Handwrytten · robot-written handwritten notes
Buy weaker competitors and move their clients onto your platform
What they did
In their words
Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M
… Those are the two. They're both spending, it looks like a fortune on paid ads, right? Simply Noted is here. Letter Labs has funded. They do. Yeah. The guy over there worked for the Boring, not the Boring Company, the Hyper, the tube train. Hyperloop. Hyperloop. And some of those guys were ex-SpaceX, so they had money. So it's like, I think it's like a friends and family round. What's your guess on what their revenue is? Fix, if I had a guess.
Yeah. Interesting. And what do you think the other one is that you mentioned? What is it? Simply noted? Two. Interesting. So even if you had a limited money- The only way I'm saying that is I'm very familiar with Simply Noted. They've been around a long time, 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. and we would just keep building our existing platform, basically. And 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 OPEX, basically. This is real sort of inventory you're holding on your balance sheet, probably millions of dollars worth of equipment. You 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 …
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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
- Lease your robots to shipping partners for ~$1,000-1,250 a month each~30 robots leased; good margin but small revenue so far
- 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
Tags: roll-up, acquire-competitors, customer-migration