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

Episode Date: March 9, 2026

In this episode of The Russell Brunson Show, I sat down with Adam Leeb, the founder of Freewrite, and we went deep into one of the most fascinating product journeys I’ve seen in a long time. If you���ve ever struggled with writing because your brain keeps switching between creating and editing, this conversation is going to hit home. Adam built a completely distraction-free writing device that looks like a modern typewriter - and the whole idea started from a simple conversation about separating the drafting process from editing. What blew my mind is that Adam didn’t set out to build a huge company. He just wanted to make something with his hands. But after a viral moment online and a simple landing page collecting emails, the idea exploded - eventually leading to a Kickstarter launch that took off almost instantly. From working on Wall Street to building hardware from scratch in Asia, Adam’s story is a masterclass in product design, patience, and creating something people genuinely want. Key Highlights: ◼️How a single conversation about “write first, edit later” sparked the idea for a completely new category of writing tools ◼️The viral press moment that sent 100,000+ people to a simple WordPress page and helped generate thousands of email leads before the product even existed ◼️Why dedicated tools can dramatically increase focus (and why laptops are secretly designed to distract you) ◼️The behind-the-scenes process of building a physical product from scratch - including prototypes, tooling, and manufacturing in Asia ◼️How Adam used Kickstarter to validate demand and turn a side project into a real company We also talk about the psychology behind creativity, why separating drafting from editing can dramatically increase your writing output, and how a product designed to do less can actually help you produce more. If you’re an entrepreneur, creator, author, or anyone who struggles to stay focused while writing, this episode will give you a completely different perspective on productivity - and maybe inspire you to rethink the tools you use to create. If you’re serious about writing more, staying focused, and finally finishing that draft you’ve been putting off, check out the distraction-free writing tools Adam built at https://getfreewrite.com/russell ◼️If you’ve got a product, offer, service… or idea… I’ll show you how to sell it (the RIGHT way) Register for my next event →⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://sellingonline.com/podcast⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ◼️Still don’t have a funnel? ClickFunnels gives you the exact tools (and templates) to launch TODAY → ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://clickfunnels.com/podcast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you have a funnel, but it's not converting? The problem 99.9% of the time is that your funnel is good, but you suck at selling. If you want to learn how to sell so your funnels will actually convert, then get a ticket to my next selling online event by going to sellingonline.com slash podcast. That's selling online.com slash podcast. This is the Russell Brunson show. What's up, everybody? Welcome back to this 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 were watching on YouTube or Spotify, whatever, if your audio only, you can imagine I'm holding something that looks kind of like a typewriter, but there's no monitor. And it's just interesting little thing that I'm kind of mildly obsessed with. And so we've got the founder and the creator and Adam Lieb, 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. Um, I heard that before you built this whole thing, you were like one of your earlier entrepreneur journeys was like actually creating supplements and things like that. Is that correct? Yeah, that is. I've had a,

an interesting route on my entrepreneurial journey. Um, 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, a little bit after that. And 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, 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. Yeah. 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-free 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-ink 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 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, you know, many successful crowdfunding campaigns,

almost a billion words written on our on our products worldwide since we started. And yeah, it's just been a wild, wild journey. So interesting. When, um, you said you with that, you had a convert, do you remember like the conversation you had when you were talking to or who you were talking to or when that situation or there 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 in 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? Like, why would you do that? And it was just so framebreaking 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 and 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, 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 about this before. How come nobody told me this like when I was pressing writing essay. 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 where 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 hardware components. And that's just, I mean, that's the weird part about me is that I'm engineer side.

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 as 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, it 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 this 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 it was in my writing journey, but somewhere when I had that realization, like, the reason why I write so slow is because I'm, Like I'm right, you know, creative brain writing and then 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 riding was on stuck on an airplane where like I couldn't research. I couldn't Google. I couldn't. I was just uncomfortable.

So like I was just I would just write and write. I'm like, oh, I'll figure out how to edit this later. And I write. And then I get to the hotel, whatever that night. And I open up and then, you know, all of the spell, spell check, correct. rack things would pop up because they weren't there when you have no internet actions, you know, all the red squiggly's 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, if you ever heard 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 typewriter.

He's like, tell me the art of it. And then I remember he was like, he's like, I want one. I'm trying to save up to get one. So I remember Googling it that night. and I saw it and I was like, oh. And so I bought it right out, right at the gate. And it showed up, you know, a week later. And then I showed him.

He's like, you got 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'd found that same problem my own writing. And then all of a sudden you had created this interesting, beautiful, uh, different solution for you know what I mean? Because I was kind of going down the same path.

