NFL Player to Hand Written Notes with Rick Elmore

OUR Guest this Week: Rick Elmore  

*We apologize for the sound quality with this weeks guest*

You know that split-second reaction when you spot a handwritten envelope in a pile of junk mail and bills? We’re chasing that moment of attention and what it means for modern marketing with Rick Elmore, former NFL defensive end and the founder and CEO of Simply Noted.

Rick walks us through the real economics of the NFL, why “not for long” is more than a joke, and how an identity crisis after football pushed him into sales, an MBA, and eventually entrepreneurship. The turning point is surprisingly simple: handwritten notes get opened, remembered, and trusted, but almost nobody has the time to write them at scale. So Rick tested the idea, proved the response, then built the infrastructure to make it real, including custom handwriting robots that put actual pen on paper.

We also get practical about scaling a self-funded business: production capacity, engineering costs, and the painful lesson that what gets you to a few million in revenue will not get you to the next level. Then we go full modern with direct mail tracking, QR code attribution, and Rick’s bullish take on AI for small business, including how he runs AI SDRs to book meetings. The big takeaway: as AI increases distance, relationship marketing and trust signals like handwritten mail become even more valuable.

Subscribe for more conversations like this, share the show with a friend who builds relationships for a living, and leave a review if you want more founder deep-dives. What’s one person you should send a handwritten note to this week?

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Welcome to The Brad Weisman Show, where we dive into the world of real people, real life, and everything in between with your host, Brad Weisman! 🎙️ Join us for candid conversations, laughter, and a fresh take on the real world. Get ready to explore the ups and downs of life with a side of humor. From property to personality, we've got it all covered. Tune in, laugh along, and let's get real! 🏡🌟 #TheBradWeismanShow #RealPeopleRealLife 

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Transcript

Welcome And Guest Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:29

This is gonna be a good one, Hugo. The Brad Wiseman Show. Real people, real life, and everything in between. So, what do your kids think of this?

SPEAKER_00 0:38

Oh, they have to.

Childhood Loss And Football Drive

SPEAKER_02 0:40

In order to be unstoppable, you simply don't give up. You get knocked down, you get back up again. Where curiosity opens the door to genuine connection. Men really struggle with their emotions. They really struggle with even understanding what's going on. Unfiltered conversations with the people shaping our world. What kind of show is this? There's red quilted leather all over the walls. There's a swing hanging from the ceiling. I don't sweat you. And now your host, Brad Wiseman. All right. We're back. Hugo. Hey. How you doing, buddy? I'm good. I'm ready for spring. Did you forget your microphone there for a second? You're ready for spring. So am I, man. I'll tell you what. This weather, you know, we're getting these little teasers now, you know, that come in and out. And but yeah, summer's on the way, man. Spring is gonna be in full bore here, and summer's on the way. But we got another good guest. Yeah. I'm not even sure how I found him. I think we kind of found each other maybe on Instagram or something like that. Typical for the social media and stuff like that, how we find each other. And it was it's an interesting one. The guy was an NFL uh football player and then ended up starting a business and it's called Simply Noted. And he's the founder and CEO of Simply Noted. And it's it's really interesting. It's handwritten mail. So yeah, so we're gonna talk to him. His name is Rick Elmore. Rick, are you there? I'm here. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, though. Thanks for being here. I don't remember how we found each other on social media, but we did. And I'm glad we did. I read your your information. And the thing that really got me was that you have a company called Slim Simply Noted, and it's a handwritten notes that you do. And we're gonna dig into that because it's pretty amazing. I saw pictures of the machinery that you that you've invented or founded. And uh, but then I looked a little deeper and it and it I found out you were an NFL football player. So why don't you start with the story of that? How you went from being an NFL player to to getting into this company, which is completely different than being a football player.

