He left millions of texts a day to send handwritten notes instead

David Wachs built an SMS platform that could send millions of messages a day. He had already spent years in marketing technology and helped pioneer mobile customer relationship management. Then he left that volume behind and founded Handwrytten, a company that uses robots to write notes in ink, on real paper, at a scale a human team could not keep up with.

That switch looks irrational if you score marketing by unit cost and send volume. It looks less strange once you sit with what those cheap channels have done to attention. Email is crowded. SMS is crowded. AI has made it cheap to produce a message that sounds almost human and is easy to delete. A card that arrives in the post still gets picked up.

Jo McKee sat down with David on The Jo Show to talk through handwritten marketing, direct mail, Shopify automation, customer experience, and the founder-level decision to change direction after you have already built something that works. If your email and SMS programs have started to look like everyone else’s, this episode is worth the time.

Why he walked away from millions of texts a day

David did not leave SMS because the channel failed. He left because he had already seen what happens when a channel becomes too easy. Once you can reach a customer in seconds, for cents, every brand in the category starts doing it. Frequency goes up. Distinctiveness goes down. The customer learns to skim, mute, and ignore. The metric still looks healthy. The memory does not.

That is a useful warning for any owner past the startup phase. Most of the advice you are getting still treats reach as the scarce resource. Reach is not scarce. A Shopify store, a local service business, and a consultancy can all fire off the same abandoned-cart sequence and the same review request by Friday. What is scarce is a reason for the customer to keep you in their head after the transaction is over.

David’s move was not a rejection of technology. Handwrytten is a technology company. The point was to put the tech behind a format people have not trained themselves to discard. If you run email and SMS already, keep them. Use them for the jobs they do well: reminders, receipts, time-sensitive offers. Stop asking them to carry the whole relationship.

Robots that write in ink on real paper

Handwrytten’s product is easy to misunderstand. It is not a printed font that pretends to be handwriting. The company uses robots to write on real paper, in ink, so the output has the variation and pressure of a pen. The note can go out in volume that a founder writing at the kitchen table cannot match, without collapsing back into a mail-merge letter that looks like it came off a laser printer.

For a time-poor owner, the hardware detail matters less than the operating model. You do not need a mailroom. You do not need to hire someone whose whole job is cards and stamps. You write the message, set the list or the trigger, and the physical object leaves without you standing over it. That is the same logic as an email platform, applied to a channel people still treat as personal.

Sceptics will say the recipient will know a robot wrote it. Some will. Plenty will not study the letterforms. They will register that something physical arrived, that it was not a catalogue, and that a person inside your business decided they were worth the cost of paper and postage. That is already more than most automated sequences manage.

What a handwritten note does that a text cannot

A text arrives inside a feed the customer already resents. It sits next to two-factor codes, delivery alerts, and three other brands asking for a review. An email arrives inside a feed they have trained themselves to process at speed. A note arrives in a different pile. It has weight. It takes a moment to open. That pause is the whole advantage.

David and Jo talked about handwritten direct mail as a way through email and SMS overload, not as a replacement for digital marketing. That distinction is the one most small businesses miss. Owners hear “direct mail” and picture a 10,000-piece unaddressed drop they cannot afford, or a postcard with a QR code and a discount code. A short note to a customer who already bought from you is a different job. It is retention and relationship work, done in a format that still feels scarce.

The content of the note has to earn the stamp. Generic gratitude is still generic when it is written in ink. Name what they bought. Name the milestone. Name the problem you fixed. If you cannot write two specific sentences about this person, you are not ready to send the note, and a cheaper channel will waste less money making the same mistake.

The piano tuner and a note that stayed

David told Jo a piano-tuner story about the lasting effect of handwritten gratitude. The plot is less useful than the mechanism. A small, specific thank you, written by hand, stayed with someone long after the invoice was forgotten. That is not magic. It is contrast. Most commercial communication is designed to be processed and cleared. A note asks to be kept.

Owners underestimate how long a physical object lives in a house or an office. Cards sit on benches. They get stuck on fridges. They sit in a drawer with other things the recipient did not want to throw out. Your email does not get that second life. Your SMS disappears under the next one. If you care about being remembered between purchases, the format that stays in the room has a job your inbox presence cannot do.

