Handwrytten Did $9M in 2025, Down From $9.4M in 2024, With 400 Active Customers (Interview with Founder and CEO David Wachs)

Introduction: David Wachs and Handwrytten

Nathan Latka

0:01Hey folks, my guest today is David Wachs, he's the founder and CEO of Handwrytten, the world's largest automated handwritten notes platform, which uses robotic machines with real pens to write personalized cards at scale for brands, nonprofits, you name it. He's a Wharton grad and serial entrepreneur who previously built Cellit, with a C, a text message marketing company sending over a million texts a day for brands like Abercrombie and Fitch and Sands Club, which he sold in 2012 for an eight figure exit. David, you ready take us to the top?

David Wachs

0:30I am Nathan. Thank you so much for having me.

Nathan Latka

0:32Alright, eight figures in 2012, you should just be on a yacht somewhere enjoying your life. Instead you're thinking about handwritten note machines.

Why Build a Handwritten Note Business After an Eight-Figure Exit

David Wachs

0:40Yeah, I left that I was 38. I was too young to retire. So I made the choice to not go on a yacht and I just next day I started Handwrytten. So here we are 12 years later, we're very niche. We're, you know, we're the largest player in a very small space, but ⁓ it's been a fun ride.

Defining Largest: Robots, Volume, and Market Position

Nathan Latka

1:01Okay, I always like to push back on vendors when they say largest. mean, can you quantify that at all? Is that largest by number of notes sent, largest by revenue? What do mean by largest?

David Wachs

1:10Well, it's, mean, I don't know for a fact that we're largest, but I have to believe that just based off age of the company, number of reviews on G2 crowd, ⁓ Google search results, everything else. If you type in the word handwritten with an I, pops Handwrytten with a Y, but we are much, much larger from our competitors. That perspective, I believe, in talking to prospects that have vetted us against our competitors. They always say that we are head and shoulders bigger ⁓ just based on their office tours or whatever they're doing. But we've got 200 robots in our facility in Phoenix. ⁓ We've been at this way longer than anybody else. we push about, last year I wanna say we pushed about six million notes, five million.

Note Volume and Active Customer Breakdown

Nathan Latka

2:00Whoa, okay, what are you run rating note volume today? Like we're in April of 2026. How many notes do you think you'll send this month?

David Wachs

2:07⁓ that is a good question. we will probably do on that around four to five, well, no, about three and a half, 350,000, my apologies, 350,000 notes.

Nathan Latka

2:23across how many customers using you.

David Wachs

2:27I mean, we have 400,000 clients in our customer database. Of those active, you're probably talking 400. It really, it's all over the place. I we have a lot of people that just come on, sign up and send one note, but then we have clients that send 20, 30,000 a month. Our biggest...

Nathan Latka

2:37interesting I was going to say you have power laws in your notes sent numbers.

David Wachs

2:52yeah, yeah, I we have clients that are sending easily 40 50,000 a month we've but you know, they're but that's the problem is there's this huge skew. And it also makes it really hard for us to get advertising that's working because if we do like a Google ad, and then God forbid a realtor clicks it, you know, that's a $5 click and we get like, you know, 20 cents in contribution margin. So it's like it doesn't it does the numbers don't don't don't work that way.

Inside the Phoenix Facility: 200 Robots Built In-House

Nathan Latka

3:15Ha ha. I would love, are you able to share a screen and show me a picture of the 200 robots in the facility in Phoenix? Do you have any of that anywhere?

David Wachs

3:30I'm not off the top of my head, but if you follow me on it, actually, yeah, if you do this, hold on one second, I will do that. Yeah, I'll screen share my Instagram. Give me one.

Nathan Latka

3:37You can screen share your Instagram maybe. I just don't, I don't think people realize, like, I mean, it's actually pretty incredible watching this technology work. I've seen these machines in the past and I've also been on the receiving end of handwritten notes that I'm fairly certain use Handwrytten. And what I like is I can always tell if something's fake because I, when I get open the letter, I lick my palm like this, right? I like my palm and I put on the letter and I smear. And if it doesn't smear, it's fake. It was like a printed thing to make it look like handwritten. But when you, with yours, when you do that,

David Wachs

4:03Mm-hmm.

Nathan Latka

4:10it actually smears because it actually is pen ink that you're using in this facility in Arizona.

David Wachs

4:16That's right, yeah. I don't know if this one will pan. We have a number of these videos that do pan. Yeah, here we go. So these are the 200 robots.

Nathan Latka

4:29Hold on, hold on, I see your Instagram browser window, although that's my Instagram. Hold on, let me stop screen sharing here. Stop sharing, you open now.

