Fred Stutzman, Freedom

Built in 1 Hour Then Grew a Self-Serve SaaS to $1M ARR

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Episode Summary

Fred Stutzman built the first version of Freedom in about an hour. It was a simple tool that turned off his internet for 45 minutes so he could focus on his dissertation. A year later, with zero marketing, the self-serve SaaS had 500,000 downloads through pure word of mouth.

In this episode, Fred reveals how a coffee shop getting Wi-Fi destroyed his productivity, why he almost became a tenure-track professor instead of a founder, and how he turned a free tool into a self-serve SaaS doing over a million dollars a year at just $29 per user.

Fred Stutzman was a PhD student studying social media at UNC Chapel Hill. He was researching how college students used Facebook - and realized he was wasting a lot of time on it himself. His solution was working at a coffee shop with no Wi-Fi. Then the coffee shop installed a wireless node and his productivity tanked.

Being a software engineer, Fred built a simple tool in about an hour that turned off his internet for 45 minutes. He put it on his academic webpage, sent a tweet, and forgot about it. Within a year, over 500,000 people had downloaded it. He had done zero marketing. The self-serve SaaS grew entirely through word of mouth - writers told other writers, professionals shared it at dinner parties, and media outlets wrote about it without being asked.

When feature requests started arriving multiple times a day and people began offering to pay him for new features, Fred took a week off from graduate school. He built a more robust version, set up a website with a PayPal button, and started charging. The transition from free tool to paid self-serve SaaS happened gradually.

Fred eventually faced a choice between a tenure-track professor position and building Freedom full time. He chose entrepreneurship, joined a university accelerator, won a grant, and started hiring a team. The company bootstrapped for four years before raising outside capital.

By the time of this interview, Freedom had over 450,000 users across Mac, Windows, iOS, and Chrome. The self-serve SaaS charged $29 per year - low enough that a single focused work session paid for itself. The company had 8 employees and was generating over $1 million in annual revenue, with growth still driven primarily by word of mouth and organic media coverage.

Topics: Product-Led Growth|Bootstrapping

Key Insight

Freedom founder Fred Stutzman built a productivity tool in one hour as a PhD student, grew it to 500,000 users with zero marketing through pure word of mouth, and turned the self-serve SaaS into a $1M+ ARR business by charging $29/year to 450,000 users across all devices.

Key Ideas

Built the first version in about an hour - it only turned off the internet for 45 minutes
Grew to 500,000 downloads within a year with zero marketing spend or paid acquisition
Charged $29/year per user - low enough that one productive work session covers the annual cost
Bootstrapped for 4 years before raising any outside funding
Partnered with smaller free competitors as affiliate channels instead of treating them as threats

Key Lessons

🚀 A self-serve SaaS can reach 500K users with zero marketing: Freedom grew entirely through word of mouth because the product solved an obvious, universal problem. Writers told other writers, media covered it organically, and the product's utility was its only growth engine.
💰 Low self-serve SaaS pricing builds volume when unit costs are low: Freedom charges $29/year because all blocking runs locally on the user's device with no server costs. One focused work session covers the annual price, making the purchase decision effortless for customers.
🛠️ Solve your own problem first and a self-serve SaaS may follow: Fred built Freedom to stop wasting time on Facebook during his PhD. He shared it casually and 500,000 people downloaded it. The best product ideas come from scratching your own itch, not market research.
🤝 Turn competitors into affiliate partners for your self-serve SaaS: Freedom partnered with smaller free productivity tools that had users but no monetization. Those tools recommend Freedom's paid cross-platform product to their user base, creating a win-win acquisition channel.
🎯 Focus on one core persona and say no to everything else: Freedom could build enterprise features, parental controls, or team tools. Instead, the team focuses exclusively on knowledge workers who need 45 minutes of distraction-free time - and that focus keeps the product simple and the business growing.
🧠 Treat pricing as a journey, not a fixed decision: Fred A/B tested pricing, ran econometric models, and factored customer acquisition costs into the equation. As the product matures and adds functionality, pricing naturally increases to reflect the added value.

