Struggling to Focus While Writing? Adam Leeb’s "Freewrite" is the Solution | #Marketing - Ep. 118

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This is the Russell Brunson Show.

What's up everybody, welcome back to the show.

I've got a really interesting special guest today

that I'm excited to introduce.

This is actually the first time I had a chance to meet him personally,

but I've been a fan of his products for a long, long time.

In fact, you can see a couple of them here on my desk.

If you're watching on YouTube or Spotify or whatever,

if you're audio only, you can imagine I'm holding something

that looks kind of like a typewriter,

but there's no monitor.

And it's this interesting little thing

that I'm kind of mildly obsessed with.

And so we've got the founder and the creator

and Adam Leeb, who's here today to talk to him about

what he created, why he created it.

He's got a really fascinating story as an entrepreneur,

but also this is the product that I think a lot of us entrepreneurs

need to be using to help you to get more done,

to be a better writer and how much other stuff.

So Adam, how are you doing, man?

I'm awesome, thanks for having me on Russell.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, I'm excited to get to know you a lot better.

I heard that before you built this whole thing,

you were like one of your early entrepreneur journeys

was like actually creating supplements

and things like that, is that correct?

Yeah, that is.

I've had an interesting route on my entrepreneurial journey.

We can talk about that more if you're interested,

but yeah, I started, yeah, I mean,

I actually studied engineering and product design

and always knew I had come back there,

but I ended up going into corporate finance

so I worked on Wall Street as a banker.

I quit that job after four years.

That was during the recession,

but this is kind of shocking to people.

I actually really enjoyed that job.

It was an incredible experience

and wouldn't trade it for anything,

but I knew it wasn't going to be my career.

And yeah, I started, I started my first like real company

after that, it was a nutritional supplement brand,

but it kind of, it did okay,

but really it was, that was my sort of like business school

almost the test, yeah.

Yeah, that was, I think it cost about as much as business school

and learned maybe better lessons, I'm not sure,

but definitely less partying than business school.

And the result was that I kind of, that business stalled

and the funny thing is that I really just wanted

to make something with my hands.

And so I'd come back to this idea that I had had

just coming out of a conversation

about making a distraction for your writing tool.

And I was never thinking that I would turn this

into a company even, it was just like,

oh, this is kind of a fun concept,

kind of marrying an e-inc screen and a keyboard,

a really nice mechanical keyboard,

and then focusing on the drafting process

so that people could just kind of get their words out,

kind of like a kindle for writing almost.

And that was just like stuck in my head.

And I'm like, I should just make this.

It'll be fun to make.

That was it.

That was as far as I thought about it.

And here I am over 10 years later

after many successful crowdfunding campaigns,

almost a billion words written on our products worldwide

since we started.

And yeah, it's just been a wild wild journey.

So interesting.

When you said you had a conversation,

do you remember the conversation you had

when you first had the idea or who you were talking to

or when that situation was more like a lot of conversations

over time, is where the idea kind of sprouted up

from?

It was one specific conversation with a friend of mine

named Patrick, who ended up being my co-founder.

He was telling me about some software

that he used to help him stay focused while writing.

And so he's a software developer.

He liked to write essays at his free time

about political subjects or whatever he wanted to write about.

And he was telling me about some specific software

that not only did it like block out distractions,

but it actually disabled the backspace key.

And I thought, I just was like, what are you talking about?

Why would you do that?

And it was just so frame breaking

that you would want to write with something

that was purposefully limited.

And so he educated me on a writing process

that I never heard of, which is really write first

and edit later.

And so you do your drafting process

in a separate session than editing.

You don't edit as you go.

And that way you can kind of optimize

for the creative portion and the critical portion.

And so I was like, what are you talking about?

Like, I can't believe that I never heard of that about this

before. How come nobody told me this

like when I was pressing writing in school, exactly.

Like it was so painful for me.

And so many others, of course, like to be writing

in high school, you know, writing these essays

or learning about these like five paragraph things.

And so I was just like, wow, there's another process

out there.

I wish I learned about this.

