In the last post, I told the origin story of the idea for Freewrite. At the time, it wasn’t called Freewrite; it wasn’t even called Hemingwrite. It was just an idea.

Time went by, as it tends to do. From February until July of 2014, Patrick and I both sat on it. I wrote down the idea on my Projects List in Evernote and continued working on SunDaily.

But the good stuff sticks.(1)(A) This idea for a distraction-free hardware thing churned around in my mind despite my energy being spent elsewhere.

To set the scene, in Jan 2014 I had just recruited an old friend and former roommate of mine to join me at SunDaily. The rest of my small team had dissolved by that point so it was just down to the two of us. We had some good months. April of 2014 was our best with a whopping $3300 in vitamin sales. Jim was hitting the road and selling at gyms and chiropractor offices in the Metro Detroit area. We were sharing a car (my mother’s 10-year-old minivan) since I wasn’t paying him enough to get his own. It was insane but we were desperately trying to make things work. There were sparks of excitement and a lot of prospects for growth but ultimately we knew we were basically out of time (i.e. money).

At about the same time, Jim was desperately needed on the west coast for family matters. Recruiting Jim was my last-ditch effort to get SunDaily to break out so when Jim left, I finally had a very clear signal that SunDaily’s time was up.(2) I had struggled enough for the previous two years by myself that I had no interest doing that again. I had put tens of thousands of my own hard-earned savings and years of my life into SunDaily but it wasn’t even a hard decision at that point. I was burnt out, very broke, and I knew that I desperately needed a break. I also had given it all I could. My 28th year of life, the summer of 2013 (the start of Bizdumb) until the summer of 2014, was my most stressful, by far. It handily beats out any year I spent at MIT or on Wall Street, recession and all. That year was terrible and I frequently think about it as a place I never want to be in again.

Once Jim made the decision to leave, I took a really deep breath. It was probably my first deep breath since April 2013 when I started selling. After spending so much time staring at a computer, I remember thinking that I needed to do something with my hands again that didn’t involve juggling a business.

It was then that I started thinking much more seriously about this project that Patrick and I had talked about some months ago. In my mind it had legs. I really liked it.

The idea was starting to take shape too. I had a basic industrial design in my head that was visually interesting. The primary components were already spec’ed. Patrick could cobble together a software prototype on an E Ink screen using a hacked e-reader (I hoped). I could integrate an off-the-shelf 60% mechanical keyboard into a housing that would hold all the components. Most importantly, I thought other people would find it interesting once we showed it to them. Whether they would buy it or not was unimportant to me at the time. All I really wanted to do was get back in the workshop and work on something interesting.

Lastly, if it got some interest, I thought it would be a perfect candidate to put on Kickstarter. Since crowdfunding came across my radar some years ago, a seed was planted in my head that I wanted to run a campaign one day. But I couldn’t just put up any idea on Kickstarter and expect it to sell. The format of Kickstarter and their users are not amenable to just anything. SunDaily was a terrible candidate. My other ideas up to that point didn’t quite fit either. But this distraction-free thing could be perfect. It was a real product that people could touch and feel. It was unique both visually and philosophically. It had elements of nostalgia while at the same time was very techy/progressive. It could work if we did it right.

Patrick was my next challenge. This project was not happening without him. I had no interest in going back to working alone. I was fine doing my pieces of the project by myself but I needed somebody else to have true ownership, it couldn’t just be me. Plus, Patrick and I had very complementary skillsets. We also both saw very eye to eye on the overall product design. Truthfully, I had never met anybody that had the same opinions on product design, let alone someone who also brought hard engineering skills. It was a match! But he wasn’t onboard right away. He was living his own life and working on Gridpar.

It was all a little too serendipitous. At just about the same time, Patrick’s business partner left to go back to graduate school on the west coast leaving him at crossroads as well. I continued to pepper his inbox with various thoughts and ideas about the project.

At some point during the summer, Patrick and I sat down to have the talk, “do you want to work on this thing?” I did and he did too. But how? Both of us agreed that we needed a deadline or else it would be one of those never-ending projects that we did in our mythical spare time. A little searching the internet found us a hardware competition called Insert Coin that was sponsored by Engadget. The deadline for applications, which required a video of a working prototype, was Sept 26, 2014. We had approximately 3 months to get our shit together. We agreed and parted. (Insert Coin Contest Page)

A solid month went by. Patrick and I met up again to have another talk. “Are we really going to do this thing?” I was as motivated as ever. Patrick was still interested. I figured we needed to go all in the next two months or this thing wasn’t happening. He agreed. After that, everything ramped up extremely quickly. We needed to build a working prototype in record time with a micro budget.