Chapters

00:00Introduction

02:32Fred's motivation - making a positive impact with software

04:08Why the company is called 80% Solutions

06:26What Freedom does - blocking distractions across all devices

09:10How the technology works under the hood

10:52Locked mode - making escape impossible

12:32Origin story - PhD student, Facebook researcher, coffee shop Wi-Fi

17:00From personal tool to product - 500K downloads in one year

19:12Zero marketing - pure word of mouth growth

20:16Decision to leave academia for entrepreneurship

23:57Team size and hiring marketers

24:12Marketing strategy - partnerships, content, and organic media

26:23Partnering with competitors through affiliate deals

28:12Dealing with copycats and competition

32:53Balancing simplicity vs feature requests

39:33Pricing at $29/year - building a million-dollar business on volume

44:17Lightning round

Episode Q&A

How did Fred Stutzman build Freedom as a self-serve SaaS in one hour?

Fred was a PhD student studying Facebook who needed to block his own internet to focus on his dissertation. He built a simple tool that turned off connectivity for 45 minutes, posted it on his academic webpage, and it spread virally to 500,000 users within a year.

How did Freedom grow to 500,000 users with zero marketing as a self-serve SaaS?

Writers told other writers. Professionals shared it at dinner parties. Media outlets covered it organically. Fred never spent money on paid search, Facebook ads, or traditional marketing - the product's utility drove pure word-of-mouth growth.

Why did Fred Stutzman price Freedom at $29 per year for his self-serve SaaS?

Fred ran A/B tests and econometric models on pricing. At $29/year, even one hour of focused work covers the cost. The low price brings high volume into the funnel, keeps infrastructure costs proportional since all blocking runs locally, and supports the self-serve model without needing a sales team.

How did Fred Stutzman decide to leave academia and build a self-serve SaaS full time?

Fred was interviewing for tenure-track positions at Carnegie Mellon but felt it was the wrong path. Looking at Freedom's growth data, he could forecast enough revenue to support his family. He joined a university accelerator, won a grant, hired a team, and committed to entrepreneurship.

How does Freedom partner with competitors instead of fighting them?

Fred identified smaller free productivity tools with users but no monetization. Freedom offers affiliate partnerships where those tools recommend Freedom's cross-platform paid product to their users - turning potential competitors into acquisition channels.

What is Freedom's self-serve SaaS growth strategy without paid advertising?

Organic media coverage, social sharing, partnerships with productivity tools, content about technology and attention, and a tweet-your-session feature that creates viral loops. Paid search and Facebook ads did not perform as well as organic and word-of-mouth channels.

How does Freedom handle the tension between simplicity and feature requests?

Fred focuses exclusively on one core persona - knowledge workers who need distraction-free focus time. The team says no to enterprise features, parental controls, and edge cases. Behind-the-scenes robustness improvements take priority over visible feature additions.

Why did Fred Stutzman bootstrap Freedom for four years before raising funding?

Fred wanted to prove the business model before taking capital. Bootstrapping forced focus on what mattered - a robust product, happy customers, and sustainable growth. Outside investors became interested only after the self-serve SaaS demonstrated consistent organic traction.

What advice does Fred Stutzman give about pricing a low-cost self-serve SaaS product?

Think of pricing as a journey, not a fixed decision. Start low to bring customers into the funnel, factor the discount into customer acquisition costs, test rigorously with A/B experiments, and increase prices as the product matures and opens access to new customer segments.