SPEAKER_01 2:46

Sure. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Um, if you had told me when I was 10 years old I was gonna be running a robotics and engineering and software automation business, I would have told you you're crazy. Just going all the way back to the beginning to the Genesis. You know, when I was seven years old, I had my childhood trauma. My father passed away. And my mom, what she did to kind of like, you know, help us through that was kept us busy in sports. And I played all the sports growing up, but what I did is I fell in love with football. We could, you know, I was a bigger kid. I'm six foot five. Wow. I was always taller and bigger than most of the kids, but I always joked that I fell in love with football because I could hit people and not get in trouble. So like you could take out that like inner anger. You know, kids don't kids don't know how to process their emotions, right? Most adults don't know how to deal with their emotions. But I found out, I remember when I was a freshman in high school, I set the California record for sacks at the time. It was like 26 or 27 sacks in a single season. And I thought I was just doing my job. You know, I felt like I was doing a good job. But my shit, we were at the awards assembly, my shit coach comes over and he like shakes me. He's like, Rick, like, you have no idea what you just did. Like I was getting all these awards from like all like the state and stuff. He's like, This is phenomenal. Like, you gotta focus on this, you gotta go with it. So it's like at like 15 years old, I was like, hey, maybe I have something here. Oh wow. And from that moment on, I really just dedicated myself to the sport of football and had a really good call a high school career, got a football scholarship to the University of Arizona. I was a three-year starter for Mike Stoops back at in 2007 or 8, 9, and 10. And then was drafted to the NFL. Had the typical NFL career. You know, most people think if you go to the NFL, like you make all this money, like 1% of the guys who go actually play through an entire contract. And most people don't know this. The NFL is the only professional sport where the money is not guaranteed. You may get like a signing bonus that's guaranteed, but the NBA, the MLB, if you sign a contract, like most of it's guaranteed. NFL, you only make the money to that day. And I remember when I was on the Cleveland Bradford.

SPEAKER_02 4:50

So it's like a paycheck, you're saying, then is what it's like. So you're gonna get paycheck.

The NFL Pay Reality Check

SPEAKER_01 4:54

It's rented labor. You're just rented labor. It's it's modern day gladiator. You know, they pay you for the performance, and then if you're there next week, you get paid again. If you're not, you don't get paid. And yeah, so it was just wild. But had the typical three-year NFL career. The NFL stands for not for long for a reason, right? You know, most people guys get in and out. There's younger, healthier, cheaper talent coming in every single year. And that's when I ran into like my I guess I adult identity crisis. For the first time, I wasn't Rick Elmer, the football player. You know, for over the a decade and a half, you know, I was like Rick, the good football player. Like everybody always wanted to talk to me about the game or the team or whatever. And like now they're like, what are you gonna do? I was just like, you know, like freaking out. And you know, what I was always good at though, at like on an individual level, I was always driven to be successful, whatever I was doing. I wasn't motivated, I was driven, and there and it's very different. Yeah, motivation is fleeting, it's it's high energy, peaks and valleys. Being driven, you show up even when you don't want to do it. And I've always had that personality towards exercising, working out. And then when I had to do it for something else, it was the same thing. I just took everything that made me successful as an athlete and transferred it over. And I was lucky because most people don't get to start working on those interpersonal personal skills until they're like 21. I was working on them when I was seven, you know, competing, you know, working hard, dealing with failure, you know, all the stuff you you, you know, all the growth you get from sports, use sports, right? Yeah, but I just got into corporate medical sales, top one percent or top five sales rep for the first five years. I just I knew that's I was there was something else out there for me. And I went back and did my MBA, and this is where my life changed. Yeah, I was typical horrible student. I wanted to be outside, grew up in California, I wanted to skateboard, play sports, you know, go do things outside. But what I found out was when I went back to my MBA, I was fascinated with business. I wanted to know how business worked. I want to know how you started a business, what and what was all I did was sales, you know, like when I was in corporate, they didn't teach anything, they just said go out and make us money. So when I went back into MBA, you know, I fell in love with learning, and that's really important to your personal growth and like everything that you do in your career, and and and of course being an entrepreneur. But I was a year into my program when I was in a marketing class, and this is where the idea of simply noted came. I had a marketing professor, and these were three and a half hour long classes. I took two classes every Wednesday for two years. I know seven hours every Wednesday. So we got there at like 2:30, we left at like 10:30. And we had a break in the middle. And exhausted, this marketing professor was, you know, talking, no one's paying attention, most likely, right? It's late. And he's going through like email, direct mail, cold calling, you know, all the traditional ads, all the traditional marketing stuff. And he ends this lecture saying something that you know just made sense to me. He says, Hey guys, you know what works better now, if not better than ever, is a good old-fashioned handwritten note. They get open 99% of the time, they're rare. No one's like looking at the mailbox anymore. Yeah. And I was just like, Yeah, that's a no-brainer. But who has the time to sit down and send a handwritten note? So true. It took me two weekends to we I used to send printed holiday cards to my clients. Took me and my wife two weekends to just handwrite the address on a white envelope and put a print card in it. Yeah, I was like, how are you gonna send hundreds or thousands of these? And just got to Googling. You know, there was a company doing handwritten notes for weddings. I was like, that's a horrible industry. Like one-time clients, bridezilla's tight budgets, like it's not a business play. Definitely bridezilla's. Yeah. Oh gosh. Anybody who's been married gets it, right? It's all right.