I'm assuming 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 kind of curious. I'm obviously, you're more of the engineer side, but there are people that have created software for similar things. Like, how did you beat out your co-founder where he's software, your physical product 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. 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. 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 trick, 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 like 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's like, I don't know, I collect old books and I'm obsessed with like, like, I feel like I should have been born

the 20s, you know, back when writing was on typewriters and stuff like that. Like I've collected some of my favorite authors. I own their typewriters now. But there was something like when I got this first one and like also sitting down and typing, I was just like, oh, I feel like the romance of writing. That makes sense. Like it felt like if I was actually writing versus on my keyboard where we're 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 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 some questions on the business side of this. So you guys create this very first one. And I'm curious, again, I've never made a physical product. Actually, I lie. I made my very first physical product. It's like a magazine holder from China. And I had to go and get these molds built and then they poured it. And 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, in that process? How does it work?

Yeah. I mean, there's a couple 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, of the ground-up designing yourself bit.

We did the latter. 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 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 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? Do you build the pieces and they build a whole bunch of first? 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've, 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 just think about when I got my first book after I wrote my first book, I got a box, open and holding the first book, like what it was like for me. I'm curious when you got the first one done after all the work and effort you put into actually having me and typing on, like, what was your experience the first time? Yeah.

It's a crazy experience. 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. You know, 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 like how many people actually had their hands on this project. It's sort of astounding. I mean, there's like hundreds of people, right, 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, you know, giant block of steel that they make injection molds out of or ejection 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 it. you funny because they're like, what are you doing?

Like, don't touch our parts, bro. Like, I don't care who you are. That's so cool. Yeah, no, it's an incredible experience. I can imagine. That's so cool. Okay, after you got these done, then, um, walks through the launch campaign. It was through Kickstarter, I understand, right?

Indiegogo, which, which, uh, platform did you have launched initially? We've done both over the years. The, the very first one was on Kickstarter. Okay. And walk us through that. Like, I'm curious, was it hard to get people to, yeah, buy into it or it was an easy proposition or is it you know because it's a new category i i feel like there's enough explanation has to go into it and i'm curious the process in how you guys first launched

it what what happened our first campaign was this we launched at 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 that campaign because remember i just said like the reason I worked on it was because 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 supplement 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-page one WordPress website, and it went super viral. Everyone was just so pumped about this thing. I mean, 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 of 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. I knew enough to do that. And we gathered something like 8,000 emails just from that, those viral press moments. We had no other outbound marketing or inbound marketing or anything.

It was just press that just kind of turned into this maelstrom of activity. And so, yeah, when we had all those emails, we basically said, okay, like, we got to do something with this. Like, what are we going to do? Like, well, we may as well see if people are really willing to pay for this, or are 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 into 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 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 to actually make this thing now. Oh, because they've been, none of them made yet. You just had just pictures of what it was supposed to look like. I mean, 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, 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 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 you ended up selling before the kickshar ended? I feel like I used to know this number off the top of my head. I was like, I said this number so many times. 10 years ago. Now we've 10 years ago and we've done four campaigns now and now I'm like, I'm going to 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 any profit involved in you guys? Or just to cover you guys making the first batches? You know, because we had so, 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 diecast mold. So that Hemingwright that you have in front of you, that's actually a die cast aluminum pieces. And so that means there's giant pieces of steel that come together and molten aluminum is injected into these 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 because 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 Hemingwright. And that was my clever idea because Hemingway had this, he was well known for sort of telling people to be concise in how they wrote. And so we liked this idea of, there was also like some, I think they're actually misattributed quotes about,

Like, you just have to sit at your typewriter and bleed and, you know, write drunk, edit 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 it turns out the 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, the Hemingway state's 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 is 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 edition of our free ride product. And so we've kind of gone through this like naming confute. 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 Heming Way branded product, which we still call Hemingwright, but free right.

Yeah. So you haven't done it. Any benefits by changing the name a bunch of times, but here we are. Yeah. Oh, so cool. That's a that's such a cool story. So after you launch Kickstarter, then you go manufacture them, you're done. And then now you're in the next phase where it's like, okay, we've created them. We've presold a bunch, shipping them out. And then how did how did you turn this into a business as opposed to just a campaign, right? Yeah. Because again, in my world, it's like when I think of businesses like we're selling digital products, paying a bunch of ads, trying to, you know, make the spread.

And it's like with a physical product, you have so many costs involved. I'm curious like what it looked like to, 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 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 on inventory, whereas if you over buy an inventory, that's a really good way that you can run out of money. And so, you know, there was some very high-profile companies that hardware companies that have died over the years,

and I always paid very close to 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 is never as good as the second version. We launched a second product. We launched the 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, and 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 is 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, the 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 through the OG, which is the smart typewriter, which had all those other names at one point. It was the Hemingwright, it was the Free Right. And now we're just calling it a Smart Typewriter because FreeWrite is the brand. So that's really the product that this Hemingwright that you have in front of you is based off 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-ink 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. I'll send pictures online, but it opens and shuts,

and it's like this little tiny thing, you slip in your backpack, and you can write with it. Yeah. 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 Hemingwriter or the free write, a smart typewriter.

