Latest / Healthy Happy Wise Wealthy / The Rise of Intentional Tech: Sleke’s Journey from Idea to Influencer Success

Transcript

The Rise of Intentional Tech: Sleke’s Journey from Idea to Influencer Success · Healthy Happy Wise Wealthy

• 0:00
  Hey everybody. I am so excited to do this in person
• 0:03
  episode here today at Reno Startup Week. And we all have our Reno Startup Week
• 0:07
  badges. I am here with. You guys are just my favorite
• 0:11
  startup ever.
• 0:15
  So Brennan Jordan and Austin
• 0:18
  Boer. I'm saying the names correctly, he told me. And it's the
• 0:22
  first day of October, so this is so thematic. Boer,
• 0:25
  right? It's your name, so it is your name. But they. I
• 0:29
  followed them a little bit along on their journey since I got here a year
• 0:32
  ago and so I'm gonna have them tell it in their own words.
• 0:37
  So why don't you guys kind of introduce how you know each other
• 0:40
  and tell us a little bit about your story. Yeah, it started when
• 0:44
  we met at the University of Nevada Reno here in reno.
• 0:48
  Was it 2016? Yep. Oh my gosh, you're so old
• 0:52
  now. Yeah, yeah. Way back in 2016.
• 0:57
  We met at. We met here at school and
• 1:01
  finished school up. We took off across the world. I
• 1:04
  moved to China right after school. This all relates, I promise.
• 1:08
  I moved to China right after school and then Brendan ended up following me out
• 1:11
  there and we spent. We had one conversation in
• 1:16
  what, 2019. And in China they have this app called
• 1:20
  WeChat and it brings so much functionality, so much utility, but
• 1:23
  at the same time there's still games and social media on it and it makes
• 1:27
  living life in China very easy, especially as a non interesting
• 1:31
  at the time, a non Mandarin speaker. And for
• 1:34
  us we saw all the utility in communication and how helpful it can be, but
• 1:38
  you also see all the distractions. And for us, we had one conversation
• 1:42
  just wanting to delete social media off our phones and
• 1:46
  really that was it, one conversation. There wasn't anything where
• 1:50
  we could like delete Instagram, for example, because that's where all our friends and
• 1:54
  family knew to communicate with on.
• 1:58
  So we brought it back up a couple years later
• 2:02
  and we saw that nobody was making a phone that
• 2:05
  had all the communication utility and super helpful functionality without
• 2:09
  any of the distractions. So no one's making it.
• 2:13
  We drew up our idea on a note card and we found a huge online
• 2:16
  community of people looking for exactly what we just
• 2:20
  drew. So we're like, well, there's a market for it, so we might as well
• 2:24
  just make it. And here we are. I love it. I love
• 2:28
  it. Well, and also I think it's super interesting that because you
• 2:31
  guys are, you know, Gen Z's, right? Would you
• 2:35
  consider yourself Gen Z's very young though? I'm on my own Cusper. You think
• 2:39
  you're still okay, well, they're a Cusper 30. But they're
• 2:42
  30. I'm 30, so okay, to me
• 2:46
  30 is Gen Z. But whatever. They're on their cuspers, whatever.
• 2:50
  But young. So it's like. And usually we think of this
• 2:54
  generation as being the ones who are so phone addicted they never get
• 2:57
  off their phones. But I think that actually might be Gen
• 3:01
  X, which is my generation. I don't know,
• 3:05
  like it's just, you know, I think it can hit every generation. So
• 3:09
  you guys call a dumb phone Brennan, I'll have you. Like, right.
• 3:13
  Dumb smartphone. Is that right? There's a. Call it what you
• 3:17
  want. What people search for when they're searching for product like
• 3:21
  ours is dumbphone Is Dumbphone? Okay. Yeah, It's kind of counterposed
• 3:25
  to smartphone because it's supposed to have less functionality
• 3:28
  than a smartphone. So that's why people call it a dumbphone. There's
• 3:32
  a Reddit, a subreddit called R/Dumphones where if
• 3:36
  you're looking for a product like a flip phone or anything up to a sleek
• 3:39
  phone, you're probably going to find grassroots
• 3:43
  research conversations around what phone's good for what, what
• 3:46
  feature set do you need? Here's my experience using it here I bedazzled my flip
• 3:50
  phone. Look how cool it is. So that's fun. And that grew
• 3:54
  from like 30,000 two years ago to I think it's at
• 3:57
  130,000 members as of today. So
• 4:01
  it's a 130,000 members on what. Is that the subreddit
• 4:04
  R/dumphones? At least 130,000. Oh wow. Yeah, that's awesome.
• 4:08
  So it's a growing movement and people are one
• 4:11
  realizing how
• 4:15
  much too much technology can be and the dangers of that and what that
• 4:18
  looks like and making more and looking
• 4:22
  for more viable options to get off of them or
• 4:26
  other phones that are opposite to what
• 4:29
  smartphones fully entail. Yeah. So what does your phone
• 4:33
  do? What can your phone do? Yeah, so we can
• 4:37
  we break it down by the 5M's maps, money,
• 4:40
  messaging, life management and music. So
• 4:44
  kind of all the essentials. So basic calling, messaging.