David Wachs

4:36⁓ my apologies.

Nathan Latka

4:38use screen share.

David Wachs

4:44So I know this is hard, probably hard to see, but these are all the robots racked up. We build them ourselves in Tempe, Arizona, and we've got about 200 of them. But now it's not just about the robots, it's about the process. So we use QA, computer vision to QA the notes. I'm going to stop the screen share.

Nathan Latka

4:46wow. Wait, this is impressive. It reminds me of like, like inside a Ukraine drone factory almost where there's all these, all these, all these, you know, machines building drones, just the 3d printers, just to be clear, but you're, you build these machines, you, you invented the machine, you built the machine yourself.

David Wachs

5:22We built the machine ourselves. Yeah, it says taking over somewhere. Were we able to see that screen? OK, OK, yeah, we built them.

Nathan Latka

5:28Yeah, it was great. I saw the whole thing. So just to be clear, what does it cost you to build one robot?

David Wachs

5:33You know, we're not gonna share that, but what I can tell you is because we build them internally, it's a fraction of the cost of anybody else out there. mean, when we started this business, we were using these things called automated signature machines, which are kind of the old school ⁓ robots that like the Biden AutoPen type deal. And our cost to build one internally is a fraction of the cost to buy one of theirs or... when we sent back those auto pens back to the factory when we were done with them, they bought them back ⁓ from us for more than it costs for us to build our own. So their cost to build a robot is more than our cost, even though we've been around, you know, 12 years, they've been around 40 years or something like that. So ⁓ yeah, and like we build them out of plastic. not building, I mean, we do have metal robots in facilities that lease them from us. And that's a whole... whole other business line for us is the leasing of robots. And then we also bring metal robots to like trade shows and that type of thing. But by and large, the robots are cut out of ⁓ out of plastic, they're cut out of lucite, and then 3d printed to keep the cost down.

Nathan Latka

6:45Interesting. Okay, and so you launched, said 12 years ago, so 2014 was when you sent your first note.

App vs. API: How Customers Actually Send Notes

David Wachs

6:512014 was when we launched the app first because we're interested in separation of concerns, if you're familiar with that term. But basically, back in the day, I was a terrible coder. And when I'd make the Cellit website, there was no separation of backend, frontend, that type of thing. And so when I designed Handwrytten, I wanted the frontend to be developed completely separate from the backend. So I had an app.

Nathan Latka

7:00not.

David Wachs

7:20instead of a website. And then I designed the website next so that it would have that back-end layer and that API layer and I wouldn't be able to kind of screw it up. These days, the way people program it's different, so it's not a problem with React and everything else, but ⁓ yeah, that's how we did it. And then... ⁓

Nathan Latka

7:38Well, so how many, like I pulled up on my phone, your mobile app, how many people are sending sort of one-offs, like realtors through the app versus using your API you've got on the site?

David Wachs

7:47It's all about, honestly, the ⁓ iPhone app and Android app are a very, very small portion of our business. I'd say maybe 30 to 40 notes a day go through that. By and large, most of our notes go through our automations or bulk upload. So on the website, you can upload an Excel sheet, ⁓ or you can tie us into HubSpot, Salesforce, Claude. We have a really cool MCP now, ⁓ where you can send notes directly from all that. ⁓ you know, lot of people use Zapier, a lot of people use make.com for automations, but quite frankly, and Shopify, we have a plugin for Shopify where you could go in and define rules and say, ⁓ after the first purchase send a handwritten note, after they spend a certain amount of money send a handwritten note, after they have been a client for a year send a handwritten note. So you can set up all those rules in Shopify, and we're gonna be coming out with a Klaviyo integration shortly as well.

Nathan Latka

8:41showing how this would work inside of Claude. Let me ask you a question. One of the reasons that like I'm not doing this more at Founderpath, right? So we've now invested in about 710 companies. The fund is, 260 million deployed. I want to send like one-on-one notes, obviously, to these founders. They mean a lot to me. But I want to also send it in like a box. And I couldn't find something that allowed me to the handwritten note, plus build a custom box and do sort of, and then sort of send it out altogether. You don't do anything outside of the note, right?

David Wachs

8:50Wow. I mean, the note, the envelope, the, we have little gift cards so could do a visit. Like, you know, we're trying to manage, we're self-funded. So you could add a gift card to Starbucks or Amazon or something like that. We are gonna start doing cookies as our first fulfillment item. It'll be a box of two big cookies with a note. We're gonna do brownies, but those don't ship well, so we'll be doing cookies. But if you want like 400 notes shipped back to you, each one personalized and then you just drop it in a box, very easy to do. That's an option on our website. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

9:42there you go. There you go, that would be the solution probably, right? Is basically like, I wanna write the thoughtful note in basically a text file, and send 30 of these a month, I would upload them to you, you would then handwrite the notes and then ship them back to me, and then I could have a little assembly line here in Austin, Texas at my house in the closet or something making the boxes.