Specimens

Footnotes

(1) I could make an argument that this concept is so powerful that it is detrimental to keep a list at all! The advice would be to only work on things that are truly memorable. If it is memorable to you, it is much more likely to be memorable with someone else. Likewise, if the idea is not memorable to you, it would be hard to expect it to be any different to an outsider. I try to use the passage of time as a tool by letting the mediocre ideas whither and the best ideas rise above.

(2) Knowing when to quit is one of the hardest things I have experienced as an entrepreneur. I hope to write a future post to elaborate.

The story starts at the end of winter, 2014. Patrick and I were both working in the Bizdom office space in Downtown Detroit, doing our best to get our startups off the ground. Patrick was building Gridpar and I was hammering away at my nutrition startup, SunDaily. We had both been through a very traumatic experience in the Bizdom accelerator program but continued working in their office for a few months after it was officially over.

It was only happenstance that Patrick and I sat near each other. I had a friend that worked for Bizdom before coming into the program and he strategically set the seating chart such that I was near him as was another person he liked, in this case, Patrick. It was me, Patrick, and Brian in one end of the room sitting across and next to each other. We kept our days interesting by talking about all kinds of random topics, primarily to take our minds away from the stress that was our startups.

Patrick has since become one of my best conversation partners but at that time I was far too entrenched (i.e. stressed) on my startup to allow myself much time to chat across the desk.(A) Even so, some discussions slipped past my focus. One of them was about writing. This was probably in February 2014 but I don’t remember exactly. I know that we got kicked out of the office approximately 6 months after the start of the program (Sept 2013) so it had to be sometime between Jan and early march.

The discussion that led to the Freewrite started simple enough. Patrick was telling me about a piece of software that he used while journalling and essay writing. I was intrigued because I found the fact that he journaled and wrote essays interesting but also for one peculiarity of the aforementioned software: it disabled the backspace key. ‘Ridiculous! That seems awfully masochistic. Why would you do that to yourself?’ I was the first skeptic.

The conversation continued on and I tried to keep an open mind. He explained to me how he is his own worst enemy while writing and by removing the ability to backspace, it pushed him forward. Drafting first and then editing later was a well-established method for writing and is often taught in MFA programs. Huh, that is interesting!

I couldn’t help but think about my own challenges with writing growing up. Everyone has to write while in grade school and I was no different. But I did always struggle and I never quite pinpointed my finger on why that was. One theory that I came up with well after college was what I call vertical vs horizontal thinking. I am a horizontal thinker and thus have a tendency to get pulled into elaboration and clarification for the perceived benefit of completeness. Whereas, vertical thinkers do not get mired in details when they are not critical to the story. The more I read good stories, the more I recognize the value of vertical narrative development. As a reader, I have more tolerance for horizontal divergence but even I can see my interest waning in these cases.

But I digress (see what I mean), Patrick introduced me a to a completely new concept in writing, this write first, edit later methodology. It’s like living your whole life trying to set nails with a log and then someone handing you a hammer. I often wonder what my relationship with writing would be if I was taught from the beginning to write first and then edit later.

During that first discussion, I learned that there are many different programs that modern writers use to help them stay focused. The software Patrick used was only one variety. There was another called ‘Write or die’ that would start deleting words if the writer paused for too long. There are many like iA Writer and Ommwriter that try to provide a pleasing writing canvas with a curated blend of fonts, desktop, and even music. The overarching concept was that the design of these environments affected the writer enough such that writers preferred them over Word to get work done. If each element of the experience was carefully thought about, the writer could get into a flow state quicker AND stay there. Distractions were the enemy, whether they were edits or email notifications or displeasing fonts, each piece of software had a method for smoothing the experience. There was a lot of room for optimization and the prevalence of these apps revealed that to me.

Just knowing that there were all these different types of software out there and that so many writers were using them was enough for my brain to start thinking creatively. ‘What if we created a piece of hardware that takes the distraction-free concept even further?’ That’s what I thought about ~20 minutes into the conversation. That may seem like a big jump to make but that’s how my brain works as a person that likes to make physical things.

In that very first conversation, we had established the vision for the eventual product. It would have a mechanical keyboard, E Ink screen, and would save all your drafts seamlessly to the cloud with Wi-Fi. The software would be pared down to a very basic writing experience. The device would turn on instantly and there would be no browser or ‘software’ to open/close.

How did I know these features would be the right choices without research or customer testing or more knowledge into supply chain? Let’s take them one at a time.