Book Recommendations

Crossing the Chasm

by Geoffrey A. Moore

Links

Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

Full Transcript

Omer (00:12.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their strategies and insights to help you build, launch, and grow your SaaS business.
This Week's interview is a story about a college student who was wasting too much time on Facebook.
He realized that he needed a solution to reduce the daily distractions and help him focus.
So he built a simple tool in a couple of hours which did the job.
He also shared the tool with a few people and it just took off from there.
A year later, with zero marketing, he had over half a million users just through word of mouth.
When he started getting multiple feature requests every day from users and people offering him money to add features, he knew he was onto a great business opportunity.
So he took a week to improve the product, set up a website with the PayPal button.
Today, his little tool has turned into a business doing over a million dollars a year.
Again, it's a great story, great interview.
I hope you enjoy it.
All right.
Today's guest is the co founder and CEO of 80% Solutions, the company which builds the innovative productivity software Freedom.
Freedom helps you to get more focused and improve your productivity by blocking access to websites, social media and apps.
The product is used by over 450,000 people and its users report gaining an average of 2 and a half hours of productive time each day.
Day Freedom was founded in 2011 and was bootstrapped for the first four years and the product has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, NPR, and many other publications.
Previously, my guest was a co founder of ClaimID.com and a technology researcher at UNC Chapel Hill and Carnegie Mellon University.
He holds a PhD in information science and is currently adjunct professor at UNC School of Information and Library SC where he teaches courses about privacy and social media.
So today I'd like to welcome Fred Stutzman.
Fred, welcome to the show.

Fred Stutzman (02:32.890)
Homer.
Thank you for having me.

Omer (02:34.730)
Now, I always like to break the ice by figuring out what drives my guests, what gets them out of bed.
So what is it for you?
What drives you to work on your business every day?

Fred Stutzman (02:45.530)
Well, it's a couple of things.
Certainly the team that I have working with me, you know, to know every day that you're going to be working with a bunch of great people, just as exciting and motivating and knowing that we are working together to make a positive impact on people's lives, you know, that is, you know, goal in and of itself of having this company and so, you know, just knowing that we are making that positive change in people's lives is absolutely motivating for me.

Omer (03:17.270)
Yeah, I love that there was a. I can't remember where I saw this, but somewhere I think it said that you'd helped your users reclaim like 10 million hours in the last year.
It's like, wow.

Fred Stutzman (03:29.790)
Absolutely.
Yeah.
It's pretty amazing when you start running the numbers at scale, the change of taking a little bit of time away from distractions to really focus, it absolutely adds up.
And we hear that just again and again from people.
So that is.
I mean, it really is motivating.
Like, you know, there's a lot of reasons to start businesses and there's a lot of reasons to develop software, but I've always been, and I know it's a complete cliche, but I've always been motivated to develop software that has positive change in people's lives.
And, you know, it will keep you going through the ups and downs of a startup.

Omer (04:08.310)
Now, before we talk about Freedom, the app, I want to talk about your company, 80% solutions.
So first question is, why is it called 80% instead of 100%?

Fred Stutzman (04:20.370)
Yeah, well, it's kind of the 8020 rule or the Pareto principle.
It's this kind of maxim that says a lot of outcomes are explained by a little amount of variance.
So what I noticed with Freedom when I was building the first versions of the software is you make a small change.
Turning off the Internet can have really, really big and positive profound impacts on people's lives.
And it isn't perfect.
If you ask people, how do you want to be productive?
They might give you a whole litany of, I want to turn off this, this, this, and this.
And I want to have software that does this for me.
What I really took from the very first version of our app, which really did nothing more than turn off the Internet for like 45 minutes, is that simple act.
Just had such this profound change and it wasn't 100% solution because there's a lot of people who had more complicated use cases there.
But if you gave people this pretty good solution, you could get really great results.
And I think that's kind of a pattern that we continue to build into our software, is that we can't be all things to all people.
But you take away or you put block or restrict the most important sites that are distracting to you.
Yes, there are other distracting sites out there or something along those lines, but you're going to have such a positive impact.
So it's those Little changes that we kind of build as a design pattern that have really big effects.
So that's where the name came from, and I've had to explain that to thousands of people.
So it's an esoteric name choice, maybe not the best one.
So entrepreneurs, it may be better to just be clear, but that's the logic behind it.
It.

Omer (06:08.940)
Yeah, well, I'm a big 8020 fan, so I, I, I, it, I kind of guessed fairly quickly that it was something to do with that, but I wanted to ask the question anyway.

Fred Stutzman (06:19.900)
Yeah, for the people who get it, it's like, you know, we, we immediately connect and.
Yeah, absolutely.

Omer (06:26.940)
So for people who aren't familiar with freedom, can you sort of give them a, a description of what the product does, how it works, and basically who are your target customers?