• 4:49
  But now we need more things for today's technological world.
• 4:52
  So we need to be able to scan QR codes, we need to open links,
• 4:56
  we need to be able to send friends money on Venmo or book an Uber.
• 5:00
  And that's making a lot of some of the super dumb phones
• 5:04
  kind of inaccessible for some people just because there's too much
• 5:07
  friction and it doesn't fit in their lives. So they want something with a bit
• 5:11
  more functionality, which is where we come in. Yeah, I love it.
• 5:15
  Two big differentiators as well, especially when we started
• 5:19
  is people who are looking for us is
• 5:23
  people who want to use a flip phone
• 5:27
  but their lifestyle prohibits that possibility because they
• 5:30
  have work apps, they need access to their banking apps or they're not willing
• 5:34
  to sacrifice on the comfort, so they're willing to take the hit to their attention
• 5:38
  span and all that just because the comfort that they have now
• 5:42
  with the applications available on the phone, they're just not willing to live without. Two
• 5:46
  big ones for our generation is
• 5:50
  Instagram messages and just messages on
• 5:54
  a lot of these social platforms. That's pretty huge, isn't it? Yeah.
• 5:58
  So there is this company that was founded just about when we were founded
• 6:01
  called Beeper. What Beeper does is they're like
• 6:05
  similar to how Apple aggregates all your emails into one
• 6:09
  unified inbox across Gmail Outlook.
• 6:12
  Beeper does that for your DMs. So they have Instagram DMs,
• 6:16
  they have Facebook DMs, LinkedIn, Slack,
• 6:20
  Signal Discord. And so but just the messaging component. So you
• 6:24
  can have that. You can keep all your chats, your group chats, your work chats
• 6:27
  without needing the full social apps. So that's
• 6:31
  helpful. And then people wanted to search the Internet as well. They wanted
• 6:35
  to, you know, there are so many times in the day you're going to want
• 6:38
  to do a quick Google. And so how do we give that to people in
• 6:41
  a dumb phone format without exposing them
• 6:44
  to the entire Internet? What we did is we gave them
• 6:49
  a tool developed by a company called Perplexity,, which
• 6:52
  is one of the first companies to do the Google AI
• 6:56
  search results at the very beginning, which is what you might be familiar with.
• 7:00
  So basically you search the web, it gives you an
• 7:05
  answer based on real up to date web results. And so you can
• 7:09
  get answers to your little everyday questions without having to have
• 7:12
  a web browser. So that's kind of extra special sauce in what
• 7:16
  we Kindle. That's very cool. That's kind of. Those are different things from
• 7:20
  when I know I first talked to you guys last year. So it's basically all
• 7:24
  the usability is there without the doom scrolling right
• 7:28
  before bed for three hours. So not that I know
• 7:32
  anything about that. No, no, we're all very responsible
• 7:35
  at that time. I am not always very responsible. Right. I think
• 7:39
  I can sometimes go, oh my gosh, there went two hours on doom scrolling
• 7:43
  or whatever. Maybe not doom scrolling, but scrolling one way or the other.
• 7:47
  So it happens very fast. It happens very fast, for sure. A big
• 7:51
  part of it, too, is. I mean, what's your experience? Do you think that you
• 7:54
  consciously make the choice to do that? Open Instagram or. Right.
• 7:59
  You know, it's just habit or just. It's addiction, probably
• 8:02
  of some kind. I imagine there's different levels. But, I mean, the
• 8:06
  amount of times that I can remember when I was using my iPhone, just like,
• 8:10
  I'll open Instagram, do something, put it away, and then
• 8:14
  just for five seconds to take it out again and press the app
• 8:18
  without me even thinking about it. Yeah. Such an
• 8:21
  interesting sensation. Well, it could be like, it's just, you know, we're sitting around and
• 8:25
  there's people around, but we're anxious. It could be an anxiety thing, like, oh, social
• 8:28
  anxiety. So let me pull up my phone. I think that's a big thing, too.
• 8:32
  It used to be we just sat awkwardly in silence in the
• 8:36
  80s. But no, we were also taught that.
• 8:40
  Boredom was a bad thing and that we
• 8:44
  should be doing something constantly. And if there's any sort of downtime, we
• 8:47
  need to fill it with something. And that only got
• 8:52
  magnified with smartphones, because now, even when I'm going
• 8:56
  up an escalator, it could be 10 seconds. You pull out your phone to
• 9:00
  fill that time. You can no longer sit in silence. And
• 9:04
  what boredom does is it helps with being creative, and it helps
• 9:08
  bring new ideas upon us. And you look at kids and they
• 9:12
  create these magical kingdoms that they think of out of boredom.
• 9:16
  And you only get there through that boredom and them trying to find that time.