Mechanical keyboard – At some point previous to the conversation I had become aware of the mechanical keyboard community on Reddit. They are an incredibly passionate group of people, mostly gamers, that buy and customize mechanical keyboards costing between $125 and $300. Since I was never a gamer, I looked on as a curious observer. In the forums they talked about how pleasing it was to use a mechanical keyboard because of the tactile feedback, the amount of travel in the keys, and how reliable the keyboards were. Once familiar, a typist could fly across a mechanical keyboard with more precision and comfort.

I vaguely remembered what it was like to type on an older desktop keyboard and I also knew the difference a high-quality keyboard can make, in general, through my experience with Thinkpads. My first laptop was a Thinkpad and even though it was a laptop, the keyboard was so good that it actually reminded me of its awesomeness every single time I used it. Even now I am typing on a ThinkPad keyboard connected to my desktop! Writers, even more than gamers, are entirely dependent on their keyboards. They deserve the best possible typing experience. A side benefit is that a mechanical keyboard is visually interesting compared to all the laptops and external keyboards that modern writers are currently using. Maybe we could facilitate bringing mechanical keyboards, for which there was always an incredible community of gamers, into the mainstream for writers. The fact that these keyboards were legitimately better in virtually every way was nearly universally accepted. The downsides are the cost (greater than 10x a traditional membrane keyboard) and potentially, size. For this concept, it absolutely needed the best possible keyboard for writing and that meant a mechanical keyboard.

Screen – After the keyboard, the second most interacted with element of the device is the screen. Both Patrick and I love the Kindle from Amazon and first-hand know the experience that comes with an E Ink screen. Looking at text on an E Ink screen is significantly more pleasing and less straining than on a traditional LCD. What the Kindle did for reading, we could do for writing. Similar to the requirements of an e-reader, we wanted to facilitate writing anywhere, indoors or outdoors, and at any time. The E Ink screen is a step change above LCDs when it comes to readability in all environments. It’s no competition with other technologies. E Ink was the clear choice.

In practice, there were some things that we were worried about. We had never seen an E Ink display pushed to refresh as quickly as possible and thus had no idea how it would look/feel when we are trying to use it as a writing display. E-readers have a different requirement because page turning is intermittent and the user doesn’t mind waiting 500ms. Writers expect their words to show up on the display immediately and we knew that was not an option with E Ink displays. It is generally considered that a refresh rate of at least 60hz is required to show ‘instantaneous’ updates. We didn’t even know the exact refresh rate limit for E Ink but our best guess from what we read online was something like 1-10hz. Even at it’s fastest, it would be 1/6th of the speed needed to show no lag. Would that be good enough? We didn’t know but I was confident that the known benefits outweighed the potential downsides. When spec’ing the screen, we also had to contend with increased cost, lack of available information on driving the display, limited hardware support, oh and one more thing, the MOQ (minimum order quantity) was 1 million displays. There were challenges but that didn’t stop us from knowing that E Ink was the best choice.

Cloud syncing – This was a no-brainer. Again, both Patrick’s and my own experience with Dropbox showed us the light on the power of the cloud. Dropbox is by far the best cloud service, by the way. I transitioned completely to the cloud such that I could drop my laptop in the trash and not worry a minute about having all my files where I need them. They are accessible on all my computers and mobile and I just don’t worry anymore about moving files from computer to computer or syncing. Backups are a thing of the past and good riddance! But I know not everybody is as technology-forward. For the modern writer, many are still managing USB keys or risking their documents on unbacked-up computers. SCARY! We can fix that and more by incorporating a robust cloud service that is constantly saving locally and syncing to the cloud. Even better, it can integrate with Dropbox and sync files there at the same time. This is a game changer and in practice, is quite strange for how simple it feels.

In high school I had a Dymo label stuck to the bezel of my computer monitor that said ‘Save Now!’ because I had so many experiences losing work or having to work from recovered documents. To hell with Word! Pressing ctrl-s as frequently as possible became a force of habit. That’s no longer needed. In fact, nothing is needed. If you can see the writing on the display, it is saved. There is something truly powerful about this. And the fact that it is simultaneously saved to the cloud as long as you are connected to the internet is game changing. The idea is that a writer can draft on the device and swivel his/her chair to the computer and continue working straight away, no manual saving or syncing required. With Dropbox, the draft is already there waiting for editing, publishing, etc. Every element of worry, doubt, and general friction in the process that we can remove is a win for the writer.

That’s it. All of the core components of the Freewrite were chosen during the very first conversation when the concept was ideated.