And so that's really worth that conversation

is what got the idea going.

And then even in that same conversation,

I sort of put the pieces together

of like the hard work components.

And that's just, I mean, that's the weird part

about me is that I was in your side, yeah.

Yeah, that's the engineer side, right?

And so, you know, I'm thinking like,

oh, I've been reading about mechanical keyboards.

They're really cool.

They're very niche.

I love my Kindle.

I'm like obsessed with the Kindle

and I have been for years and years and years.

I give them out to gifts to everyone that I can find.

If I hear that, you don't have a Kindle,

then I just buy you one.

You must have it is.

I just think it's one of the best products ever made.

And yeah, just kind of like it just formed in my head.

I'm like, oh, Kindle screen, mechanical keyboard.

Oh, we need to like be able to get the documents out.

We'll sync it to the cloud, you know?

And then it was like these, those three components,

which was the essence of it.

And I'm like, okay, if my friend is using the software

to kind of dumb down his super expensive laptop

for this very specific writing experience,

maybe we can just make a dedicated thing

that's just for that.

And it's not really dumbing it down per se,

but it's like a tailored experience

just for this drafting portion of the writing process.

And yeah, that was it.

Interesting.

When I first discovered you guys,

it was actually through one of my friends.

And I've written three books.

I can't remember where I was in my writing journey,

but somewhere when I had that realization of like,

the reason why I write so slow

was because I'm like, I'm writing creative brain writing

and then flipping to like left brain editing

and back and forth and back and forth.

And then I was sort of getting to flow and things like that.

And I found that the times I got the most

and the best writing was on a stuck on an airplane

where like I couldn't research, I couldn't Google,

I just there and it was uncomfortable.

So I was just, I would just write and write.

And I'm like, I'll figure out how to edit this later

and I write and then I get to the hotel

wherever that night and I open up.

And then also all of the spell check correct things

would pop up because they weren't there

when you have no internet access.

You know, all the red squigglys and I edited it all.

And I was like, oh, and I was telling my friend this.

I'm like, I found out like for me to be the most

like to write really good, like I have to like not edit.

And he was like, oh, dude, have you ever heard

of the free write?

I'm like, no, what's that?

And he started telling me and he's kind of an artsy guy.

So he's just like, oh, it's this most beautiful thing.

It's like this type right?

And he's like, tell me the art of it.

And then, and I remember he was like, he's like,

I want one, I'm trying to save up to get one.

And so I remember googling it that night and I saw it.

And I was like, oh, and so I bought it right out right out of the gate.

And it showed up, you know, a week later.

And then he showed him, he's like, you caught one.

I'm like, well, you sold me on.

I had to try it now.

And that's why I first got introduced to it

because I found that same problem, my own writing.

And then also you had created this interesting, beautiful,

different solution for it.

You know, I mean, because I was kind of going down the same path.

I'm assuming you your co-founder did like how

like we could do this with software.

Maybe there's some software I could buy to do this,

but I hadn't really figured out a process yet when I found this.

I'm actually going to curious, I mean,

obviously you're more of the engineer side,

but there are people that have created software for similar things.

Like, was, how did you beat out your co-founder?

Were he software your, your physical products in the debate

to actually decide to go this direction?

Was there a debate about it?

Or just kind of, let's do it together.

No, no, there was no debate about it.

I, he also liked the idea of having a dedicated tool.

I think there's a hidden benefit of having something dedicated

is that like your brain is triggered based on its environment, right?

So when you have this device in front of you,

your brain subconsciously knows, oh,

this is like my writing device, right?

And unfortunately, like our computers are,

they actually work against us in that way,

because this is like, it could be whatever's in your mind, right?

Because your computer can do anything.

It's like, oh, there was that YouTube video

that I really wanted to check out.

Or like, I really need to check my email.

Or there's these pictures that need that.

There's just this constant stream of temptation

that your computer brings.

And so there's no pure association.

And so that's part of the problem

with trying to work at your computer

and also something that we very easily solve

because it's a product that's only designed to do one thing.