David Wachs

9:58correct. Correct, yeah, that's, I mean, from our website, when you do your bulk upload, it'll say how do you want them delivered? Do you want them stamped, sealed, ready to go, or just unsealed, unstamped, or node only, no envelope? All those are options when you use the service.

Nathan Latka

10:17Okay, you just said you're self funded. So you're bootstrapped you on you on employees on 100 % of the company.

David Wachs

10:22Yeah, yeah, 100%. I'm 100%.

Revenue History: $1M in 2018 to $9.4M in 2024, Then $9M in 2025

Nathan Latka

10:25love that. Okay, tell me more about the revenue growth. When did you break a million of revenue? Do you remember?

David Wachs

10:29A million was probably like five years. mean, it's a slow growth with with self-funded and and trying to grow organically. So let me tell you when we hit a million. It would probably be 1999 or 98. Let's see. I mean, sorry wrong wrong set of years 2018 Yeah, sorry, you know the years I'm old the years seem to pass fast. So I'm just pulling out my quick books

Nathan Latka

10:49was about to say what? Are you open to sharing the QuickBooks and just talking us through the revenue story?

David Wachs

11:01Yeah, to some degree. we hit 2019, we were 2.4. Before that, we were in LLC, we did the Qualified Small Business Stock Conversion. Are you familiar with that?

Nathan Latka

11:03Okay. Yep, super smart.

David Wachs

11:19Yeah, so we did that in 2019. Before that, there's a separate set of books that I don't have access. I don't want to fumble around on your podcast for, but we were 2.4 in 2019. We were probably low to mid one millions in 2018. 2024, we did 9.4 million. 2025, full transparency, we actually went down a little. We were only at 9 million. This year we are fully on track to break 10 to 11. So we're growing. It's not the speed I'd like to see. ⁓ But with that growth, the margin improvement and profitability has drastically increased this year.

Nathan Latka

12:06In 2025, what did you take to the bottom line or was it breakeven?

Profitability: $350K in Profit in 2025

David Wachs

12:10It was relatively break even. had a whopping $350,000 in profit. The year before that it was a buck.

Nathan Latka

12:18on we got to celebrate that David it's it's more profit than 99 % of publicly traded companies that are burning money you know

David Wachs

12:23It's a look, you know and some of that is I am a hundred percent owner So if I need extra money to pay to read redo the backyard or something On my house it comes out of the company. So There'd be a lot of add-backs and that type of thing for a quality of earnings analysis

Nathan Latka

12:44So what motivates a guy like you? You're 38, you had your first big exit. I imagine you made personally more than a million cash on that deal, right, if you sold it for eight figures? Well, well more than a million. Yeah, and you're now building this, it's at 10 million. Okay, yeah, so that was a very meaningful, obviously, cash life event for you. what keeps you motivated? Are you just sort of a builder and Handwrytten is where you sort of scratch that builder itch?

David Wachs

12:52Yeah, yeah, yeah, was 75 % on the back, so I did okay. Yeah, so, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but it's Handwrytten. You were not the first one to call it Handywritten. The Y is, it's Handwrytten. Yeah. I, you know, you kind of get in and then now I've got 60 employees and giant machine leases and 200 robots. It's not like I can just say, okay, I'm done with this. So there is an element of that.

Nathan Latka

13:11what did I say? Handwrytten, I'm sorry, thank you. Yep.

David Wachs

13:36⁓ That said, everything going on now is very exciting. There's a lot of, you know, I'm a geek at heart and there's a lot of itches to scratch as far as ⁓ optimization. know, like we did this whole thing where all the notes, you know, we used to have people literally stuffing envelopes one by one, and that just does not scale. So we replaced that with a computer vision system. That was a good mental thing. We replaced the insertion with a giant $600,000 insertion machine that does all that and we had to figure out ways to do it where it's undetectable by the human So we're not like barcoding anything or there's some secret sauce there And all that was very exciting. So as you grow and as you scale as you scale There's always new exciting problems to figure out like for instance the last one One of our clients is a veterinarian practice and you know, they send per quarter 80,000 handwritten notes with us, right? Like a pretty good number. Like two of those were misstuffed by the envelope stuffer because the envelope stuffer grabbed two notes at once and them in one envelope. It was bad. mean, two was bad, but two out of 80,000, right? So we're dealing with these very, very small error percentages, but we had to design a whole engineering flow to detect if a card has more than one piece of paper in it after it stopped. So there's like, there's always these fun little things you got to figure out and kind of continuing to challenge yourself. And then plus when you add AI, you know, and allowing us to kind of accelerate the, pace of innovation with AI, that's been very exciting too. So, ⁓ I mean, the short, the short version is I'm a little stuck with it because I, I'm not at the point where I can just drop it to somebody else and I'm not willing to fire a bunch of people and.