Fred Stutzman (06:41.260)
Sure, absolutely.
So we help people be more productive by blocking distractions.
And that's pretty much as simple as it gets.
We make a software product that works across all your devices.
So Mac, Windows, iOS, we have an Android partner, browser, extensions, all those things that you interact with on a daily basis from your sort of technology stack.
We make products that allow you to choose when you're going to be able to be distracted by that stuff.
And your distractions can be anything from social media to email to news to sports.
I mean, what have you.
Everybody's got a distraction.
Everybody's got something that is competing for their attention.
And we just make it super simple for you to turn that off when you want to focus.
And so our target customer are people who need to do focus work, which thankfully is like almost everybody.
But you know, we really go after people who are in the knowledge worker space, people who are creatives, students, professionals of all types, accountants, attorneys, lawyers, and anybody who realizes that their time is valuable.
And that's really what it boils down to because when you sit down at your computer to get stuff done, you've got all these things that are competing for your attention.
Everything from like notifications from Facebook to the endless stack of emails from your friends and coworkers.
And having all of that competing for your attention just makes you less productive.
It's scientific, it's validated.
We didn't do that research.
Other people did that research.
It's absolutely the case.
And so the more that you can kind of turn off the noise and, and not be able to go and check, having it turned off for you so that you're just going to be able to focus and think only about your work at hand is incredibly powerful.
That's what we do.
A couple years ago, people would say that's a crazy idea.
But I think as we just see where technology is evolving and see just how high fidelity distractions are and just how sort of constant they are, we make it easy for people to sort of get in that work state where there are no distractions.
And, you know, once you've done that and experienced it, it's just so powerful.
So that's what we do in a nutshell.

Omer (09:10.280)
So from a technical perspective, what's going on under the hood?
Like, can you kind of give us a brief description of that?

Fred Stutzman (09:17.560)
Yeah, it's not too different from a parental monitoring program that would be doing content filtering.
You, you would say, I don't want my kids to get on YouTube.
You're sort of saying, I don't want to get on YouTube.
Now the key difference between freedom and a parental monitoring program is you're turning it on for yourself versus you're turning it on for your kids.
And so what we do is we have some hooks that make it quite difficult for you to disable or escape for that.
When you make a commitment to being away from YouTube for 45 minutes or away from all distractions for 45 minutes, we make it very tough for you to escape that.
And of course, we have some options where you can run it, where you can escape.
So if you need to get back to your email, you can, but we allow people to kind of choose what level of restriction they want to have.
And so it's not different from that at all.
We do all the blocking locally on your computer or on your phone, so it doesn't go to the cloud.
There's no privacy implications.
We've tried to keep it real tight and secure, but really it's a content filter.
Not too much unlike any of the software that you would use to filter your kids.
Internet connectivity.

Omer (10:34.170)
Now, at the basic level, you can enable it for a certain amount of time and then if you need to get out of that, there's a way to get out of that if you need to.
But there's also a.
You also have a locked mode, right?
Maybe for people like me who need a little bit more discipline sometimes.

Fred Stutzman (10:52.780)
Absolutely.
So when you're setting up your schedules or you're turning on a session, you can choose how restrictive you want it to be.
Locked mode is very powerful, it's very popular and it is really tough.
If you turn a session on with locked mode, yeah, you are not going to escape.
You're going to be offline until the timer runs out, you're going to be locked away from Facebook or YouTube until the timer runs out and you can reboot your computer.
You can try and quit the software, but it's going to keep you on task.
This is for people who just don't want to even have to think about distractions.
They're going to be able to work completely at peace, knowing that, okay, that stuff is away, I can't even be tempted by it.
The software is taken care of for me.
So I'm just going to get work done.
And that's the purpose that serves.
I know.
I realize that's not for everybody.
So you can choose the strength of your session before you set it.
But once you've set it and your session has started, you're locked in.
You've made a commitment to yourself, and that's really powerful as well.
Being able to set up and make a commitment, I think it enhances productivity.
You don't want to let yourself down.
You want to hit that 30 minutes or an hour or two hours of time away from social.
So we help you do that.
But at the end of the two hours, you can feel really good about knowing that you took that time away.
The software helped, but you did the work and you got your work done.