And so it actually, it's a bit of a mind track,

the whole product, right?

Because you can do everything on this product on a laptop.

But somehow everybody that uses it,

they tell us like we get these reviews all the time.

I'm writing twice as much as I used to.

I don't understand how this works.

Why do I feel, why am I enjoying writing again?

This is incredible.

And again, it's just a bit of a mind trick.

It's funny that you have to buy one of these,

but it does work.

And no, I mean, my co-founder was happy to get involved.

And he wrote the original software for the product.

But yeah, I mean, part of what makes it work

is that it's an actual physical dedicated product

that's separate from your computer.

Yeah.

I also think that it's like, I don't know.

I collect old books and I'm obsessed with like,

I feel like I should have been born in the 20s.

Back when writing was on typewriters and stuff like that,

I've collected some of my favorite authors,

like I own their typewriters now.

But there was something like when I got this first one

and like also seen down in typing and I was just like,

oh, I feel like the romance of writing,

that makes sense.

I felt like I was actually writing

versus on my keyboard where we were doing whatever,

you know what I mean, just it felt different,

which for me that became really fun too,

because it's just like, oh, I feel like I'm in that zone

of like I'm a writer now, not just like someone

who's on a computer who's trying to write something, you know.

Yeah.

See, it tricked you too.

It worked.

Yeah.

It totally did.

So I want to ask you some questions on the business side of this.

So you guys created this very first one.

And I'm curious, again, I've never made a physical product.

Actually, I like, I made my very first physical product.

It's like a magazine holder from China.

I had to go and get these molds built and then they poured it.

I mean, it was like a year long process for me,

this little plastic thing that holds a magazine.

So that's the only thing physical I've ever actually created.

I'm looking at this.

I'm like, how do you know where to start?

How does it, like, what was the process to create

the very first prototype to be able to go and eventually,

I think you did a Kickstarter campaign to launch it,

but like, how do you actually create the first one?

Like, what's the steps in that process?

How does it work?

Yeah, I mean, there's a couple of different ways

of going about it for sure.

There's sort of one process where you can take advantage

of existing designs and maybe tweak them a little bit here and there.

Or there's sort of the ground up design yourself bit.

We did the ladder.

And so everything on the product is designed and designed

from the ground up by us or by our team.

And effectively, what you do is you go to a contract

manufacturer, in our case, we went to some of the big

like consumer electronics manufacturers in South Asia

where most consumer electronics are made.

And you develop a relationship and ask them for quotations.

And of course, you actually do that engineering first.

So there's several different kind of core aspects

that go into our products.

There's mechanical design, electrical design, software,

and firmware.

So you kind of need at least a person or someone

with multiple skill sets to do each of those things

and be responsible for them.

And yeah, I mean, that's what engineers do, right?

So we do each one of those major components.

They also have to work together, designs together.

You start working with a contract manufacturer.

You get feedback from them.

And you kind of just go from there.

So cool.

So do you create just one first or do you build the pieces

and they build a whole bunch of firsts?

Or what does that look like?

There's a few different steps in the process.

You know, the tricky thing with hardware

is that you can't make one without all of the pieces.

And so each one of the pieces is independently designed,

sampled, tested, verified.

But you can't assemble the whole thing

and actually have a working unit

until you have 100% of the components.

And so there's a lot of different things

that have to line up, basically, to get that working.

And so there's sort of, there's like some of these

like gating process, like DVT, EVT.

This is like some industry speak for what

are the main kind of like phases of the development process.

But essentially, it's like, you validate your design

and the engineering.

And then you put the whole thing together.

You make 50, you make 300, then you go for mass production.

Something like that.

That's cool.

So when in that cycle, well, first off, when you got the first one,

I think about when I got my first book,

after I wrote my first book, I had a box

opened and holding the first book, like what was life for me?

I'm curious when you got the first one done

after all the work and effort you put into it,

like actually have me in typing on it.

What was your experience the first time?

Yeah, it's a crazy experience.

It says, yeah, I spent a lot of time in Asia

at our factory partners.