Nathan Latka

15:23Mm-hmm.

David Wachs

15:34lose a bunch of money on leases and stuff, but I'm having fun at the same time. And then plus, I've got young kids at home, relatively young kids at home, so it's not like we're gonna go travel the world, they need to be in school. So it's a little bit of that too.

Nathan Latka

15:49mean, we've got a lot of really savvy investors that listen to this show, a lot of builders that have an exit looking for the next thing. If someone came and offered you 100 million all cash to sell the business, do you sell?

David Wachs

15:59⁓ heck yeah. For a company that's growing like 20 % a year, hopefully. Absolutely. Yeah. I think there's a lot. I think our growth has been hampered a lot by organic growth. You know, we're not, we haven't taken any rounds and because of that, we're growing slower, but we're growing profitably ⁓ and smartly and you know, that type of thing. You know, there's been talks about expanding into Europe, but the problem is there's so much opportunity here.

Nathan Latka

16:0510x multiple, you would take it.

David Wachs

16:28⁓ I just don't need the distraction of dealing with Europe, you know.

Nathan Latka

16:34talk, go deeper on your inbound for a second, because I mean, you have a very strong SEO footprint. mean, you've put this article out best wishes, good luck messages. brings in almost 14,000 clicks to the website on a monthly basis. Your overall domain rating is above a, you know, a 70, which is very strong getting 40,000 organic clicks a month. this sort of SEO strategy? Was this, was this tactical and specific and agency runs this for you or you do it?

SEO Strategy: In-House Content, No Agency, No SEM

David Wachs

16:55Mm-hmm. We all, we do it all internally. Yeah, I have a woman that writes articles. It's because SEM doesn't work. We've done, we've gone the SEO route. Now we're going to start with social media advertising. We're doing a lot of social media posting, obviously, but now we're going to be doing social media advertising. That's starting this week.

Nathan Latka

17:04Okay. So what have you done? This is your top performing post 14,000 people hit this a month. What have you done to optimize this both to stay high in the rankings, but also to convert more people into a paid account?

David Wachs

17:33That's a great question that I don't have an answer to. Probably not enough. We do a lot of content marketing. We haven't done a great job converting it. If you go down to the bottom of that article, ⁓ scroll up just a wee bit. I mean, there's a sign up here to get started today thing. I mean, it's really pretty minor. We probably could go a lot farther than we do with our blog posts. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

17:58Do most of your larger, like the veterinarian one you just gave, most of your larger accounts today start off by one employee use the app and send one letter a month and then it scales to 80,000 a month or a quarter?

David Wachs

18:05Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. So what's happened with them is we were kind of fortunate, they're a practice, believe it or not, of euthanasia for pets. So if you need your pet put down, they'll take care of that for you. And it's a franchise model. So and their franchise has been growing pretty quickly. So every time a new vet center comes on board, they're pretty much mandated to use Handwrytten. And it's been a great partnership. And I believe we're going on year eight or nine with them. like it's been one of our longest standing accounts. Now there, you on top of that, we've got very big meal boxes, we've got department store change, eyeglass store chains. One of the, you know, and I'm probably being a little bit too transparent in this call, but one of the big issues with our company is we can't advertise any of our, any of our clients. Nobody wants to be known as sending phony handwritten notes, right? So we don't have any client mentions on the website. The best we have is a G2 crowd page with ⁓ a bunch of testimonials on it. But for the most part, nobody wants to be known as sending handwritten notes. Or nobody wants to be known as sending Handwrytten with a Y notes.

Nathan Latka

19:17I wonder. I wonder about, mean, you guys should comment watching on YouTube and post-processing. You should comment below. Like, here's my thinking. Like, if a founder knows that I used an auto pen to write a message, but I wrote that message myself digitally and uploaded it to like a machine to actually do the physical writing, I still personally did it. I put in the emotional energy to sort of do it. I mean everything that's written. It should still mean the same thing, right?