• 9:19
  So we are getting rid of all of that time. And even now with kids,
• 9:23
  they're also getting more. Getting rid of that time now to sit there and just
• 9:27
  be creative, think outside the box and just do stuff? Yeah.
• 9:31
  Yeah. So how is it going? Like, I know you guys have.
• 9:35
  People are starting to buy these all over the place. Tell me a little bit
• 9:39
  about the process you've gone through to build it.
• 9:42
  So our strategy we've taken is working with different
• 9:46
  strategic influencers in the market. We found
• 9:51
  we don't really have that big of a following. We're kind of new at this
• 9:54
  whole space, so why don't we go to the people who
• 9:58
  already have huge followings, who have ideas, who are trying
• 10:01
  all the different phones and can give us feedback. And if anything, it was more
• 10:05
  for feedback initially because they've tried everything so they can tell us
• 10:08
  how our idea compares to everybody else or what we're doing. Are we
• 10:12
  on the right track? That Seems smart. And we found
• 10:16
  with our first influencer worked very well. So we kind of just
• 10:20
  kept doing that with more and more influencers and now we went out of
• 10:23
  the minimal and dumb phone space and now we're in more tech. We kind
• 10:27
  of, we didn't grow out of the tech space, but we're also exploring lifestyle at
• 10:30
  the same time. So we have different influencers in these different niches to
• 10:34
  kind of reach their own audiences on their own value ads. So you mean
• 10:38
  you're in those spaces with the influencers. The influencers are in those space talking
• 10:42
  about your phone. Correct. So they'll sit there, they'll use it for
• 10:45
  whatever their purposes are because everyone uses phones to
• 10:49
  differently. Right. And for sure they'll share
• 10:52
  it, say how it fits in their life and then
• 10:56
  their audience relates with them. Oh, this is something that's practical for
• 11:00
  me as well. I can possibly use this. Right. I love that.
• 11:04
  So you guys have used services I know with Reno Startup Week or different
• 11:08
  things like that. What is, what is. So we're at Reno Startup Week and you
• 11:11
  guys did a talk here, but tell me first, first,
• 11:15
  Brennan, I'll ask you, so what have you used from services
• 11:19
  for anything in Northern Nevada or here? Services
• 11:23
  in Northern Nevada? I think everything starts from
• 11:27
  people's willingness to
• 11:30
  lean into the community for people who want to
• 11:34
  pour into Northern Nevada just to make it a richer
• 11:38
  culture, as well as to bring business, non profit, just
• 11:41
  social and commercial activity to the area. And so there's a
• 11:45
  great grassroots community of people who are trying to start things,
• 11:49
  help people who are trying to start things. And then there are a whole bunch
• 11:52
  of different services like the Innovation center attached to the University
• 11:56
  of Nevada that they've made to let these people gather
• 12:00
  and to support each other. So the biggest advantage is probably
• 12:05
  the grassroots in the community here and just the openness.
• 12:08
  Yeah. So this is the third year of Reno Startup
• 12:12
  Week. First year we came with just an idea. We had
• 12:16
  no code behind it. We just came with an idea. We didn't even
• 12:20
  know if this was the right place for us. And quickly we found a
• 12:23
  niche of other people like us and a lot of our friends
• 12:27
  now today who grew out of this space. And we all
• 12:31
  got together once a week, get together, just co work together.
• 12:35
  Well, that's cool. Quickly magnified, year over year.
• 12:38
  Yeah, we. Okay, there was a fun,
• 12:42
  here's a fun, very community oriented example for
• 12:46
  why like Reno Startup Week is really helpful.
• 12:49
  We. The first year there was a challenge.
• 12:55
  Go take these pictures at all of these locations.
• 12:59
  Post them on your Instagram to get this prize, which
• 13:03
  was. It was like a spa retreat at
• 13:06
  the Grand Sierra or something like that. Oh, fun. Yeah, it was awesome. See, I
• 13:10
  missed that one. Well, we're like, alright, you know what, we could parlay the
• 13:14
  spa retreat into something else. So we busted our butts, posted
• 13:17
  all the pictures, ended up beating one of our good friends now who's
• 13:21
  also. A. Person creating really
• 13:25
  cool stuff in the science space. We beat her. Don't feel bad. But
• 13:29
  we got the spa retreat. And we're like, hey guys,
• 13:33
  whoever can get us the most emails onto our email list will get
• 13:37
  the spa retreat. Oh, that's so smart. Yeah. So
• 13:41
  there was a war between two of our friends and
• 13:45
  they were always texting us like, hey, what's this person at? Hey, what's this person
• 13:48
  at? So we grew our initial email list pretty well
• 13:52
  off that. That's amazing. The best part is we had
• 13:56
  a launcher version, so just kind of. It mimics the UX UI
• 13:59
  or mimics the design of our phone. There's nothing really behind it,
• 14:03
  but it mimics our phone. And we
• 14:07
  didn't have Instagram or it was
• 14:11
  Instagram posts. So we had to go and connect to WI fi wherever we were
• 14:15
  to be able to upload the post by a certain time every day to be
• 14:18
  within this, this running.