I think the biggest, even more impactful

than getting the first one was actually

seeing a whole production line spun up building them.

There's 20 plus people on the line plus five to 10,

maybe production engineers, QA people, QC quality assurance,

quality control people, sort of the peripheral machine

that goes into making things, not just the people that are

like literally physically putting stuff together.

Then there's also procurement.

There's finance.

There's a whole company on top of it

that's sort of supporting you.

And you just start thinking about how many people

actually had their hands on this project.

It's sort of astounding.

I mean, there's like hundreds of people

that go into actually making it.

And then you see your design that started on

maybe an African sketch and that went into the computer

and then over the course of a year or two

gets refined into actually a physical

giant block of steel that they make injection molds

out of, or injection molded parts out of.

And yeah, I just remember like the first time seeing

the line spooled up and all these people that I didn't know

they're like meticulously like making these things

literally by hand, you know?

And I'm like, wow, this is crazy.

And it's so funny.

The best experience is if you try to actually like

take something off of the line

and they're like, they like look at you funny

because they're like, what are you doing?

Don't touch our parts, bro.

Like I don't care who you are.

Yeah, no, it's an incredible experience.

I can imagine.

That's so cool.

Okay, after you got these done and walked through

the launch campaign, it was through Kickstarter

and send writer Indiegogo, which a platform

which he has launched initially.

We've done both over the years.

The very first one was on Kickstarter.

Okay.

And what walked us through that like I'm curious,

was it hard to get people to, yeah, to buy into it

or it was an easy proposition or was it,

you know, cause it's a new category.

I feel like there's enough explanation as to go into it.

And I'm just curious, yeah, I'm curious the process

and how you guys first launched it.

What happened?

Yeah, you know, our first campaign was this,

we launched a December 10th, 2014.

This is already a long time ago.

We had the great fortune of having some viral moments

ahead of the campaign, which was what led us

to even having the idea of making the campaign.

Cause remember, I just said like, the reason I worked on it

was cause I want to make it, not because I wanted

to have a whole company again.

And so we, as opposed to what I was doing before

with my nutritional supplements startup,

it was the complete opposite experience.

With the supplements, I was pushing them into the market.

I was trying to find someone that cared.

It was a struggle with this.

We had a render online and a concept like a name

and we had like a tag and that was it.

We had a terrible single paid one WordPress website

and it went super viral.

Everyone was just so pumped about this thing.

I mean, there was, there was people that were excited

about it negatively.

There was tons of people excited about it positively.

We had over 100,000 people come to this little website

from just this viral press moment

or a couple viral press moments

that happened in the fall of 2014.

And so we did a couple things right.

I mean, the main one being we had a couple good opt-ins.

So, you know, you're the funnel master.

We had like the simplest funnel possible, right?

We literally just had a couple opt-ins

on this like one and a half page WordPress site.

And you enough to do that.

And we gathered something like 8,000 emails

just from those viral press moments.

We had no other outbound marketing

or endon marketing or anything.

It was just press that just kind of turned into

this mail strom of activity.

And so yeah, when we had all those emails,

we basically said, okay, like we gotta do something with this.

Like what are we gonna do?

Like what we may as well see if people are really willing

to pay for this or they just kind of excited about the concept.

And so that was the beauty of Kickstarter

because that's really what it was designed for, right?

Like will people basically pre-order this

and support the campaign

and to actually making this a real thing

and not just an idea?

And it was insane.

We shot out the gate.

I mean, the numbers were just like going faster

than you could like refresh the page.

We did 200,000 in the first 20 hours.

And we quickly shifted from like,

like, you know, prototyping, like,

oh God, we got actually make this thing now.

Oh, because none of them made yet.

You just had just pictures of what it was supposed to look like.

I mean, we had we had a prototype

that was really hacky inside.

I mean, no, nothing even remotely equivalent

to like what would be needed to be done in production.

So we were basically starting from scratch

from the first day of the Kickstarter campaign

when it came to the actual design.

But that was it.

We didn't do any marketing, right?