David Wachs

19:39Correct. I mean, look, this is not new. If you in like the 1960s, right? You know, I know you're not that old, neither am I, thank goodness. But if you complain to the CEO of TWA and you said my flight was delayed or my three course meal, hot meal was not hot, the CEO of TWA would write you back a letter, signed letter, but did he write it? No, he had his admin write it. Did he sign it? No, he either had his admin sign it.

Nathan Latka

19:52you

David Wachs

20:11or an auto pen do it or whatever, maybe you signed it without even looking at it. How different, you know, it's the same thing. It's that they're at least taking the time in the organization out. And then once you get to a certain scale, like we work with these huge nonprofits, once you get to a certain scale, there is no way you could thank people in the way they deserve to be thanked without a solution like this. The alternative to this is not you the head of development doing it. It's you. ⁓ bribing a bunch of volunteers with pizza to do it. And how much is that gonna cost? How much pizza, how many managers to watch the pizza? There's all these things you don't think of, the total cost of that. And then on top of it, each of those notes is gonna look different. Some are gonna be really sloppy, some are gonna have pizza oil on them, some of them are gonna have typos in them. So if you want to consistently thank your customers in a way that tries as hard as possible to be genuine at scale, I think it's a good way to go about it, if you read our Instagram comments, mean, there's certainly people. yeah, it's a very polarizing thing, and I understand.

Competitor Landscape: Simply Noted, Letter Labs, and Roll-Up Potential

Nathan Latka

21:14It's polarizing question, I'm sure. Of course. Talk to me about, since you talked about organic growth, I do want to touch on inorganic growth for a second. You rank, which is very impressive, number one for the keyword handwritten letter. Also brings in a lot of traffic to the firm. If we look at some of your competitors that rank below you, and you were to have unlimited money and rolled these folks up, I mean, how big is the market? I do you know, do you have a guess of what Pen Letters does in revenue and RoboQuill in revenue?

David Wachs

21:35Yeah. RoboQuill I know is based in ⁓ the UK. So that would be an interesting one just because we could fulfill them in the States and then just drop ship them to the UK. We've talked about doing that and we're talking about doing that in a different country in Europe. ⁓ Pen Letters, they're just using the automated signature machine that we started 12 years ago with and I'm guessing they have... 10 of them, you know, I think they're a really small shop. I have no idea if that's true or not. I mean

Nathan Latka

22:19They don't look, their branding certainly is not as good as yours, I'll put it that way.

David Wachs

22:21Yeah, I just I never run into them. Like when we do, ⁓ you know, there's like two competitors that we run into a lot. ⁓ But they're not one of them. The competitors we run into are simply noted, and I'm gonna stay above board in what I say about them. And then a company called letter labs. Those are those are the two.

Nathan Latka

22:33Yeah. Well, and they're spending, they're both spending, it looks like a fortune on paid ads, right? Simply noted is here. Letter lab is here. Do you have any? They do. Okay.

David Wachs

22:45Yeah. Letter Labs has funding. Yeah, they, ⁓ the guy over there got worked for ⁓ the boring, not the boring company, the hyper the tube train thing, Hyperloop. And some of those guys were X ⁓ SpaceX, so they had money. So it's like, I think it's like a friends and family round. But ⁓

Nathan Latka

22:59Hyperloop. What's your guess on what their revenue is?

David Wachs

23:14Six, if I had to guess.

Nathan Latka

23:15Yeah, yeah, yeah, interesting. And what do you think the other one is that you mentioned? What was it? Simply noted? Interesting. So even if you had unlimited money,

David Wachs

23:21to, to, I mean, if you look, and the only way I'm saying that is I'm very familiar with Simply Noted. ⁓ They've been around a long time. I will say there's ⁓ some, a lot of adversarial stuff between the two of us. But if you go on their LinkedIn, the number of people that actually work there, once you filter it, like the term Simply Noted is very broad, it pulls up a lot of stuff. But when you filter it to the people that actually work at Simply Noted,

Nathan Latka

23:39Mm-hmm.

David Wachs

23:49It is a very small number of people. I would say it's eight. And they're in Arizona. They're right down the street from us.

Nathan Latka

23:53Interesting. they're in Arizona. there's a story here. There is for sure a story here. Was Rick ever an employee of Handwrytten?

David Wachs

24:01No, he wasn't. He wasn't actually but if you look at their website, there's some glaring similarities. You have to go like the dashes the way he goes from and it's just like come up with your own idea, dude. So

Nathan Latka

24:10Yeah. ⁓ animation. Yeah, well, it's weird you're both in Arizona.