So, but it's super small unfolding. So, you know, that's kind of the tradeoff. And then we have Alpha, which is the other product that you have in front of you. 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-ink screen, so the screen is 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, 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 Word Runner,

which is very exciting, which is our first mechanical keyboard that actually connects to your computer. And so this product is like, think about like, what is a mechanical keyboard for writers in sort of the free write world? It's got some very unusual features on it, including an embedded word counter that we're calling it a Wordometer that actually has 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, 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... It was just a keyboard hooked your normal computer. Yes.

I mean, we kind of reintroduced the concept of a mechanical keyboard to a lot of people because they were sort of, They sort of went out of fashion for a long time, and really only people that were using them were sort of hardcore gamers. It was, again, 10 years ago. And so we brought this mechanical keyboard style keyboard back and, again, reintroduced 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 this on my computer? Right? Because we accept that people are still using their computer. Like, we don't, 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, you know, video editing or whatever. 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 that's the concept with Word Runner and we're yeah, we're super pumped about it. It's pretty wild product. That's really cool. I'm excited to try that one out. Okay. For those who are listening, they can't see this.

I love to you explain. It's kind of like how it works, how it gets pushed to the cloud, like just that concept. Because I think the very first time, like, I didn't understand how it works. I bought it. I sat down and I was like, okay, this is how works. I right here. Then I pushed the cloud. Then I can move to grab it here?

Like, can you just walk through that process to people understand how this works inside their workflow? Yeah, absolutely. The thing that's 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 placement for an old school word processor. It's not really one of those things. It is 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, turn it on, it instantly opens the writing canvas, you start typing, you do your drafting, and then in the, in the 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 on to Postbox at postbox.com. Or you can have it sync to one of the cloud providers that we sync to.

So we sync to OneDrive, Evernote, 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 right. you can literally just rotate to your computer. And if you have one of those third-party cloud services installed, you just like open your draft in Dropbox on your computer. That was sort of the magic that we were trying to, that we're trying to give people.

And so, yeah, it's really just like draft, open 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. So they do some other things that like makes more sense to them. and that's fine. But the prescribed workflow is sort of how I described it using using one of these cloud services. Yeah. So cool. Yeah, I think it's I think we guys crazy really cool. I've been a big fan of it for a long time and using it. I got the one in my office. I've got one in my backpack when

I travel and I've got this new one that you guys sent me. It was really fun that I'm just trying to figure out my workflow with that one, but it's just been really fun. I'm curious like the the people that are using it. Is there a certain genre that photos is every writer all over place or do you guys 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 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, bloggers, of course, and we even

have songwriters. Like I just, we just saw today, Jeanelle 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 I, you just, we have all kinds. There is a, 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 notes in the operating room with his rewrite. So, you know, anyone that needs to write and be focused and values that type of experience, you know, they're, they're a great candidate for, for this product. That's so cool. And how many words 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 interesting, when 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 as we get more products out there and also improve the products. We, we release new firmware updates and are constantly improving the product. So yeah, it's, it's amazing. It's amazing that people are actually using the product. Yeah. We love it.

It's so cool. All right. Well, this has been really fun hearing your story and the backstory behind it all. For those who are listening or watching this and they want to go invest, where's the best place from the go to check them out and figure out which one's going to be the right one for them? Yeah, I mean, you can check your, you can go to getfreyright.com. You can ask your favorite AI about distraction freewriting tools. name free rights.

But yeah, anything, go to getfreyriot.com. Check it out. And then you should get the Hemingway and get a travel one. That's what I say. That we got one at the office, one to travel with. You need at least two.

That's my thought. But you can get away with one. At least two. At least two. Yeah, you need at least two. Well, the one is like, again, it's so cool. Like, 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 funny. The first time I brought it on a plane. I popped it out. I'm on this thing. And everyone's walking past.

And I see people like staring at me and that you know, everyone's like, what is that? And the person in the next to me is like, is that a calculator? I'm like, no, it's like a it's like a typewriter that's hard to edit on. But then you can write really fast and like, why would you want that? I'm like, because I'm trying to explain the whole thing the person next to me. I'm like, can I just write? Leave me alone. But it's a it's definitely fun conversation piece as well 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. Thanks for creating such a cool product. I can't wait to see all the update 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 is just been it's it isolates me when I'm doing my creative work, right 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 we guys have 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, so awesome. All right, get freewrite.com.

Everybody get your free write right now and let us know. Post pictures and tag us all in it. I want to see them. Anyway, thanks, man. 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. text come in, you open one tab, and 45 minutes later, you're watching something random on YouTube. That's why I use FreeWrite. 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 freewrite, 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.gatfreywrite.com slash Russell and grab yours. Turn off the noise, turn on the words. Your future bestseller is waiting.