Omer (12:32.960)
So where did the idea come from?
How did you come up with the idea for freedom?

Fred Stutzman (12:38.480)
So the origin story of freedom goes back to when I was in graduate school and I was studying social media.
My dissertation work, I studied information science and human computer interaction.
I was interested in how people use technology and the social impacts of technology.
And when I was in graduate school, it was the very early days of this piece of software called Facebook that nobody had heard about.
I was studying college students using it, and I would these numbers, you know, the utilization of the software, how much time they were spending on it, it was incredible.
It was a phenomenon kind of unlike anything we'd seen.
So studying the software, I started using it as graduate school, sort of continued.
Facebook got more popular.
And I was realizing, well, I'm able to sort of claim Facebook as research time, but really, I'm kind of wasting a lot of time here as well.
So I started going to a cafe to work, and the cafe didn't have wireless.
And this was before everybody's phone was like, lte.
Internet was everywhere.
So I was like, okay, this is great.
This is a great way for me to get work done.
I'm just away from connectivity.
I'm away from distractions.
And I got a lot of my dissertation work done that way.
Then one day that coffee shop opened up a WI fi node, and all of a sudden my productivity started tanking.
I basically said, well, if we're never going to be able to escape connectivity, then, you know, what can we do about this?
And being a, you know, a software engineer, I said, okay, well, maybe I can build some software to solve this problem.
And I built the first version of Freedom, you know, in about an hour.
And all it did was, you know, you pressed a button and it turned off your Internet for, I think it was 45 minutes.
And you were pretty much locked, you know, you locked away.
And I started using it and it made a pretty positive impact in my life.
And.
And, you know, I knew I knew how to escape it too.
But I found that, like, once I committed to being offline, I followed through and I got my work done and I said, wow, there's something really kind of powerful and positive going on here.
So I started, you know, I shared it with some people and it just kind of took off from there.
But yeah, I mean, it was just, literally just, you know, me in a coffee shop thinking about how, how do I solve this problem that I think is only going to become a bigger and bigger problem.
And, you know, here we are all these years later.

Omer (15:15.610)
Yeah, I mean, the wireless thing is awesome to be able to have that connectivity everywhere, but it's also a pain.
And, you know, I've been in situations and, you know, I'm not embarrassed to admit this, where I've gone to a coffee shop and I've spent 15 or 20 minutes trying to get connected to the Wi Fi and I wasn't even sure what I needed to be connected for, but I was like, I should be connected.

Fred Stutzman (15:41.140)
Right.

Omer (15:41.300)
And so the amount of time you waste just getting connected and then once you're there, obviously you're gonna start.
If you're not disciplined, it's very easy to stop looking at things that probably, you know, aren't relevant to what you're trying to do.
Right then.

Fred Stutzman (15:54.980)
Exactly.
And I mean, when you think about the.
The type of messages or kind of the obligation, the moment you get back online, you know, you're.
You're now connected and be.
You're reachable.
All these people who may be emailing you or sending you messages or, you know what, and it just puts you in this completely different state than when you're really offline.
You're really just, you know, it's just you and your work.
And I love that story about the spending 15 minutes trying to get connected because I have done that.
I've completely done that as well.
It's like, I mean, there's a WI fi here.
I should figure out how to get connected.
And then, like, you know, 10 minutes later, you're signing up for some coffee shop WI fi service.
Yeah, it's a colossal waste of time.

Omer (16:42.400)
So you built the first product, you said, in an hour, but it was you.
Presumably, you weren't thinking about a product at that time.
You were just thinking about something that would help you get the job done.
So at what point did it become a product for you?

