. So
• 11:43
  but as far as how do you identify something, you know, just think about what do you need? What
• 11:48
  are unmet needs do you have? And that's I think a pretty good place to start. You know, I didn't want to
• 11:53
  start another email service or another CRM. There's enough of those.
• 12:05
  you