Ep. 215 David Wachs wanted to send handwritten notes to his employees and customers when he sold his first company so he invented Handwrytten.com

Published: May 17, 2021, 8:45 a.m.

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David Wachs\'s latest venture, Handwrytten, provides scalable, robotic solutions that write your notes in pen. Used by businesses in all industries, Handwrytten changes the way brands and people connect.

Prior to Handwrytten, David founded Cellit, a leading mobile marketing platform. With clients including Abercrombie and Fitch, Walmart and more, Cellit was sold in January of 2012.

David is a speaker on marketing technology, has been featured in the Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, and is a contributor to Inc. Magazine.

 

Most passionate about

  • My new company, Handwrytten. It\'s not so new at this point; we\'ve been around for seven years. Our goal is to reignite the lost art of Handwrytten communications.
  • Specifically, we focus on communication from business to business or business to consumer in this day and age of electronic communication\\u2014whether that\'s email or text or Slack, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, all these other forms of electronic communication or old-fashioned junk mail, preprinted stuff that gets thrown directly in the trash bin.
  • About seven years ago, we started this company with the idea of making and sending Handwrytten.
  • We have a website, an iPhone app, and Android app plugins for major systems called Zapier and API, stuff like that, that allow people to get their notes to us very quickly in electronic form.
  • On the other side of the technology, we have robots that we build in our facility in Arizona. They hold real pens and write these notes out at scale. The robots can write out about 750 notes a day each.

David\\u2019s career and story

  • I grew up very middle class in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Always, even from the youngest days, I wanted to be an entrepreneur.
  • When I went off to university, I specifically took a double major in business and engineering. I chose computer science engineering.
  • I was in this program at the University of Pennsylvania called the Management Technology Program. I got a degree in engineering and a degree in business from Wharton. Then I went on and worked in consulting.
  • In 2000, which was at the height of the dot-com bubble, I went to work for a consulting firm that was helping large companies start dot-coms inside of them. It was just standard management consulting, but it was a good experience nonetheless, and they worked me to the bone.
  • I then wanted to get into venture capital. I worked in equity analysis for a large investment bank, Credit Suisse, first in Boston, and then I was moved over to a venture capital firm in San Diego, where I was abruptly fired without cause.
  • When I moved out to San Diego to work at this venture capital firm, I had no savings left. I was relatively debt-free, but I had no savings. So, when I got fired, I moved home. My family had relocated. My parents had moved to Arizona, so I moved home to Arizona with my head between my legs. I didn\'t know what to do next.
  • I started a text messaging company called Cellit. This was in 2004. Back then, we didn\'t have the iPhone or anything like that. When you drive by a house that was for sale, you\'d want to collect information on that house, get the price, and all that, but oftentimes there was no way to get information about that house. So I started this company called Cellit. Our first product was called House for Sell.
  • I quickly pivoted away from Realtors to more large brands. Within a few years, we were sending millions of text messages for brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, which is a large clothing brand, toys, Walmart\\u2014some very, very large brands. I ended up selling that company in 2012.
  • I started Handwrytten because what I realized, when I sold that company, was that I wanted to send Handwrytten notes to all my employees...'