• 14:21
  And the last day I was, we went, took the
• 14:25
  picture and I was racing back the Innovation center to connect to their
• 14:29
  WI Fi because the coffee shop we were at, their WI Fi was down. So
• 14:32
  I had to race back to get the last posted so we could end up
• 14:35
  winning the competition. So it was like
• 14:39
  the, the hoops were already. And the frictions were already there for us. Trying
• 14:43
  to post things online without having having social media on their
• 14:47
  phone. That is. That's wild. It was also
• 14:51
  a good teacher and you get what you give. Because
• 14:55
  they were trying to promote Reno Startup
• 14:58
  Week, they were trying to get engagement with all these things that they were trying
• 15:01
  to build around getting this thing off the ground. And we were
• 15:05
  willing participants in the stuff. They were doing that along with other
• 15:09
  like, hey, how can we help you? Oh, hey, can we move this food? Can
• 15:11
  we move this table? Even though we weren't volunteering with them now, Austin is
• 15:15
  twice in a row now, but because of that,
• 15:19
  you are generous with your time, your attention and your energy and then you get
• 15:23
  that energy back. And so that was a really good teacher
• 15:27
  for us. Yeah. And this whole thing is free, which, you know, I think
• 15:30
  someone had. I told someone I was speaking Yesterday. And
• 15:34
  they're like, well, how much does it cost? I'm like, no, the whole thing's free.
• 15:37
  And then I've seen some business owners post on Facebook. They're like, well, we don't
• 15:41
  even know anything about this. How come no one invited us? I'm like, well, they,
• 15:44
  they're, they're promoting it as best they can and it's free, so
• 15:47
  come on and come, you can come. This is open to the public and that
• 15:50
  is really, I think, remarkable. I don't know that there's that many. I don't know
• 15:54
  how many communities really have this, but I have, this is the first time I've
• 15:58
  heard of it. In a community, that's for sure. Yeah, it's,
• 16:02
  it is, it is interesting because on the startup or small
• 16:06
  business side, you also need to be doing everything you can looking for opportunities
• 16:09
  like this. Yes. You don't know it exists, but you
• 16:13
  really try. And for us, you look for every
• 16:16
  opportunity to increase your statistical chance of success. Right.
• 16:20
  And Reno Startup Week for us was a huge step in
• 16:24
  the right direction for that. Yeah, it's amazing. So what was the
• 16:28
  talk on? Who talked, who talked? A lot of us. You both did. All right,
• 16:31
  what'd you give the talk on? I missed it. So we were on a panel
• 16:34
  with two of our advisors, Saf and King,
• 16:38
  and it was about doing good versus doing well. And it's all about
• 16:42
  leading mission driven, vision driven
• 16:46
  companies and startups. And then on our other advisors time, he's
• 16:49
  a mission impact investor. So we got both of the mission and
• 16:53
  vision central decisions being made on
• 16:57
  both sides of the spectrum. That's amazing. So tell me about the
• 17:00
  advisors. Who the. How, when did you get them? How did you get them?
• 17:05
  What's that about? Is that like someone who's come in and invested with you guys
• 17:08
  in their time or money or. Yeah, what they do. A lot of time. A
• 17:12
  lot of time. A lot of time. Nothing. Yeah, nothing money wise yet.
• 17:16
  But the. Another one of the events in town,
• 17:19
  I think it was Launch Reno or
• 17:23
  it was one of these events where it's a speaker series.
• 17:26
  So somebody from some facet of the startup community
• 17:31
  goes and speaks and you just have drinks and then you go and hang out
• 17:34
  with other founder types, anybody interested in the community. And
• 17:38
  on this particular one, King, who is the impact investor,
• 17:42
  was giving a talk about a fund he had just raised and examples of
• 17:45
  companies he had funded. And what is an impact
• 17:49
  investor do? What does a company look like in the
• 17:53
  portfolio of an impact investor? And for us we're like, oh,
• 17:57
  we're pretty socially oriented. Let's check this out. So then we met him and we
• 18:01
  sent him an email and we just kind of said
• 18:04
  hello. We weren't really asking for money, but it was more like, hey, let's introduce
• 18:08
  ourselves. You seem to be in the same orbit of something that we're trying to
• 18:11
  do. I love that other guy. His
• 18:15
  name is Saf. Really cool dude. We
• 18:19
  met him through a pre accelerator called G Beta, which.
• 18:22
  Awesome. Yeah, G Beta. Yeah, yeah. It's through the
• 18:25
  Generator program. And tell everyone
• 18:29
  about the generator program because not everyone's from Reno and probably even if they are
• 18:33
  from Reno, they don't know what Generator is. So Generator is an accelerator program.
• 18:37
  What an accelerator is is they invest money into your company
• 18:40
  in exchange for equity and you get not only that money, but you get
• 18:44
  business mentorship, you get connections in the community.