And then we were just like heads down and like,

okay, we got to figure out how to actually make

a complicated consumer electronic in Asia,

which we had neither of us had ever done before.

So there was a lot to figure out.

Dang, so 200,000 in the first 24 hours.

How much did it go?

How much did it sell in before the Kickstarter ended?

I feel like I used to know this number

off the top of my head as like I said

this number so many times now we,

10 years ago and we've done four campaigns now.

And now I'm like,

I'm gonna say the wrong number.

But we did pretty well.

That's all I'll say.

I can't remember exactly the number.

Was it enough then to cover all the manufacturing

for the first thing?

Was there a profit involved in you guys?

Was that just to cover you guys making the first batches?

You know, because we had sold,

we didn't spend any money on marketing.

Yeah, definitely covered tooling.

I mean, tooling itself was I think about $100,000.

And so tooling in the manufacturing world

like refers to anything that you need

to actually like make the parts.

So the big things being like an injection mold

or a die cast mold.

So that having right that you have in front of you,

that's actually a die cast aluminum piece.

And so that means there's giant pieces of steel

that come together and molten aluminum is injected

into these molds.

And so you actually have to make the mold

and then you have to make all the molds

for each plastic part as well.

And so yeah, we had to spend about $100,000 on tooling.

And then again, that's to make the first one, right?

You can't spend $95,000.

And because then that's not enough, right?

So you have to spend the entire amount

or the entire cost of tooling

to even get just one out of the gate.

You know, plus firmware, plus software,

plus all the engineering.

Interesting.

When you first launched it was the company,

I think I read this,

but the company was called Hemingway initially, right?

Or just the product was, what was that?

Yeah, we gave ourselves years of confusion

in that initially the concept was called Hemingway.

And that was my clever idea

because Hemingway had this,

he was well known for sort of telling people

to be concise and how they wrote.

And so we liked this idea of,

there was also like some,

I think they're actually mis-extributed quotes

about like you just have to sit at your typewriter

and bleed and you know, right trunk at its sober.

There's like a bunch of different quotes

that are from Hemingway, supposedly from Hemingway,

some are some aren't.

But there was just like this great persona

and yeah, we came up with this name Hemingwright

and turns out that Hemingway family

still manages the rights to the Hemingway estate.

And they reached out to us and they're like,

hey, by the way, you know, Hemingway states here.

And actually we did sign a license with them initially,

but we eventually decided like,

maybe we don't want to have our whole company

on just this one persona.

And the idea was that we'll change the name to free rights

and then hopefully one day we'll make a special edition

and long story short, that's what we did.

And so that's what the product is in front of you.

That's the officially licensed Hemingway addition

of our free-right product.

And so we've kind of gone through this like naming,

confused, it's a bit tricky because it was like,

it was Hemingwright and then free-right

and then free-right became a brand.

And now there's a Hemingway branded product

which we still call Hemingwright, but free-right.

Yeah, so we haven't done any benefits

by changing the name at a bunch of times, but here we are.

Yeah, so cool.

That's such a cool story.

So after you launch Kickstarter, then you go manufacturing,

you know what I've done.

And then now you're in the next phase where it's like,

okay, we've created them, we've pre-sold a bunch,

shipping them out.

And then how did you turn this into a business

as opposed to a campaign, right?

Because again, my world is like,

when I look at businesses like,

we're selling digital products, paying a bunch of ads,

trying to make the spread.

And it's like with a physical product,

if so many costs involve them,

curious what it looked like to turn it from a promotion

into an actual business for the last decade.

I think it's been a progression.

Part of it is just learning.

Part of it's going through even some market cycles

that we've had in the last 10 years,

which has been interesting, not just consumer market cycles,

but even on the supply side as well.

You can remember, I mean, COVID was a crazy time.

There was like the chip shortages

because they were all going into cars.

Now there's like RAM shortages

because they're all going into AI clusters.

I mean, we've been going through all these crazy experiences.

I think like going from just an idea to company

or just initial product to company

and a brand with a suite of products,

I tried to take it very conservatively.

