Serve people in prison through the prison email system they already use

Jordan Rejaud… guy I was working with, I was producing a mobile app for him and we were having a meeting to finish up the project. It was near completion, and I go onto the Zoom call and I get there and his girlfriend, who I wasn't expecting, was there and she was really upset. And she just told me he got sent to prison, and that kind of just sort of shocked me a lot. One day he's here and you're talking and you're working with him and the next day he's gone.

Jordan RejaudSo I kept in touch with him for a couple of years, you know, paper letters, very high tech. Eventually, he told me how a lot of the services in prison are just a massive scam. It offers not very good quality services at a very high price. So I figured I could do something better, and lots of people who use uh my product agree.

Pat WallsOkay, I mean that's a crazy story. Usually, people just find ideas from, you know, some AI thing that they want to help do. But you built something in the prison industry, which is just wild. So, you come up with this idea to improve the lives of people that are in prison. How did you validate this idea?

Jordan Rejaud… ChatGPT and other AI services so they can learn whatever they want. Mostly, they use it to learn about their own legal rights, and also there's a communication aspect where people use it to talk to their family. We've had a lot of messages from our users saying, "Oh, thank you, thanks to your system, I was able to talk to my daughter. I haven't been able to talk to her in years, and she sent me uh a hello message, and it means the world to me."

Jordan RejaudFrom the perspective of the users, it's the internal prison email system. They just email a specific email address, and our bot processes that information, and then sends them a reply. And so our app is actually a chatbot that people on the inside can use to talk to, and it will look up things on ChatGPT, it'll look up sports statistics. That is it. There is no app in the sense that you can go on the Play Store and download it.

Pat WallsThis is so cool. I don't know that much about the email system that they use, but you built around these limitations. I'm curious and what a lot of people will be wondering is like, how does an app like this make money? Or how do prisoners even pay for this since I'm assuming that's a little bit more complicated?