• 18:48
  If you're looking to make connections with all investors as well, they help
• 18:51
  make connections for you. So it's super beneficial if you're
• 18:55
  trying to get your company off the ground. Yeah. And we did the free
• 18:59
  version of that. So we got no money, but we didn't have to give up
• 19:02
  any of our company. But we got all the mentorship and all the business
• 19:06
  connections. And for us at that time, that's what we wanted. We weren't
• 19:09
  raising any money where it was called bootstrapped or we're paying
• 19:13
  ourselves our way through. We're funded by sales of our
• 19:17
  phone. So we went through that version and for us, that was
• 19:20
  more beneficial what we wanted to do. We got into that program
• 19:24
  and we met one of our other advisors
• 19:29
  along with a lot of other people in the community. We were are willing to
• 19:32
  work with early stage companies and help out. I love that. And I was at
• 19:36
  that talk. Yeah, that. How long was that last year? Was it a whole year
• 19:39
  ago? About now? Ish. I've been to two of your talks. Yes. I just missed
• 19:42
  the one this time. But you know, at our launch party, which was May
• 19:46
  4, 2024 there and then October
• 19:50
  4. G beta. Yeah, which it was a little over a year
• 19:53
  now. Yeah, sounds right. We were presenting. Yeah. Yeah. That's
• 19:57
  why it's so fun to watch you guys do this because you've really like
• 20:01
  jumped in and kept the ball going.
• 20:05
  So tell me about sales. Like, how is it going? We went through.
• 20:09
  I mean, it's a cold start problem. I think there's a book written about it.
• 20:13
  But how do you go from nothing to something
• 20:16
  like Austin said we did, we're exclusively
• 20:19
  influencer based right now. I guess the industry term would be
• 20:23
  gifting campaigns. So what we do is we give people a phone
• 20:27
  and not even asking for a video, just say like try it
• 20:31
  out, you have expertise. And then eventually if they give their input enough,
• 20:34
  then they're bought into the project and they deem that that would
• 20:38
  help their users and thereby help their viewership,
• 20:42
  they'll make a video about it. I love that in that process
• 20:46
  more videos would come. As we develop the product more. As we develop the
• 20:50
  product more, we went from alpha, which we call it a
• 20:54
  beta alpha, very early stage, alpha.
• 20:57
  And beta, all the same critical bugs. So
• 21:01
  basically the first step was we couldn't, you know, we were making
• 21:04
  sales. We started with
• 21:08
  one sale and oh my gosh, just some, some person in a
• 21:12
  state that we hadn't discussed ever. Probably just like,
• 21:16
  wow, this person really. Believes that they just, they found you. Yeah. And then
• 21:20
  you get a couple a month and we still
• 21:24
  had to put our own money or go do all these side jobs to continue
• 21:28
  funding the business. And then over time we would get maybe
• 21:32
  one or two a week and then it's like, okay, now maybe we
• 21:36
  can really scrape by, only put a little bit more money
• 21:39
  in ourselves. And then we would start to just
• 21:43
  flatline, just start to pay our bills through sales, which is kind of where we're
• 21:47
  at right now. So it's really, you know, that's amazing though. I mean, that's amazing.
• 21:50
  You know, it's really hard to do a startup, it's really hard to do a
• 21:54
  startup where it's not an idea that's proven. This is a new
• 21:57
  idea that, you know, maybe some other people somewhere have had
• 22:01
  that still is really relatively not being used
• 22:05
  or tried or anything else like that. And to take that and then make it
• 22:08
  something that, you know, hey, it's, it's, it's
• 22:12
  rolling. That's. And paying bills. That's. I think that's. Give yourself a pat on the
• 22:16
  back. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Benefit of how we've gotten
• 22:19
  this far bootstrapped is by talking with all of our
• 22:23
  users. And this is extremely important because with
• 22:27
  limited resources coming in, we need to use those resources
• 22:30
  very methodically. Yeah. For us taking the time,
• 22:34
  speak with our users, making ourselves available, we don't guess
• 22:38
  what we need to build. We know exactly what we need to do to get
• 22:41
  to that next step. And then if you sit there, you listen to them and
• 22:44
  then you implement what they asked or what they said, there was an issue,
• 22:48
  they're bought in even more because like, oh, I'm being listened to. They're actually
• 22:52
  turning this a part of development and you just create more evangelists. And
• 22:55
  then they're starting to spread the word with friends and we're starting to see that
• 22:59
  more. More now is like people are spreading the word with friends and family
• 23:02
  and bringing them on board. Or we've had a lot of people buy
• 23:06
  phones in multiples so they're buying two or three phones because they're like I'm
• 23:10
  doing this with my husband or I'm doing this with my wife or I'm doing
• 23:14
  this with my rest of my family or one of my friends. So they're doing
• 23:18
  it in kind of groups to kind of one maybe holding, hold each other
• 23:21
  accountable because it is, it's easier to create a community. Yeah,
• 23:25
  yeah, there is. There's a lot of like minded people who are looking
• 23:29
  to make the switch. And one thing we heard a lot in those
• 23:32
  initial interviews is I've tried a complete dumb phone and I felt very
• 23:36
  isolated because one texting on it is difficult
• 23:41
  and everyone's on social media and so messaging. So for us
• 23:45
  trying to cultivate and create a community where people know that they're
• 23:48
  not alone on this journey has been very beneficial. That's
• 23:52
  awesome. That's awesome. And you've done that through influencers. Through
• 23:56
  influencers. And then we have like an online. And your own thing.