Fred Stutzman (17:00.000)
Yeah, that was a couple of years.
Let's see.
Kind of how it worked is I made the first version.
I think I put it on my academic webpage.
I put a link to it.
I think I sent a tweet about it.
And it just kind of took off completely organically and virally from there.
I think within the first year, we had a half million.
I was able to look at my logs and figure out a half million people had downloaded the software and it had been written about.
And it was literally just this little app that I had made.
And I made lots of little apps.
So I wasn't thinking too much about it in terms of a product.
When the change.
When my thinking started changing around, it was when I would get feature request emails, and at first I would get one a week, and then it just kind of built until I'm getting multiple emails a day from people and people offering to pay me to make the software do this.
And I said, okay, this is getting kind of crazy.
So I need to either invest some time into this and see what I can do with it, or I don't know what.
So I actually talked with my graduate advisor.
At the time I was still in graduate school.
I said, hey, I've got this kind of thing going on.
What do you think about me just taking a week and building a more robust version of this and spending some time on that and seeing what I can do with that?
And he was okay with it.
He thought it was an interesting idea.
So it took a week.
I built, you know, some new versions of the product, create a website, and threw a PayPal link on there to take donations.
And very quickly that turned into a business where I was.
I said, okay, well, if I'm gonna start taking donations, and I'm gonna actually just start charging for the product, because at that point in time, people said, well, if you're taking donations, you should support it.
And okay, well, I'm just gonna.
I'm just gonna Charge for the product.
And so those more robust versions, I started selling those and they continued to grow organically.

Omer (19:12.490)
So you did no marketing?
It was just word of mouth?

Fred Stutzman (19:15.850)
No, I was completely word of mouth.
I never did any marketing in a traditional sense.
A little bit later, after the product had been out for A while, maybe 2012, I put like, at the end of your session, you could tweet about your session, which, you know, is ironic, but people would do it.
Maybe that helped a little bit.
But for the most part, the way this thing grew is people would tell each other about it at their dinner parties, you know, or they would read about it and somebody would, you know, we were popular with writers, so, you know, writers love to write.
So you would get written about and covered.
But we never did any.
I never did any, you know, marketing of a traditional sense now.

Omer (20:00.560)
So at what point did you sort of see this as a bigger opportunity and how did you sort of start building out that team that you talked about?

Fred Stutzman (20:16.320)
Part of it was just looking at the numbers.
So I was looking at not exponential growth, but really strong growth and, you know, could kind of could kind of forecast out and say, okay, well, and I had at that point had gotten a full time job.
I was either at.
I was at Carnegie Mellon as a postdoc, and that's a very intense job.
And I was doing faculty interviews for tenure track teaching positions.
So I had this kind of interesting.
I don't know if it was a crisis, but I had really enjoyed my time in academia and I really enjoyed being a researcher.
But I was not feeling like going on the tenure track was the right path for me.
Everything in my body was saying, this is not the right thing.
I tried it and I didn't like it.
So that created the sort of questions around, what next?
So am I going to join a large technology company and sort of do research in one of those companies or.
Or you know what?
Yeah, I had to do some soul searching.
And at the same point, I had this idea that I was pretty interested and excited about that was starting to take off.
And I had done a little bit of entrepreneurship before.
I had started one other company that we never really tried to monetize, but I'd been through that process before in terms of building out a company.
And I said, okay, well, the numbers kind of work that I will eventually be able to quit my job and support my family.
And I think there's a lot more we can do here because we're only addressing the tip of the iceberg of the problem.
Here.
And I had also kind of run out of my ramp as a software developer.
I'm okay, but professional software developers are a lot better than me.
So I said, well, with a team, with the right people on board, we could turn this into something pretty exciting.
And so that started the process in motion, where I did eventually decide to go on that route.
I quit my job and started working on the product full time.
I went into a.
Well, I went into an accelerator.
So the university and the town had just created this incubator accelerator to kind of help companies get started.
That was a huge move for me because I went in there really not knowing much about taking companies to the next level.
I was able to work with people who were able to help me with that and start building out the team.
And that was really the transition point where we put together the roadmap for the company.
We won a competitive grant to allow us to make a hire or two and then really start building out the vision for the product.
And from there, it was okay.
We start building it, we start seeing good things.
Investors started being interested in what we were doing.
And it's a little bit of a.
Thinking back to that time, it was a little bit of a blur.
But I was able to start growing the team and building out this product and to the eventual point of building a team, raising some money, and eventually launching the product in 2015.
The next generation of freedom.