SPEAKER_02 8:52

You know it, the card's never gonna be right. It's never gonna be right.

SPEAKER_01 8:55

Yeah, yeah. And it's like, uh, so I was just like, you know what? If I can test this for a business, I'm sure there's a use case. So I got a pen plotter out of China. I started Googling handwriting robot, you know, handwritten mail business, and was trying to like do some reverse engineering. Like, what are people doing? Looking at pictures, and I saw these pen plotters by Axydraw. And I was like, hey, like, I'll try it. I got it, and I had no clue what I was doing. I had to deal with Python, I had to do like deal with software integrations, Inkscape, all these things. And I didn't know how to do it. I just would talk to people. Like, I wasn't a software guy, like I would talk to somebody who knew a software guy, and I'd be like, Hey, I'm trying to do this. Can you help me? So I got help. I didn't do this on my own, like I got help. Yeah, but I got this pen plotter to write out 500 handwritten notes in just about a month. What's it a pen plotter?

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Just I just so I it's a three access, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:47

So a pen plotter is basically, I mean, I can go grab one.

SPEAKER_02 9:51

I I have my bone yard of like old tech but it's an old so it's something you order and it has a you put a pen in it.

SPEAKER_01 9:58

Yeah, so it's basically this machine, so it has like a like a XYZ axis so it can move back and forth, left and right and up and down. Yeah, and you would place a pen pen uh pen on it, and then it sends like G code instruction to the machine to move it and write like handwriting.

SPEAKER_02 10:12

Oh wow.

From Identity Crisis To MBA Focus

SPEAKER_01 10:13

So it requires like Python, it requires Inkscape plugin, it requires like all this stuff to make it work. Yeah, and like that was my first hurdle just to figure that out. Yeah, but I sent out 500 handwritten notes that were written very badly on this AxieDraw Pen Plotter, and the response rate was amazing. For the first time, I had like my clients call me back, I had a$50,000 a month quota, and in the first six weeks, I sold just under$300,000 in sales. My whole business was going nuts, you know, made the most money I've ever made, you know, in a sales job at that time. And that was when I had the entrepreneurial seizure. I was like, you know what? There was a light bulb moment. I researched it, I tested it, I proved it out. There, this is a business. I just got to run with it. And fast forward eight, eight years, we've we've gone, I would say we're not even in the same universe anymore. If there's a multiverse, like if you believe in multiverse, we're in a completely different universe when it comes to technology. We've completely engineered our own robot. When I say we, I mean our engineers, our software developers. I just project manage, you know. Um, I I call myself like a I have like a PhD in problem solving. I don't solve the problems, I just find the people who help me solve the problems. Sure, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 11:26

And I think well, you leverage you leverage what you don't know. You you what you don't know how to do. You look at that, you look at it from up here and go, okay, this needs help, or this needs I need to do something here. And then you find the people that that are the best at doing that. But I did see on your videos the machines that you have that do this stuff, and it and so you actually you guys create you and your team created these things, these are not something you just went out and bought.