You do not need a piano tuner in your client base to use the same idea. After a difficult install, a custom order, a referral, or a complaint you made right, write the note while the details are still sharp. The delay is what kills these gestures. Three weeks later you will send nothing, or you will send a template that could have gone to anyone.

Shopify triggers after the moments that matter

One of the more practical stretches of the conversation was Shopify automation. A handwritten note does not have to wait for someone on your team to remember. A first order, a third order, a subscription anniversary, a high-value cart, or a win-back window can fire the send the same way those events already fire an email. The note is still written. The decision to send it is not left to a Friday afternoon when you finally clear your desk.

This is where a lot of service businesses and eCommerce brands should start, rather than with a cold list. You already have the customer. You already have the milestone. You already know the note will land in a house that has your product in it. Cold direct mail is a different budget and a different risk. Warm notes after a real event are closer to good account management than to advertising.

Set rules before you turn the trigger on. Decide who qualifies. Decide what you will never say. Decide how the message changes after order one versus order five. If every customer gets the same paragraph, you have rebuilt the problem you were trying to leave behind, only now you are paying for postage to do it. Automation should protect the specific sentence, not erase it.

Why the extra cost can be the point

A handwritten note costs more than a text. David did not treat that as a defect to apologise for. The cost is part of how the recipient reads the gesture. People are not naive about marketing. They know an SMS is cheap. They know an email is cheap. When something expensive enough to notice arrives with their name on it, they update their guess about how you see them.

That does not mean you should send notes to every browser who abandoned a $19 cart. Unit economics still apply. Use the dearer channel where the customer is worth keeping, where the margin can carry the postage, or where a single retained client covers a year of cards. A trade business with 80 good accounts can afford to write to all of them. A store with 8,000 one-off buyers cannot, and should not try.

If Handwrytten or any similar service is outside your budget this quarter, the principle still holds at a kitchen table. Ten notes a week, written by you, to the customers you cannot afford to lose, will teach you more than another webinar on subject lines. Do that for a month. Watch who replies. Then decide whether scale is the next problem, or whether you simply needed to start.

Phone calls and paper as acquisition tools

David also put phone calls next to handwritten notes as underrated ways to win customers. Both feel outdated to people who live inside ads managers. Both are empty enough, relative to inboxes, that a competent owner can still get through. Most of your competitors will not pick up the phone. Most will not write a card. That is not a branding insight. It is a labour insight. The work is uncomfortable, so it stays available.

Acquisition and retention get muddled here, so keep them separate in your own plan. A note to an existing customer is usually retention. A note or a call to a referred prospect, a lapsed high-value buyer, or a business you want to supply is acquisition. Do not send a stranger a matey card with no context and call it strategy. Give them a reason you are writing, a specific observation about their business, and a single next step that does not require them to decode your intent.

Measure these efforts on replies, booked conversations, second purchases, and referral behaviour. Open rates do not apply. If you need a dashboard to feel like the work happened, you will drift back to the channels that produce charts and very little memory. Paper and phone calls produce fewer rows and more people who can describe you to someone else.

Risk, hardware, and changing direction

The founder half of this episode is easy to skip if you only came for the marketing tactic. Do not. David went from a software-shaped business, sending digital messages at huge volume, to a company that has to deal with robots, paper, postage, and regulation. That is a different set of constraints. Hardware fails in ways a server restart will not fix. Rules around mail and commercial communication do not move at the speed of a SaaS changelog.

Owners who have already built one working model underestimate how hard it is to put that model down. The SMS business was not a hobby. Walking away from a channel you helped scale takes a kind of nerve that strategy decks never list. The useful question is not whether you should copy Handwrytten. It is whether you are still running a motion because it is right for the customer, or because it is the machine you already know how to operate.

If your current marketing only works when you turn the volume up, you already have the problem David left. You can keep the digital stack and still steal the part that matters: pick a small number of customers who are worth a slower, dearer, more specific gesture, and do that gesture on purpose. The robot is optional. The decision to stop blending into the inbox is not.

About David Wachs
David Wachs spent years in marketing technology, helped pioneer mobile customer relationship management, and built an SMS platform capable of sending millions of messages every day. He later founded Handwrytten, a company that uses robots to write handwritten notes on real paper at scale.

Website: https://www.handwrytten.com/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidwachs/

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