• 23:59
  Yeah, we talk every, we try to talk to all of our users once a
• 24:03
  month. It's a little bit less possible now with all of the users that we
• 24:07
  have and all the different countries we have. So it does make it a bit
• 24:10
  more difficult. But we do everything we can. And they all have my personal number
• 24:14
  and get a hold of me. Oh wow. We've
• 24:17
  built it into the product too. Like right on the home screen there's a button
• 24:21
  that you put push to tell us if there's a bug or you have a
• 24:24
  suggestion or you want an app. So in addition to texting, in addition to
• 24:28
  the group chat that we have for all the users, it's literally in the product
• 24:32
  to encourage people to say like, hey, talk to us, we care. I think that
• 24:36
  sends a strong signal to them about like how much we want
• 24:39
  to input. So how many countries, different countries is
• 24:43
  this in now? 10. 10 different countries.
• 24:49
  Do you want to tell the story of that? You guys have some interesting
• 24:53
  stories because I've heard some over the years, the year and a half that I've
• 24:56
  been here. I guess I say years but it's not been that long. So it
• 24:58
  was an accident that we went international.
• 25:02
  One company who is a dumb phone, minimal phone retailer,
• 25:07
  they buy a bunch of phones from us, put them on their website, and then
• 25:10
  they sell to their user base. They
• 25:13
  bought 10 or 15 phones initially for our first
• 25:17
  go around. And I got an email, or we got an email
• 25:21
  for a couple of Swedish apps. This guy's like, hey, I just
• 25:25
  bought your phone. Can you add these apps to the app
• 25:28
  store? We're like, oh, well, I guess we're in Sweden now. I guess we're now
• 25:31
  an international company. So it was kind of an accident. It's so
• 25:35
  funny. But it just kind of kept going and building on itself. And
• 25:39
  it shows that this isn't just a problem here in the states of like people
• 25:42
  wanting to disconnect or use this intentional tech. It's
• 25:46
  a worldwide thing and people are becoming more aware of it. Yeah, that's amazing.
• 25:51
  So tell everyone how you started with getting the technology
• 25:54
  side of it's interesting. And how you got the phones to
• 25:58
  even start selling them. You,
• 26:03
  and this is for any endeavor, have to just really understand
• 26:07
  the problem. And if you really study the problem
• 26:11
  and it helps if you have the problem yourself, you understand what the
• 26:14
  solution needs to look like. So when we were looking at. Man, that's
• 26:18
  really great wisdom, actually. Yeah, I almost want to say it again when I hear
• 26:21
  really great wisdom. So it's like when you really know what the
• 26:25
  problem is and you know what it is you want to see,
• 26:28
  because then you know what you're looking for and then that drives your
• 26:32
  decision making. Yeah, exactly. I love that. And so when we were looking
• 26:36
  for. Thank you. Yeah, we were looking for
• 26:40
  just a way to reduce our screen time, but we need Uber, WhatsApp,
• 26:43
  Venmo, all this. We went to look at the market and everyone
• 26:48
  innovating in the intentional tech space
• 26:52
  making these dumb phones. They were all kind of making their own
• 26:56
  hardware or optimizing for like,
• 27:00
  build these, this subscription for like family communities,
• 27:03
  which is cool. But the product was moving away from what the core
• 27:07
  needs to be, which is a software problem. Like, we have a specific
• 27:11
  set of, like software requirements and a specific set
• 27:14
  of softwares we want prohibited. So to make that happen, that's fundamentally
• 27:18
  software. So then when we went to look at like, what tools
• 27:21
  exist to bring this product into
• 27:25
  existence, we're like, okay, let's just start
• 27:28
  with software. And then from there, do we do an app? Do
• 27:32
  we do like a full operating system? And then we say, okay, with an app,
• 27:35
  there's workarounds screen time limiters. You can just get around them really
• 27:39
  easy. So how do we make it impossible for someone to escape our
• 27:42
  framework? You gotta go all the way down, make your own operating system
• 27:47
  and then you make these small decisions and then they add up over time
• 27:51
  to what we have now, which is an operating system that we built
• 27:55
  that is based on the Android open source project. And we said, well
• 27:59
  we need some hardware because you can't just hold an operating system.
• 28:03
  You really can't. This is super hard to do that.