SPEAKER_01 11:51

Nine patents. We've yet we've tried to patent them mechanically, but that we just keep getting denied. The real secret sauce is in the like the software, um, because that's what makes it looks real, and that you know that's what makes it scalable within our system. Um, that's the hard thing, is making this scalable. You know, when you're servicing thousands of clients and they're putting in thousands of orders a day, trying to keep track of that with older technology is impossible. So we have scanners, we have cameras, we have automated mailing equipment, automated print production, like all this stuff that's had to be figured out in order to scale this business. This, you know, this it was a blessing and a curse to start this business as my first business because of everything I've had to learn.

SPEAKER_02 12:31

Um, this is definitely but it also seems very investment heavy. Like when you're inventing something, it's not like you can just go, oh, well, they have that. I'll just get it and I'll just tweak it a little bit and then we'll do it this way. You know, you're you're inventing when you're inventing something, you're creating something completely new. There's a lot of money that's because things fail. You know, you you might think that this is gonna work and it fails. And the next thing you know, you got you know 500 envelopes that were done the wrong way.

The Handwritten Note Lightbulb

SPEAKER_01 13:01

Yeah. Millions and millions of dollars have gone into the design, the engineering, the production, the maintenance, the scaling of this product. It's all customer funded. My background is sales and marketing. I'm a I'm incredibly obsessed with learning on how to scale a business. You know, we've invested a lot in SEO, a lot in PR, a lot in a product that is scalable. You know, in order to make or create like a, you know, I call it like a recipe for success. Um I always like to use analogies. Like you can't, you know, if you're gonna make, you know, a hundred cupcakes, you know, just like something that's gonna be scalable, you can't use, you know, a certain ingredient that's not gonna allow you to get to a hundred cupcakes, right? Like it's a recipe for success. Like so everything has had to scale together. So our productions had to scale together, our engineering, our ads, our sales team, our marketing team, like we've had to slowly scale together to grow together to become the business that we've become today. You're gonna find out really, you know, once you get to two or three million dollars in revenue, what got you here won't get you there. Yeah, and in order to keep scaling, like everything has to scale. Yeah, like the building, the building has to get bigger or the the you know, everything. Everything has to change. I mean everything. And it's like, and then you have to like your problem solving goes from so like micro focused to okay, now I have so many other problems I gotta scale and figure out together, but you still gotta like figure them out independently. Yeah, I I like to compartmentalize, you know, like I I dress them on different days, you know, I have like marketing Mondays, I have sales Tuesdays, you know. I like to like really focus, you know. Yeah, but yeah, it's it's really interesting scaling a business. I'm absolutely like passionate with about it because it's like the ultimate puzzle. Like it's like absolutely there's always a problem to work on, so it keeps you really engaged.

SPEAKER_02 14:49

Well, yeah, because otherwise it would get boring. And I think that's an entrepreneurial thing, is we we we don't have entrepreneurs definitely don't exist well with monotonous. So if something is very monotonous, the same thing over and over. It's why I've been in real estate for 30, 33 years now, because it's never the same thing twice. I mean, everybody thinks, oh, you're selling a house or you're doing this. No, every day is completely different. You know, it's a different person, it's a different house, different problems, different inspections, different whatever. So I get it, and I think that's really cool. So let's go back to the machines. So now you have these machines, and you said how many can you do at one time? You were telling me before we recorded.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

We just we have 220 custom-built handwriting robots. Our engineering team's here in Gilbert, Arizona. They're about 10 miles away from our office. So we just scale as we need to. Yeah, each robot, you know, can do anywhere from like 400 to a thousand letters a day. It just really depends on the length of the letter. So like basically start geeking out and like nerding out with like all the specifics because they're literally dragging a pen as it writes every character. So, you know, we have the vol the capabilities of writing, you know, a million pieces a month. You we don't do that, you know, it's such a niche product, but like what we had to do is scale production to get ready for those big influxes of orders because we do have clients who will place hundreds of thousands, you know, then it shoots down our production for 10 days, you know. So we had to scale our production, even though you know we don't always use a hundred percent of our capacity, if that makes sense, because we had to be ready. You know what's interesting too?