Omer (23:57.790)
So what's the size of your team currently?

Fred Stutzman (24:01.310)
So there's eight of us who work on the product right now, and we're trying to hire two more.

Omer (24:06.750)
Have you started doing any marketing, or is it still growing organically for you?

Fred Stutzman (24:12.660)
Definitely, definitely.
So we have two great marketers on our team now, and how we think about marketing is still very much informed by how the company started and grew.
So organic media coverage, social is still a huge, huge driver for us.
But in terms of marketing, we think of a couple things.
One is partnerships.
Who can we partner with that makes sense for our customers and our funnel?
And so we've done a lot of work building partnerships with other productivity tools and even other tools that are direct competitors of ours who may not be monetizing their products.
We also just like to sort of validate through putting out good content.
You know, we see the vision of freedom as more than just, you know, let's turn things off.
It's, you know, we've got a voice and we've got some thoughts around, you know, how technology should be developed.
And so we certainly do a lot of our own content.
Production and you know, partner and support things like the time well spent movement that, you know, are pushing for more just and equitable and technology that respects, respects our attention and really respects people.
And you know, we do some, you know, we do our marketing tests in terms of, we do AB testing and funnel testing looking at how we can better engage with people who are customers who are in our funnel.
And a lot of that is just trying to get people to understand how to use the product and how to, how to best take advantage of the product.
But at this point we're not a big paid search or Facebook advertiser.
That stuff doesn't work as well for us as the organic and the word of mouth.
And so we certainly are using, that is all part of the marketing toolkit, but we're probably not using the standard

Omer (26:23.040)
how do you do a partnership with a direct competitor?
How does that work?

Fred Stutzman (26:30.290)
I mean it's interesting.
So our space is full of people and products that resemble what my company was five years ago.
So somebody who thought I'm going to solve this problem and I'm going to make a little piece of software and it gets popular and then all of a sudden this person is now supporting a large user base.
They're most likely not monetizing on it, but they still want to, they want to have positive outcomes whether it's making a little bit of money or developing a good piece of software.
So what we do is we'll go out and partner with them.
We'll say okay, and basically just do affiliate partnerships where you build your product out, make it great, make it wonderful.
How can we help?
How can we integrate and support you?
But we'd love, we think your customers would also like to see, oh, you've got a great Chrome plugin, but we can block on across all browsers.
We can block on your phone and tablet.
We've got more advanced functionality.
This is a great upsell for them.
So that's kind of how it works.
It's, it's almost like treating those competitors and I say competitors, we're not talking really one to one competitors.
These are small mom and pop apps that have been successful in a segment but they're not monetizing and they don't have the powerful features that our product has.
But their customers are a great fit for our product and so we will partnership and do affiliate deals with them.

Omer (28:12.450)
You said these aren't one to one sort of direct competitors.
But you also told me that initially you built the first version of the product in an hour for Yourself.
And I'm sure over the years, the product has got a lot more sophisticated and a lot more robust.
But how do you deal with sort of copycat products and people trying to come to market with something very similar?
Do you spend a lot of time looking at that and tracking what's going on, or is that just not something you'd spend a lot of time or energy on?