I always, I was reminded by many other harbor products

that went bust that they all go bust for the same reason,

which is they run out of money, right?

And so it's almost impossible to run out of money

if you don't over buy an inventory,

whereas if you over buy an inventory,

that's a really good way that you can run out of money.

And so there was some very high profile companies

that harbor companies that have died over the years

and I've always paid very close attention to them

and tried to learn my lessons without doing it the hard way.

So we really just did it methodically, right?

We had one product, we tried to tweak it a little bit

to make it even better

because the first version's never as good as the second version.

We launched a second product, we launched a third product,

but each product, each one of these electronic devices,

they take one to two years in development

plus, I mean, it takes quite a long time.

And so, yeah, I mean, that's, I don't know, one step,

one foot in front of the other, that's the best answer.

I think in just trying to be really conservative

in terms of how much inventory we buy,

how much we spend on marketing.

I mean, it took us a long time to actually get confident enough

to spend really any money on marketing.

And I think, I don't know, I look back at a little bit

and I'm like, probably should have been a little more aggressive,

but then I'm like, well, we're still here.

And it's fine, so I don't know.

We'll never know, right?

Yeah, that's cool.

How big's the team behind you?

We're about 10 people.

I'm based in Detroit.

We have a bit of a Midwest cluster,

but we have folks from all over the country

and also some folks all around the world.

We've kind of always been distributed in a way

because we work with factories in Asia,

we work with engineers in Europe.

And so we've kind of always been a bit of a hybrid.

And that's worked well for us.

Yeah, that's really cool.

Okay, so walk us through the current products

in your product line.

Number one, number two, I'm curious,

which one is your personal favorite

of all the different ones you guys have so far?

Yeah, for sure.

So we have sort of the OG, which is the smart typewriter,

which we had all those other names at one point.

It was the Hemingwright, it was the freewright.

And now we're just calling it a smart typewriter

because freewright is the brand.

So that's really the product that this Hemingwright

that you have in front of you is based off of.

It's the same electronics.

That's the original product.

I mean, improved over the years,

but it's the original model effectively.

Then we have the traveler,

which is our smaller folding portable one,

still with the E and screen, all the same features,

but super portable basically.

That's the second one I bought,

which I don't have with me here

because I left it in my travel bag.

So I do travel with that one all the time.

It's cool to send pictures online,

but like it opens and shuts.

And it's like this little tiny thing

slipping your backpack and you can write with it.

You know, what you give up from going to the traveler,

it's got a little bit smaller battery.

It doesn't have a front light

and it has a scissors switch keyboard.

The scissors switch keyboard that we designed in there

is like fantastic.

I think it's as good as any scissors switch keyboard

you can get on a laptop,

but it's still not a full-size mechanical keyboard

like you have on the Hemingwright or the freewright

or smart typewriter.

So, but it's super small in folding.

So you know, that's kind of the trade off.

And then we have Alpha,

which is the other product that you have in front of you.

That's a, it's really a nod to this product

called the Alpha Smart,

which was very popular in schools

and still very popular with writers

as a collectible effectively

because they haven't been making them in over 10 years.

It's a slate style device.

It doesn't have an e-ing screen.

So the screen is like super fast.

And you can still write outside,

but it's a little bit different orientation

or aspect ratio.

And it has the best battery life out of all of them

because it is a very low-powered computer inside.

So it's sort of really just preference.

They all can do the similar things.

I think it's mostly about sort of the form factor

that whatever your preference is.

I think if you have like,

if you have the space

and you want the full quote unquote experience,

I mean, the original smart typewriter

or the Hemingwright version

or one of the special editions of that smart typewriter

is really like still the best experience.

Yeah, but I mean, they all can do the job, right?

So again, it's sort of up to your personal preference.

Then we have a new product called WordRunner,

which is very exciting,

which is our first mechanical keyboard

that actually connects your computer.

And so this product is like, think about like,

what is a mechanical keyboard for writers

in sort of the free-right world?