SPEAKER_02 16:28

I saw yours on online and I saw like the the more the intricate yeah, intricacies of it. And I've seen people that other businesses like yours that have tried to do what you're doing, and basically all it is is it's just it's handwritten, but it's printed. You know what I mean? Like laser bars, yeah, yeah. It's yeah, and and it doesn't look the same. Well, you're actually putting a ballpoint pen or whatever it is to paper by a with a robot.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

100%. Everything we do is real penwritten. We don't use any what do you call it, branding. No one will ever know you used it. But we're also very tech like forward, like tech forward focused product. Like we track a handwritten note to the mailbox, never been done before. We track QR code scans on the envelope or on the card. So if you put a QR code on the handwritten note, we could actually show you who scanned it. So imagine, like, you're like a land investor and you send out 10,000 pieces and you see 400 people scan that QR code. Now you have data, you know, you can set up like a notification to email them, update a spreadsheet and have your team call them. Speed delete now becomes you know, the attribution for your handwritten mail is now trackable. That wasn't done, like no one could do this stuff. And we that was part of the reason of building our own handwriting robots. We had to like improve and become like the objectively better technology, so we didn't have to do what everybody else does, just sells on price. Yeah, you know, how you win business is how you lose business. And simply note it as a tech-focused business that's constantly invests to push the product forward, and we're so it's just hard for other people to keep up because they just invest in sales and marketing, and we're constantly investing in the technology, right? So the bigger, more professional brands will want to work with us because we just have features other other competitors don't have, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

No, it totally makes sense. I get it. And there was something I was thinking here, I wanted to say now I've just lost my uh train of thought. But uh yeah, with with that, what is your top business? Like what what I mean by my top five maybe, but what businesses use you the most? I mean, I'm a realtor, so do you get a lot of realtors using you?

Engineering Robots And Scaling Production

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Tons, yeah. Yeah, so we have like a self-service platform. You know, if you're gonna send like onesie twosie or a hundred or two hundred, we try to like show you how to use the website, but you know, it's very seasonal. Like right now, we're going into the spring. A lot of real estate like investors are like using us to go like pepper the neighborhoods and say, Hey, spring cleaning, if you want to sell your house, you know, they're trying to like farm off market deals. A lot of land investors, political, nonprofit, home service is big right now, landscaping, yeah. Yeah, just big, like service-based businesses, you know, and then like there's I mean, there's tons, and that's been the hard thing about scaling this product, is so many people, so many different industries use us. And being a self-funded business, it's like we don't have the time or the money to sit there and just like scale up in one area. We have to work with anybody who wants to work with us. So, yeah, it's been a growing a tech robotics engineering business self-funded in mail, which is a tight margin, you know, it's not like we're getting tens of thousands of dollars in profit. It's been incredibly hard.

SPEAKER_02 19:38

Now, do you guys actually and you send it out too? It's not like you're sending it to somebody and then they have to send it out. You you you're like one-stop shop. So you go into your website, or if you're doing larger products, you probably contact you directly or whatever. But you you go in there and you create the hundred pieces, and then you guys mail it. It goes out to the mail, it goes out with that QR code and everything that you're talking about.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

We do everything here. I mean, it's we have a 12,000 square foot facility, full print shop, full mail shop, full engineering, all production, all robots. I mean, everything's here. Um it's just wild.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

Where do you see it going next? Do you think it's in now with AI? Uh, you do you see the do you see these cards being written by AI? Are you doing that already? Or you know, is there any AI that's in your business?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

So we do have. So I actually like talk and consult on AI. I'm very like bullish on AI. I'm really I think it's there's a tsunami coming. There's 30 million small businesses in the United States, and none of them are ready, 0%. And it's the businesses that can adapt, evolve, and implement AI are the ones that are going to continue to flourish. I mean, on my life, I I mean, I completely I'm sold on it. We're using AI in our business. We have a Mac mini that runs three SDRs, all it does is outbound and book a meeting for our sales team. But anything that's on a computer and AI can do better. It just takes like the person to orchestrate and build it and engineer it in a way that's most beneficial for that business. And there's opportunity there too, you know, to go in and talk to businesses and say, hey, what's your biggest like thorn in your side? You know, what's the biggest problem you're having? And then set up some type of AI agent to help you solve that problem. You know, I have SDRs that cost 60 grand a year. Now I'm running three of them on a Mac mini that I had in my my office that run on nine dollars of electricity. We have local large language models that are doing all the heavy lifting. You know, every once in a while we have to, you know, ping anthropic or or Chad GBT and use some like API tokens, but like the cost of running three SDRs is gonna be less than a hundred bucks a month versus you know$180,000 a year.

