Handwrytten · robot-written handwritten notes
Lease your robots to shipping partners for ~$1,000-1,250 a month each
~30 robots leased; good margin but small revenue so far
What they did
What happened
In their words
Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M
… revenue, or the company name Revenue. The CEO like you sees and says, wait, I need to go on Nathan's show to do the real data, tell the real story. So I appreciate you coming on. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah, no, it's interesting. Okay. Wrap us up with the giant machine leases. Is that meaningful part of your 10 million revenue? Not 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 um in tempe that has about 15 robots so why would they want the robots why not just pay you to do it all for them? They're 3PL facilities. So they're doing what you like gifting.
… 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 I would say this makeup was designed specifically for Nathan. You know what I 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 lease to the right cost and footprint.
We've got some ideas on the footprint, the cost we're trying to keep rather high. But yeah, I mean, putting these robots in three PLs is kind of a big opportunity for us. Very interesting. All right, time to wrap up. Anything I missed that you want to talk about? No, I just hope I didn't wander too much, man. I thought it was fantastic. I mean, I lost, I just realized we went way over on time, so I apologize for that. But guys, wrapping up here, again, here with David Wax, he sold Sell It for eight figures, owned 75% of that back in the early 2000s. In 2014, launched the app for Handwritten with a Y.
2018, broke a call at a million of revenue. 2019, 2.4 million. Fast forward to last year, 2025, did 9 million of revenue, about 350K of profits. And now here in April of 2026, he's going to send 350,000 notes across 400 active customers. I mean, pretty wild amount of notes that he's sending. Also leasing out these machines that write these handwritten notes to a couple of providers as well, experimenting with a new business model. But he's doing …
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More from this episode
- Hire one in-house writer to blog on searches like 'good luck messages'~40K search clicks a month, but few become paid accounts
- Run Google search ads when most customers are worth very little$5 per click vs ~$0.20 margin from a typical small sender
- Start paid social ads after lots of organic posting
- Let customers trigger notes from their CRM, Shopify or ClaudeMost volume comes through automations; apps send only ~30-40 notes/day
- Let customers add gift cards or cookies to each note
- Stay bootstrapped and US-only instead of raising money to expandProfitable (~$350K in 2025) but growth hampered; revenue dipped
- Buy weaker competitors and move their clients onto your platform
Tags: hardware-leasing, new-revenue-line, 3pl, gifting