What I hope is also apparent is that the origin had nothing to do with typewriters. In no way did we want to create a modern typewriter or recreate the typewriter. Typewriters are terrible! We made the decision at some point to call the Freewrite a ‘smart typewriter’ but I am still on the fence as to whether that was a net positive idea. The one thing that I find funny is that people will come to us with a feature request and try to make an argument for it based on the fact that typewriters could do it. Sorry friend, it doesn’t matter if a typewriter could do it or a word processor could do it or a pencil could do it. The only features that made it into the Freewrite or would ever be added to the Freewrite are those that can stand on their merits alone while at the same time holistically improving the experience for the user.

-Adam

Written on Sprinter

 

 

 

Specimens

Hello all current and future applicants, I am going to make this really easy. Here is how to get a job at Astrohaus:

Find this post

If you find this post, that means that you have at least Googled me and clicked around my website. It astounds me how little googling people do before coming to the interview.

Write an intro

A generic intro is better than no intro. A specific intro is, of course, the best. I know a lot of job seekers are following the spray and pray method but the best people know what they want and then pursue the best opportunities for them aggressively. There is no question that writing a quick note to give me an idea of ‘why you are interested in this role’ shows that you are more interested in it than most people. Interest tells me a lot about a person.  If you don’t have highly relevant experience, tell me exactly why you think you could still be a good fit. Even if you do have relevant experience, tell me how your successes would translate to even bigger successes working with Astrohaus.

Have a great resume and portfolio

Thankfully, candidates in NYC that I have seen rarely have terrible resumes or portfolios. However, there are some things that I frequently see that are not doing candidates any favors. If you are any kind of designer, you should have a visually pleasing resume. I would vote against over designing the resume to the point it looks like a cartoon or movie poster or something crazy (this would be fine if that is the job you are applying for but not for us). Just make a normal resume but put extra care into typography and a simple color palette. If I am hiring a designer and their resume is bland or has terrible style, that’s no bueno. All designers should have a portfolio online and it should be listed as prominently as possible on a resume and everywhere else you are marketing yourself. Don’t make me work to find it. Most importantly, only put the projects that you are very proud of in your portfolio. Sure, I will mentally note if something was a school project or whatever but why make me do that? Just put your best stuff online. I would hire a designer with one incredible masterpiece (note relevance of etymology) over another that had a big portfolio of mixed quality.

All non-designers should have a nicely formatted resume but nothing more than that. Just stick to something traditional. Most importantly, do not include any jobs/roles that you are not proud of. I would have thought this was obvious but I think some other resume coaches make it seem that it is worse to have a gap in your resume. This is terrible advice. A gap wont come up until an interview (if ever) and at that point you can at least explain it. If you put some lame job on your resume, I will probably question your judgement and never even give the interview.

Research

The more research you do, the more valuable our conversation can be. If I have to explain the product to you during an interview, that’s not a good sign. If you don’t find our Kickstarter (even though it was under a different name) you are not going to mesh well with our organization. The more you know about the product and can accurately deduce from the diverse information and misinformation on the web, the more impressed I will be. Sometimes I think candidates are slightly bashful about revealing how much they ‘stalked’ the product or me. Don’t be bashful about showing how much prep you put into the interview!

Be honest

Always. This includes questions that you may not think are important or you may not feel 100% comfortable answering. For example, if I ask you if you are a dog person or a cat person, don’t be afraid to say which. If you don’t know the answer to a question, think about it, then say that you don’t know. The way someone tells me that they don’t know something says a lot about their character.

Use jargon in the interview

I want to hire the smartest people I can find. The smartest people can’t help themselves from using jargon because they are experts in their field and no other words are suitable other than the actual words that people use within that field. If you don’t use jargon in the interview, I will assume you are not sufficiently technical or embedded. I don’t mean you should use a lot of buzzwords. There is a difference! Using buzzwords will likely have the opposite effect.

Write stuff down

You don’t have to take notes on everything but if I bring something up in the interview which is related to your role or area of expertise, write it down. Show me that you are interested in the subject matter and you are curious enough to check it out later.

Email me after the interview

Thank you notes are fine but what I am really looking for is a follow-up to something that we discussed in the interview. Something in our conversation should have got your wheels turning and inspired more thought.

Be persistent

Do not harass me or the other employees. Do follow up multiple times if you haven’t heard anything. Persistence is a rare quality that I value. If you really want the job (or anything) persistence always pays off.

Bonus points

Knowing more than your role

It’s great when candidates are knowledgeable about the full machine they work within, not just their part. It doesn’t matter if you are a marketer or a designer, you should know the some high level stuff about your current company like number of employees, revenue, users, etc.

Having clear stories

Having a clear story about how you made an impact at your current role or in a previous role is very helpful. Numbers are good too. Know a few!

Overall

I want to hire the smartest, most passionate, curious people that I can find. Everything you do and say should be aimed at encouraging me to think that you are one of these people.