SPEAKER_02 21:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 21:45

Think about that. Yeah, it's crazy. That scale. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I'll I'll share some more stuff off of yeah. But that's crazy. Crazy, crazy. There's a lot to go into this.

SPEAKER_02 21:56

It's amazing. So so basically everybody's using this, this, this product or using your your materials because it's it's it's it's it's still the handwritten note, all obviously is gonna even become more important, I think, as AI becomes more involved because people still want to see a handwritten note. And it is funny. Whenever I go through my mail, if I see something that's like handwritten, it's the first thing you open. You know, the other stuff kind of just goes aside.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

It's just so funny. It's like I've I've been doing this for eight years, I've been on hundreds of podcasts, and it's the same thing that's said every time what you just said. Like you go through the mail, you look at all the junk, you look at all the postcards, right? It but you see the handwritten letter. And you're just so intrigued. Yeah. You're like, who is that? Why'd they send it to me? And it's like, imagine doing that in your business like at scale, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:49

Yeah.

Tracking Notes With QR Data

SPEAKER_01 22:50

Like people, you know, will work with who they know, like, and trust, right? What's a way to get someone to know, like, and trust you, right? You can spend time with them, but that's not scalable. You can call them, that's not scalable. You know, but you can also send them a handwritten note in perceptions reality. They're gonna think that you gave them time, which you didn't, right? And then it's gonna put you in a category of trust versus someone who just emails them, right? So, like handwritten mail, I think it's just a secret weapon. You know, I'm 38. I think my generation going forward will always have nostalgia towards the mailbox and they're gonna appreciate it. And the human-to-human, like human in the loop in business, is gonna be around, I think, for 30 years. But I think our kids, my kids at least, they're six and eight. I think they're gonna grow up in a completely different world. But I think we're safe. But it's really important to invest in those relationships as AI is coming. It's gonna transform businesses and people will still want to work with who they know, like, and trust. But it's up to you to make sure that you are making that investment in your relationships. Yeah, it's just how are you doing it?

SPEAKER_02 23:58

And with AI becoming more and more relevant or in our lives, it becomes harder to know, like, and trust because we become more distant. So that's what's cool about the the written, the written note is something that will make you want to go, oh, well, who's this? You know, and then you start reading it or whatever. The other thing I want I was thinking about here was with the AI thing. So you're saying when somebody goes onto the computer, do you suggest that they write their own note, right? Not have AI do it. You're suggesting that we write our own stuff.

AI SDRs And Future Proofing

SPEAKER_01 24:30

You can use a large language model, you know. I think there's a time and place to put your own message. You know, if you're gonna send like a message to your best friend and it's gonna be like completely heartfelt, you know, but maybe you write it yourself. But I don't know. I'm very business focused. I like to be professional, I like to make sure that it's reading the right way. Yeah, you know, how I talk sometimes may be too direct, you know, and I don't want it to come across too direct. So I have no problem using large language models to come up with copy that makes it read better. Yeah, you know, but you know, as a business, you know, like you have tools, right? It's up to you to use the tools that are available to you to help you execute better. And you know, what tools are you using that are helping you execute better? And then what tools are you using that you can learn more about that can help you execute at a higher level, right? Everything's evolving every single day. Everything. And if you think you knew something two years ago, I'm sorry, but you don't know it anymore. Like it's it's so far, so far forward that you you're you're behind. Yeah, and it's like in order to stay competitive and stay ahead, and I would say future-proof. I don't know if that if you can really do that in any business, but it gives you the best chance to future proof is to continue learning and uh be a lifelong learner and learn how to continue to use these tools to help you execute better more profitably.

SPEAKER_02 25:55

The the thing I I read in here too, which I really liked, and I is that you have the ability to have somebody you could do my handwriting. Yeah, yeah. So, like if I wanted because because you can actually do that. I know there's a cost to it. I I did see that there's a cost, but but if I wanted to have my handwriting on something, you could do that.