• 28:07
  We just took the millions that we had from our
• 28:10
  family and we made it fun. Just kidding. Nice. There's no millions from this. I
• 28:14
  know, I know. That's why this is so cool. Like you hear. I just, I
• 28:17
  think I saw a post today on social media because I'm still on social media.
• 28:20
  Whoops. But no about you know,
• 28:24
  the self made millionaires kind of thing.
• 28:28
  We're not self made. They were very much funded by their family.
• 28:32
  So. Yeah. And to be honest, like yeah, our families have given us a lot
• 28:35
  of support. Yeah. Like we were able to stay with my parents.
• 28:39
  Like a big lore thing that we have is like one of my
• 28:44
  things can help. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, yeah. So it was great. We were
• 28:48
  bunking in the early days. And that's a good deal.
• 28:51
  But hardware, refurbished hardware is becoming very popular.
• 28:55
  It's the fastest growing, one of the fastest growing segments in consumer
• 28:59
  electronics. So we just said okay, what
• 29:02
  hardware smartphone are out there that we can put our operating system on?
• 29:06
  And we decided to go with the Google Pixel. Super high quality
• 29:11
  cameras, high build quality, reliable name
• 29:14
  and very developer friendly. So we decided, you know what, if it ain't broke, don't
• 29:18
  fix it. Let's put our operating system on Pixels. And
• 29:22
  that's what we're doing now. Oh, that's awesome. There's so many good
• 29:26
  phones just sitting in warehouses that one take a lot of
• 29:30
  materials to create in the first place and for them just to sit there and
• 29:34
  not be used again. Which the whole recycling phone market is kind
• 29:38
  of meant to do. Right. It's kind of a no brainer to
• 29:42
  use these at least until anymore. You know, eventually
• 29:45
  they will break eventually, you know, new tech comes for us to innovate
• 29:49
  on and build, build upon. Maybe it will be our own phone one day but
• 29:53
  right now, you know, it is, it's very reliable. It's great.
• 29:57
  Why use anything else? Yeah, I love that.
• 30:01
  It just seems very smart to me. And you're making it work.
• 30:05
  So what is next for you? Guys, what's your next goals and
• 30:08
  visions with this? The directions, full release.
• 30:12
  We are trying to shoot to get to full release by the end of the
• 30:15
  year. We're doing a lot of things and. Tell
• 30:19
  me what full release means. Basically just the phone is completely ready for
• 30:23
  consumer use. It's out of the testing trial period.
• 30:26
  Okay. Because you're still been doing that, but it's more like you feel like it's
• 30:29
  about to wrap up then. Yeah, we're getting closer. A lot of the critical bugs
• 30:33
  are gone. We're getting closer and closer to a little
• 30:37
  bit more frictionless experience. So there's not as much friction. It's
• 30:40
  easier for the user to swap over, it's easier to use.
• 30:45
  But there is some things we will always continue to innovate and build upon.
• 30:49
  But there's a couple of things that we're trying to finish for us to get
• 30:53
  past that finish line. Yeah, I love that so much. And
• 30:57
  I do definitely see a market in different. Well,
• 31:00
  it's not just, you know, you guys who are just like, you know, we don't
• 31:03
  want all those distractions, but then there's also people who are like,
• 31:08
  you don't want. There's other. Maybe I can't even say it, but I see it
• 31:11
  as a mother, I see it for kids. I know maybe you can't market directly
• 31:14
  to kids like that, but, or to families. But you know, I see that as
• 31:17
  someone who's like, I would like limited use because there's too many
• 31:21
  war stories, horror stories, for things that happen to kids.
• 31:25
  And you know, sometimes boomers don't want all that technology either,
• 31:29
  you know, so, you know, that might be another, you
• 31:32
  know, I know everyone's age and every.
• 31:36
  I think of an aunt and an uncle, different sides of the family,
• 31:40
  but who were in their 80s and it's like they will receive a text,
• 31:45
  they will not necessarily respond, you know, so, you know, like, it's just like
• 31:48
  just the different technology things and maybe just people don't want to deal with it.
• 31:52
  So there's a lot of people I think that are just like, I just don't
• 31:55
  want to deal with all this stuff. Yeah, people, people from all these different areas
• 31:58
  are reaching out to us. Like, when is this ready for kids?
• 32:02
  When is this ready for older adults? We have a lot of companies,
• 32:05
  small to medium sized businesses that we're in conversation with and they want it for
• 32:09
  their industry and benefits for them. So we have people reaching out
• 32:13
  for us in all these different areas. For us, it's just getting it past that
• 32:17
  finish line so we can start exploring these other areas. Yeah, I love that.
• 32:21
  I love it. It's exciting. It is so exciting. So
• 32:24
  anything else? Any other fun stories you guys want to share or
• 32:28
  thoughts before we wrap up? I just, I love talking to you guys so much
• 32:32
  and I've been. It's so been so much fun following you. So I'm gonna keep.
• 32:35
  I'm gonna keep interrupting you just like that. Just for fun, folks.