David Wachs

24:20Yeah, and you know, I will say we were a little further apart and then I moved to his area because ⁓ I needed a bigger location. There was one available. So ⁓ part of that's on me.

Nathan Latka

24:30But your thesis, like if I backed up a dump truck here out of my fund and said, David, here's 50 million, let's go roll up the space. sounds like you think we could probably, if we bought everyone, your top competitors, it'd still only be probably 20, 30 million of total annual revenue. I mean, you're the biggest player.

David Wachs

24:44Yeah, yeah, I think I think right now, there's probably the hard one to buy would be letter labs, just because those investors are probably pretty, ⁓ pretty high on themselves and pretty thin and think they're going to get a better, you know, buyout amount. The other ones I would I've actually tried buying one for like a commission on revenue, like basically buy them pay them a little bit upfront and then a recurring revenue stream for their existing revenue. I did that on my last company and it worked. ⁓ I bought a company called ⁓ MessageBuzz, I believe. ⁓ Something like that. But, ⁓ you know, I think there's an opportunity to buy up these competitors for sure. And then honestly, I'm not even interested in their technology. I'm very confident that we have the best technology. We would just buy them, throw their clients on our platform, their clients would have an upgrade, immediate upgrade and experience.

Nathan Latka

25:20Mm-hmm.

David Wachs

25:41And we would just keep building our existing platform, basically.

Nathan Latka

25:46And you, and you, it sounds to me like the hard thing about competing in this space is actually building the 200 robots and the systems to make this all work smoothly. It's, fixed op X basically. This is real sort of inventory you're holding on your balance sheet, probably millions of dollars worth of equipment.

The CapEx Moat: Why Physical Robots Are a Competitive Advantage

David Wachs

26:00You know, and it's funny, Nathan, if you asked me a year ago, if I liked that, I'd be like, I will never do another CapEx business again, full stop period. These days, I'm like, thank God I have CapEx because I can't be vibe coded away, you know?

Nathan Latka

26:10Ha ⁓ Exactly. mean, and look at what are all these massive rounds right now with OpenAI and Anthropic. What are they spending on? CapEx, it's data centers. It's physical. It's bit it's atoms and bits.

David Wachs

26:24Yeah. Yeah, man, we were actually rolling out some alternative ⁓ businesses that will leverage our capex but won't be handwritten note related. ⁓ But I'm all about physical now because, you know, there is a bit of a moat there 200 robots and then it's also, again, it's the pop, it's the process that we have that makes everything hum around here as far as computer vision and all that stuff. that whole moat is, ⁓ I think it's what's gonna save us because if we were just a software company, I mean, we could be vibe coded in a weekend.

Nathan Latka

27:07100 % no I guys full disclosure like I've tried buying my own robot to do this kind of thing The software is so terrible. I mean it is so bad. I spent like three grand on this machine from China It's sitting in my closet over here. I've never used it ⁓ And I want to send these handwritten letters like we see on Founderpath when companies break, know, 10 million of AR I want to write it no a handwritten note and send it to the founder and congratulate them and put it in a box of other stuff But I just don't do anything right now because it's just so hard to make that process work smoothly over and over again

David Wachs

27:37Yeah, yeah. And that's the thing is like people could go and get an AxiDraw or a unit tech sounds like you bought a unit tech. Yeah. Yeah. So, like when we a couple years ago, even three years ago, we were buying unit tech writing arms, not what you have. know what you have, but we're buying the writing arms and those that's a component on top of our robot. So we have a conveyor belt, we have a processor.

Nathan Latka

27:44It was a Unitec, that was the brand, yep.

David Wachs

28:06It's fully autonomous and hooks up to our back end and it pulls orders. And then honestly, the hardest thing was the paper feed. Believe it or not, feeding paper at scale is very difficult. And then what we've done is we now...

Nathan Latka

28:20And the variance, right? It's a four by six postcard versus the eight and a half by 11 trifold versus whatever.

David Wachs

28:23Yeah, correct. Yeah, and these things are really, it becomes very difficult. The cards are okay. It's the envelopes that are a bear because and again, this might not be interesting for anybody except my competitors. when now what we do is we write on the written envelope. So before it was like you write the card, you write the envelope, you stuff. Now we write the card, stuff it in a blank envelope. And then we feed that quote unquote blank envelope into a machine that writes on that. So it's writing on a rather thick, uneven piece because that envelope, the thickness of the flap side is different than the thickness of the, you know what I mean? So anyway, so building a really good paper feed has been a multi-year process.

Nathan Latka

29:07gosh yes because if you get off by one then every envelope is labeled to the wrong letter on the inside.

David Wachs

29:15Yeah, we've solved for that. But yeah, that could be.