It's got some very unusual features on it,

including an embedded word counter

that we're calling an wordometer

that actually has a rotating wheels

that count your words as you type them.

And so that product,

we did another crowdfunding campaign last year

and that's going to get shipped in the next couple months.

So we're super pumped about that.

It's been a crazy ride.

It made no sense at all that we made it,

but we did it anyway,

because it's just a keyboard-hooked general

and a computer.

Yes.

I mean, we kind of reintroduced the concept

of a mechanical keyboard to a lot of people

because they sort of went out of fashion for a long time

and really all the people that were using them

were sort of hardcore gamers,

is again, 10 years ago.

And so we brought this mechanical keyboard style keyboard back

and again, we introduced it to writers

and they're like, wow, this is the best keyboard.

Like, we love this keyboard.

How do I get this?

I'm a real writer now.

Yeah, I'm a real writer now.

Like, how do I get to some of my computer, right?

Because we accept that people are still using their computer.

Like, our products are not designed

to replace your computer, right?

Like, we understand that you're going to still need

your computer, not just for video editing or whatever you want to do,

but also even for parts of the writing process

that require editing.

And so we wanted to bring that like,

same, great or even better mechanical keyboard experience

and let you have it on your computer too.

So that's what the concept with we're growing on,

or yeah, we're super pumped about it.

That's pretty wild, wild product.

That's really cool.

I'm excited to try that one out.

Okay, if those who are listening, they can't see this.

I love how you explain this kind of like,

how it works, how it gets pushed to the cloud,

like just that concept.

I think the very first time I got to understand how it works,

I bought it, I sat down and I was like,

okay, this is how it works.

Right here, then I pushed the cloud, then I can grab it here.

Like, can you just walk through that process?

People understand how this works inside their workflow.

Yeah, absolutely.

The thing that's real, the most important thing is to understand

that there is a prescribed workflow.

I think that's what catches people up

that are confused about the product

because, excuse me, they see it almost as if,

it's like a replacement for a typewriter

or a replacement for an old school word processor.

It's not really one of those things.

It's kind of its own thing that's designed

to be part of this draft first edit later process.

And so we wanted to make that,

we wanted to bridge that gap as easily as possible.

And that's why we have Wi-Fi and how it sinks to the cloud.

And so the idea is that you use this product,

you turn it on, it instantly opens the writing canvas,

you start typing,

you do your drafting,

and then in the background it's syncing in real time

to back to our backend called postbox.

And you can grab documents out of there

if you go log onto postbox at postbox.cafrid.com

or you can have it synced to one of the cloud providers

that we sync to.

So we sync to one drive,

ever know, Google Drive and Dropbox,

sort of the big four, so to speak.

So once you set that up,

it's really just meant to be set and forget.

The idea is you do your drafting on your free write,

you can literally just rotate to your computer.

And if you have those,

one of those third party cloud services installed,

you can just like open your draft in Dropbox on your computer.

That was sort of the magic that we were trying to,

we were trying to give people.

And so yeah, it's really just like draft,

open the, once you're done drafting,

you open the file on your computer and you're good to go.

Now, a lot of people just download it from postbox.

They do some other things that like,

it makes more sense to them and that's fine.

But the prescribed workflow is sort of how I described it

using one of these cloud services.

Yeah.

So cool.

Yeah, I think it's,

I think Reesh Craze is really cool.

I've been a big fan of it for a long time

and using it, I got one of my office,

I got one of my, in my backpack, when I travel

and I got this new one of the SME,

it's really fun that I'm trying to figure out my workflow

with that one, but it's just been really, really fun.

I'm curious like the people that are using it,

is there certain genre that focuses

every writer all over the place or GIS have pockets

of where you're getting most of the customers?

I'm curious about that.

Yeah, it's so interesting.

The way I describe it is that if you write more

than on 300 words at a time,

you should probably consider a free, right?

If you don't, then yeah, probably not.

Creative writers are definitely our biggest segment,

people that are authors or writing books.

But we also have, we have all kinds of people,

we have lawyers, we have academics,

we have journalists, we have journalists,

bloggers of course, and we even have songwriters,

like I just, we just saw today Janelle Monet

was posting about us and like we had no idea, right?