Custom Handwriting Options And Wrap

SPEAKER_01 26:16

Yeah, we're actually doing uh I can't say who, but like there's a company that they've been around for a hundred years. It's a CEO, and we're sending 125,000. This is like what makes it like it validates makes me like makes it validating, you know. When you when you're going a business like in the early days, like you you sit there and you're like, man, was this worth it? You know, but like the further you stick to something and you look back, you you realize how far you've come. And we're actually working with a a CEO of like a Fortune 100 company. It's a hundred to a hundred and twenty-five year anniversary. I don't know, but we converted his handwriting and he's sending out 125,000 notes. I mean, it's a large billion dollar global brand. I'm just like, that's cool. You know, you're having somebody come to us, yeah, and we're sending they're trusting us to send letters in that guy's handwriting, you know, and it's just like that's so cool. That is very cool. When I go to bed at night and I'm just like, see, that's what we're doing matters, you know, it makes a difference. Absolutely.

SPEAKER_00 27:17

So you have a question, Rick. I have a question. So you mentioned uh maybe two different formats. Is that do you do letters or notes, you know, like the thank you cards, or what type of papers or formats? I don't know if format is the right term, but what type of formats, let's call them, do you do you offer?

SPEAKER_01 27:36

So we're optimized for like the the note card, like this. It gets open the most. So like the five by seven, we're optimized for that, but we can write on anything. So we just like if you're gonna work with us and invest like a lot of money, we're like, we want to make sure you have success, right? Like we don't like, don't send a number 10 envelope, like it looks like a bill. Yeah, like send something that like it looks it looks more relational driven, right? It stands out and looks like a hallmark card size to it. Looks like a Hallmark card, right? Yeah, you know, you there's a lot of real estate inside that that envelope and on that card that you can do a lot with, you know, you can still make it a marketing piece, but make it look different. But yeah, we can write on anything. We can write postcards, we can do four by six, five by seven, and awesome, number 10, you know, envelopes, eight and a half by eleven letters. We can do anything. We just we've been doing it a long time. We know like what works.

SPEAKER_00 28:29

Yeah, that's cool. Awesome.

SPEAKER_02 28:30

That's very well, and and I think it it's uh it's a great business. It's a uh it's an awesome business. I think you guys are doing it at a really high level too. But uh, we're gonna wrap it up. Is there anything that you want else that maybe we didn't touch on that you would want to share or you know that uh we could talk about?

SPEAKER_00 28:46

But how do you find them? Yeah, how do we find it?

SPEAKER_02 28:49

You're pretty easy to find. Put your name in and you you show up everywhere. A lot of it has to do with football, but then there's also Simply Noted is is all over the place. So is that the best way, simply noted.com, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 29:00

Yeah, simply noted.com. Uh you can just request a sample. We you know, we we'll send you a big sample kit like this. Uh oh, cool. Yeah, we we spend like 20 or 30 bucks just getting you guys like all the the samples before you you even spend a dollar with us. Or just go to uh LinkedIn. Um that's my like number one social media tools, LinkedIn. I get spammed all the time, but if it looks like if it looks real enough, I'll respond. Yeah, right. But uh, if anybody has any questions, yeah, I'm I'm happy to help any way I can.

SPEAKER_02 29:29

Well, I love it, man. It's great. It's a very innovative thing, and I think it's actually something that's gonna last for a long time because the fur the more we get into AI, the more people want to see like real things, you know, they want to see something that's like a real written note. So it's very cool. And if you have handwriting like my handwriting, you will definitely just let you do the writing because my you won't be able to read my writing anyway. So it doesn't matter. All right, that's that's about it. Thanks a lot, Rick. I appreciate it. All right, if you are looking to do handwritten notes and you have writing that's like mine, you would want to talk to uh to Rick there at Simply Noted. He's the founder and CEO. It's such a cool business. And I think if uh if you want to look him up, you want to do some cards or do whatever for your business, check it out at simplynoted.com. It's the best way to get them. All right, that's about it. We'll see you next Thursday, 7 p.m. All righty.