Nathan Latka

29:19wild, wild. So just to be clear, look, I'm gonna have my producer for the podcast. This is how I do this kind of thing. I'm gonna have them reach out to the CEOs of all these other companies, try to get them on the show, try to get all the other metrics. And then basically, try and buy them out live on the show, then come back to you and say, David, look, we've got basically what they would sell for. Let's let's, let's invest 5 million here, debt pays back over whatever, four or five, six years, and let's go roll up the industry.

David Wachs

29:41Okay. How did you get, how did you get where you are, man?

Nathan Latka

29:47Media man, I sold too much my first company. I bootstrapped to a million of ARR when I was 19, 20, raised too much VC. So when I sold, I made way less than I thought I would. And I said, you know what I'm gonna do? I need to figure out a way to help founders grow their business without selling equity. And so we launched a small million dollar debt fund. Now we're on our third fund, 150 million bucks. And you know, we've invested in over 700 CEOs. It's been just a dream, tons of fun.

David Wachs

30:15it for you man. Yeah, I saw your website had our I mean, where are going to get our stats from? But you had some incorrect stats on there, which is why wanted to get on here and set the record straight. We're not huge. We're 10 million bucks.

Nathan Latka

30:17Yeah. Well, now you're now you're telling now you're telling everyone my secret. That's exactly why I lack of work. So, all right, is because we get a lot of SEO traffic. I mean, we get, we get almost 4,000 clicks a day from Google, from people searching Hannah and revenue or the company name revenue. The CEO like you season says, wait, I need to go on Nathan show to do the real data, tell the real story. So I appreciate you coming on.

David Wachs

30:31Bye now. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, so, ⁓ yeah, no, it's interesting. It's a pleasure to get to know you and whatever you need for that, let me know. And yeah, I mean, there's two, so there's, you know, there's simply noted, I wouldn't wanna work with that guy. Are we still recording? Are you done?

Nathan Latka

30:55Yeah, absolutely. guess. I know we're still recording, but feel free to say whatever you want.

David Wachs

31:06Yeah, I just wouldn't want to work. I wouldn't want to work with them. I don't think we would jive. ⁓ But then there's ignite post letter labs, you know, there's it's a small industry. It's a cottage industry. And you know, now what we're doing is really going over to Europe and we're contemplating it, we're thinking of fulfilling it in the States and shipping it over for some of that type of stuff. So that's, but again, ⁓ you know,

Nathan Latka

31:11Okay, fair.

David Wachs

31:33I used to in my my last and this is kind of interesting. My last company we did the website for auto trader Latino not auto trader the mobile site for that. And you know there's more self ⁓ you know people that are that are Latino in the United States than there are Canadians in Canada. So any and while we do have a presence in Canada I always think you know the opportunity in the States is so big.

Nathan Latka

31:55Wow.

David Wachs

32:03niches make riches, right? Like you could just niche down, niche out, niche down and find that market to go to. You don't need to go to Europe. In the United States, in Europe you do, because they're relatively small countries. But that's part of it. However, we are certainly exploring other options as well. We need to get the growth.

Pricing Model and Postage Costs

Nathan Latka

32:20Well, I'm going to come back to you. have a whole internal M&A team. I'm going to put a plan together and pitch it to you via email and see if you're game to go try and roll up some folks. And if it works, we'll come back on in six, 12 months to give everyone else here on YouTube and update. But before we wrap, I do just, you should touch on pricing briefly. I want to talk about your pricing on the website and then also about how you're leasing the robot. So these, this price per card, I mean, are these good or bad margins?

David Wachs

32:34Yeah. ⁓ They're fine. I don't want to get into all that. ⁓ It's the monthly fee where we so basically what it is, is it's the Costco model, you pay a higher fee, it gets you in the door to get the lower price. The elite plan is where most of our clients sit now. And this is our, ⁓ you know, our new pricing as of this year. And it's been working pretty well, the clients find it reasonable. ⁓ And we're able to cover our cover our expenses.

Nathan Latka

33:14So all in, if they're gonna ship a thousand cards, it's gonna basically be $12,900.

David Wachs

33:19plus the monthly fee.

Nathan Latka

33:21plus eight, four, okay, what about postage?

David Wachs

33:24yeah, the postage. we do first class and we do ⁓ now we do pre sort, which is it's expensive man. It's not gonna be your cheapest option. So first class postage is 78 cents now. Or if you ⁓ want to do what's called pre sort, which is we feed it through a pre sort facility and it's a slight it's 68 cents for that option. So it's not it's not you know, it's it's

Nathan Latka

33:46Okay, interesting.