And she's literally, she has pictures

writing on a Hemingwright on her floor

and writing some music presumably, I guess.

So you just, we have all kinds,

there was a surgeon in South America

that was like taking notes in the operating room,

which I'm not sure if that's a good idea,

but he's notes in the operating room with his free rate.

And so, you know, anyone that needs to write and be focused

and values that type of experience,

you know, they're a great candidate for this product.

That's so cool.

And how many words have you said have been written

so far on across the platform?

We're about to cross a billion.

That's crazy.

Yeah, it's a lot.

The instrument, someday it's like a billion a year

and then a billion a month as it keeps growing

and more people are using it, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, it is growing quite quickly

as we get more products out there

and also improve the products.

We release new firmware updates

and are constantly improving the product.

So, yeah, it's amazing.

It's amazing that people are actually using the product.

We love it.

It's so cool.

All right, this has been really fun here in your story

in the back store behind it all.

For those who are listening or watching this

and they want to go invest,

where's the best place to go to check them out

and figure out which one's gonna be the right one for them?

Yeah, I mean, you can check your,

you can go to getfreeright.com,

you can ask your favorite AI

about distraction free writing tools, name free rights.

But yeah, anything, go to getfreeright.com, check it out.

And then you just get the Hemingway and get a travel one.

That's what I say.

One of the office, one to travel with,

need at least two.

That's my thought.

But you can go with the other one.

At least two.

At least two.

Yeah, you need at least two.

We want to say, again, it's so cool.

It's like a typewriter, but way cooler.

And the other one's just nice

because I don't want to carry a typewriter on a plane.

It was fun.

The first time I brought it on a plane,

I popped it out and I'm on this thing

and everyone's walking past.

And she'd be like staring at me.

And then, you know, everyone's like,

what is that in the person next to me?

It's like, is that a calculator?

I'm like, no, I'm trying to explain.

I'm like, it's like a, it's like a typewriter

that's hard to edit on.

But then you can write really fast.

And they're like, why would you want that?

I'm like, because I'm trying to explain

the whole thing to the person next to me.

I'm like, kind of just right.

Leave me alone.

But it's definitely fun conversation.

Peace is what when you're traveling.

Yeah, I've heard that a few times.

It's awesome.

Well, Adam, thanks so much for jumping on the podcast.

I appreciate you.

And thanks for creating such a cool product.

I can't wait to see how the updates you guys keep doing.

And hopefully all of our people

will start writing on these as well and get people,

I think writing more creatively.

And the biggest thing for me, it's just been,

it isolates me when I'm doing my creative work,

write brain, not editing,

to actually come out with really cool stuff

versus normally I'm flipping back and forth and editing.

It just, you know, it takes so long versus this.

I can write so fast.

And then like you said, later edit and clean things up.

And it's just, it's really cool.

So thanks for being here.

I appreciate you guys created.

Awesome, man, thank you so much for having me.

I really appreciate that you're highlighting these products

and that they're useful for you.

That's like, just makes me so happy.

Yeah, it's so awesome.

All right, get free right, I call them everybody.

Get your free right right now and let us know.

Post pictures and tag us on it, I want to see them.

All right, thanks, man, I appreciate it.

Awesome, thanks Russell.

You guys know I've written a few books

and people always ask me,

how do you stay focused long enough to actually finish?

Because let's be honest, writing isn't hard.

Staying in the zone is hard.

Email pops up.

Texts come in.

You open one tab and 45 minutes later,

you're watching something random on YouTube.

That's why I use free right.

It's a distraction free writing device

built for one purpose.

To help you get words out of your head and onto the page,

no notifications, no internet, no browser tabs,

just you and the draft.

When I sit down with my free right,

my brain knows it's time to create.

If you've got a book in you or a sales letter

or the next big idea you've been putting off,

go to www.getfreeright.com slash Russell and grab yours.

Turn off the noise, turn on the words,

your future bestseller is waiting.