• 32:39
  Go ahead. We'll have a follow up episode. Interruptions only. Yeah,
• 32:42
  interruptions only. That's right. No, I have a bad habit
• 32:46
  of cutting people off mid speech. I think that's how I like. Everyone's got a
• 32:50
  different. This is such a tangent. I'm just doing it to you right now. Just
• 32:52
  for fun. Exactly. Like some people, it's just a different conversation style.
• 32:56
  But it doesn't work for everybody, huh? No, but
• 33:01
  we talking a lot about the tech and the come ups of like
• 33:04
  how we've done it, but kind of at the end of the day, the reason
• 33:08
  that we're doing it and the reasons why the customers buy the phone is
• 33:11
  the it's on theme of why Reno Startup Week
• 33:15
  is such a beautiful place. It's like comes down to the community and what you
• 33:19
  can do with other people. It sounds cheesy, but
• 33:22
  literally what we're trying to do is to just get, pack, get people back from
• 33:26
  focus into real life with the people that they love and the things they love
• 33:29
  to do or used to do and maybe they forgot. And that's
• 33:33
  actually what's happening. All we have to do is give them the phone and the
• 33:37
  people do the rest. And so that's kind of the mission of
• 33:41
  what we're doing, which is important to really shout out. Yeah,
• 33:44
  for sure. People want to spend more time with family, friends
• 33:48
  and hobbies and doing hobbies that they love or a new hobby that they,
• 33:52
  they've always wanted to try but they always said they didn't have the time for.
• 33:56
  It's just that time is being allocated other places. So to help give
• 33:59
  them an opportunity to go after that. Hobbies, it's giving people
• 34:03
  their life back, right? Yeah. A lot of fun to see because.
• 34:07
  That'S what we want to see. We want to get together and talk and
• 34:11
  do stuff and go on hikes and
• 34:14
  enjoy hobbies, things that you said. And not necessarily just everyone's
• 34:18
  in their own little room or
• 34:22
  their apartment or their just space within a house, just, you
• 34:25
  know, detached from the rest of the family or everyone they live with. And
• 34:30
  on Their screen, which is what happens. That's been
• 34:33
  going on for. Since screens, really. Yeah. Tv.
• 34:37
  Yeah. But especially since phones because, you know, phones having all these capabilities
• 34:41
  is a rather new phenomenon. Yeah. Like when you guys were born, it was not
• 34:45
  a thing. Thing. And you guys are young. Last 10 years. Yeah, you guys are
• 34:48
  young. So I think we just don't think about the effect,
• 34:52
  but we're in the middle of all these effects of what the technology is doing
• 34:55
  to us, so. And it just keeps increasing. Of course it keeps increasing. And when
• 34:59
  we were at CES this last year, there's so much amazing new
• 35:03
  technology. Tell me what CES is. The Consumer Electronic Show.
• 35:06
  Okay. And it was down in Vegas. And it's cool to see a lot of
• 35:10
  the tech coming out, but a lot of that tech is
• 35:14
  trying to now mimic the human interaction. Well, it's only trying to
• 35:17
  mimic the human interaction because that's what we're missing with
• 35:21
  technology. So now we're trying to use technology to fix a problem that
• 35:25
  technology has created when at the end of the day it's just like trying to
• 35:28
  go out and have conversations. Technology is made
• 35:32
  to make our lives better. And it's become so much more than that. Full
• 35:36
  fledged entertainment. 24 hours, 24 7. Always
• 35:39
  on not giving us a break when initially technology was supposed to be
• 35:43
  a tool. You don't carry a hammer around with you 24/7. You
• 35:47
  only use it when you actually need it. And that's what we're trying
• 35:51
  to bring the phone back to again. Yeah. And I love that. Well, I know
• 35:54
  with my kids who are Gen Z's, so
• 35:59
  they will just put their phone away and forget
• 36:03
  about it for. For hours. So it's really the opposite of what people
• 36:07
  say the younger generation does. And I think there must
• 36:10
  be some kind of. We're missing something here. Like
• 36:14
  there is something, I think in that generation in particular, when you were
• 36:18
  little, there wasn't this. And then it became a thing as
• 36:22
  you were through the teens and early twenties. And now it's like,
• 36:26
  don't. You know, I don't. You know, when you grow up with it, you don't
• 36:29
  think about it. But that's, that's a curious thought to me. A question
• 36:33
  of as humans, how much are we going to
• 36:37
  lean out and lean in? Is it going to control us or are we going
• 36:40
  to control it? Which is maybe what you guys are bringing to the table.
• 36:43
  Really interesting problem to study for sure. It is, isn't it?
• 36:47
  Yeah, that's probably what the study should be on. Versus
• 36:50
  maybe some things we study. But you know, I don't know about that. I don't
• 36:54
  know too much about that. There might be some stuff coming out
• 36:58
  soon. Yeah. Yeah. Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for your
• 37:02
  time. I so appreciate you and it's so fun to watch your journey and
• 37:07
  much success to you in the years to come. So thank you.
• 37:11
  Thank you again.