David Wachs

33:51you get what you pay for is in terms of response rates. You know, ⁓ people open these, they look real, they get the response, but it's an expensive thing, postage paper, the manufacturing process of it.

Nathan Latka

34:03Do you have any kind of, like if someone listening right now, what they might be wondering is, Nathan, I haven't checked my physical mailbox in three months. If someone sent me a letter, I wouldn't even open it. Do you have like, when I email send this to Jennifer Martin, do you have any sort of anything clever that tells the sender Tia Moore, whether Jennifer opened it or not?

David Wachs

34:21We don't okay, so two things we do offer delivery confirmations, which will let you know when Jennifer receives it. As far as opening it, we, you know, I'm not a huge fan of them, but we do have QR codes. And with those QR codes, they're unique to the recipient. So if I send, if Tia sends Jennifer one and Nathan one and so on and so forth, we'll know which one was scanned.

Nathan Latka

34:28Okay.

David Wachs

34:51So then we can kind of track open rate that way. What I can tell you is they have a three.

Nathan Latka

34:54But there's no, I was gonna say there's no way, electronics have gotten so small these days. Is there no way, almost like a piece of tape you can put on the inside of the envelope and electronically tell actually when it actually gets physically opened and then ping back to something and is that too crazy?

David Wachs

35:09I wish man, I we'd be dealing with cell phone towers and we don't have that yet.

Nathan Latka

35:13Yeah. I mean, is that, I mean, cause see, like I, the people I'm mailing, I care about them so much. I mean, I am willing to spend, if you had to put a little something robotic inside of the thing to casually like tell me, yeah, they definitely opened it. We saw the whatever, we saw the envelope go from 90 degree closed to 180 degree open. You know what I mean? I'd pay extra five bucks per envelope for that.

David Wachs

35:38That's interesting. ⁓ We don't currently, I don't know of solution like that. I mean, the best we do right now is QR codes. And the way our clients do it is they, you know, when they get a delivery confirmation from us, they'll then email the person saying, hey, we just sent you something. We think it's in your mailbox now, go check.

Robot Leasing Business and Third-Party Fulfillment Opportunity

Nathan Latka

35:44Yeah me either. That's smart, that's smart. I'm sure that's all automated too. Okay, wrap us up with the giant machine leases. Is that meaningful part of your 10 million revenue?

David Wachs

36:05Not yet. We've only got about 30 out in the field. Each one you can assume is about $1,000 to $1,250 per month per robot. They cost us much less than that to, you know, on an annualized basis to build. So there is good margin there. And those accounts tend to stick around. So we've got two large accounts on the East Coast, both actually in the Pennsylvania area. And then actually a very large one. Not too far from us in Tempe that has about 15 robots. ⁓

Nathan Latka

36:39why would they want the robots? Why not just pay you to do it all for them?

David Wachs

36:42their three PL facilities. So they're doing what you like gifting. So they will send somebody one of them is a very large gift card company, they write handwritten notes that go with the gift cards. The other ones are kind of swag companies. And then there's one that's a personalized beauty brand, where would say this makeup was designed specifically for Nathan, you know what mean? And that would be written in. So but we see that as a huge opportunity. You know, especially for gift notes, if we can get the robot least to the right cost and footprint. ⁓ We've got some ideas on the footprint, the cost we're trying to keep rather high. yeah, mean, putting these robots in three PLs is kind of a big opportunity.

Nathan Latka

37:24Mm-hmm. Very interesting. All right, time to wrap up. Anything I missed that you want to talk about?

David Wachs

37:35No, I just hope I didn't wander too much, man. Hopefully you'll cut it down.

Nathan Latka

37:37I thought it was fantastic. mean, I lost, just realized we went way over on time. So I apologize for that, but guys, wrapping up here again, here with David Wachs, he sold Cellit for eight figures, own 75 % of that back in, you know, the early two thousands in 2014 launched the app for Handwrytten with the Y 2018 broke, call it a million of revenue, 2019, 2.4 million fast forward to last year, 2025 did 9 million of revenue, about 350 K of profits. And now here in April of 2026, he's going to send 350,000 notes. across 400 active customers. mean, pretty wild amount of notes that he's sending. Also leasing out these machines that write these handwritten notes to a couple of writers as well, experimenting with a new business model. But he's doing this all out of a facility in Phoenix with 200 robots. There's 60 folks on the team and he has bootstrapped this business, owns 100 % today as he looks to continue to scale. David, thank you for taking us to the top.

David Wachs

38:11for months now. Thank you, Nathan. Pleasure.