Fred Stutzman (28:56.400)
It's not something we spend a lot of time and energy on.
I think kind of going back to, like, some advice I got pretty early on in my entrepreneurial career, which is like, you know, you've got to just pick the things you want to focus on.
And.
And I know a lot of people who are getting started in entrepreneurship do focus on competitors and, you know, get really anxious about, you know, somebody's entered the space.
I guess I've been doing this long enough, and I've seen competitors to the point where I've seen competitors come and go.
I mean, I've seen people come and enter the market with, like, you know, a really robust technical vision.
And, you know, to make it work is it's easy to put on a pitch deck.
It is extremely hard to execute the technology behind the scenes.
We try and make it as easy as possible for our users, but the technology behind the scenes is even more complicated than I would like.
I mean, it is extremely complicated.
So, you know, if somebody did come in and, you know, and tried to replicate this, they would, you know, I would have to, you know, tip my hat to them.
They would just be kind of replicating work, but it would be a lot of work to do.
That being said, you know, we do keep an eye on who's out there, who's doing what, but our goal, you know, when we.
When we design our product and we think about, okay, what are the features we're going to roll in, what's our goal on the roadmap?
It's totally driven by our customers and making them happy.
And that's something that every day we hear from our customers, we do hear good feedback, but we also get the feedback of, here's what we need.
We've been able to boil that down into something that's pretty cohesive.
We focus entirely on that and know that if we hit that, if we make our customers happy, if we keep our satisfaction up, then we're going to be viable and sustainable.
And, you know, I mean, I think that's the risk of doing, you know, being in any businesses, there are going to be people who are going to compete in.
We I think we're lucky enough to be in a marketplace that is so potentially big that even if there were some really good competitors of ours, you know, the market would support it.
There's just so many people struggling with this problem that, you know, it would be great to be the only solution for them.
But, you know, it's, it's potentially rational to say having a few in the marketplace is a good thing because, you know, from the standpoint of a customer getting their needs met, but also for us to look and see, you know, what's working and what's not working.
And if we were the only person, you know, innovating or working in this space, that might, you know, that might be kind of hard and challenging.
So.
And you know, being in the space, the people who build, for the most part, I mean, there are some people who are just like straight up copycats trying to, I mean, they like even steal our copy from our homepage.
But like the people that are.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's interesting.
But the people who are trying to innovate in the space, we absolutely make a point of becoming friends with them.
Like, they are absolutely the people that we want to network with and, and engage with.
And if they have a competitive product, that is totally fine.
But we want to be around more people who are thinking about how to solve this problem.

Omer (32:18.440)
Yeah, I think some of the most successful entrepreneurs that I've met have this sort of growth mindset in terms of.
It's not like there's a fixed pie and if you take something, you're taking away from somebody else, but that the pie can continue to grow and there's plenty of opportunity there for their business as well as competitors, and that's completely fine with them.

Fred Stutzman (32:45.800)
Exactly.
And that's, I mean, we've, we've seen that, we've seen it in our data.
So, you know, I feel I'm very comfortable there.
Yeah.

Omer (32:53.000)
So one thing I'm curious about is it's clear from, from, from listening to you that you, you've strived to take a lot of complexity and really present it in a very simple way.
And you kind of made the comparison with parental control software.
And as a parent, I've gone through a long list of parental control software and there are so many issues I still haven't found something that actually works well.
And, and some of it is kind of around understanding the scenarios where I sometimes wonder, are the people who are building this product parents themselves?
Because they're not necessarily sort of thinking about that as deeply as I think it needs to be.
And in other cases, it's just the technology doesn't necessarily always do a great job with doing what it's supposed to do.
And you know, very simple example, with my kids, I have parental control software and I've used, you know, the Mac, the built in parental controls, I've used third party software and the other day I found my son playing Minecraft and I was like, I'm pretty sure that you've been on there a lot longer than you're supposed to.
And he had figured out that if he put the Minecraft app into full screen, the parental control software wasn't actually doing a good job at tracking what was going on.
So it was just letting him play like endlessly.
Yeah, yeah, so, so I think that, you know, I sort of look at that and say, okay, wow, they need to have this.
They need to have this to really make it.
First of all, make sure you do the basics well, if, if you, if you're blocking an app or you're blocking a website, make sure you're actually blocking it.
And if you're putting in time restrictions, make sure they work.
But then as I start to think about, well, here's what I need to be now I've got two kids to think about.
I need this scenario result.
And so I'm sure you also are in that situation where you're getting people who are discovering the product, they start using it and then you get a barrage of feature requests and, and, and the 100 things they really need in freedom for it to be the perfect product for them.
And as this becomes this, this tension between keeping focused on what really matters and driving towards simplicity versus turning it into a product with a gazillion features that really doesn't do anything one thing well.
So how do you deal with that?
And is that first of all, is that an issue for you as well in terms of people asking for more and more in there?
And if so, then how do you deal with that?

Fred Stutzman (35:41.900)
Absolutely.
I almost think you've been reading our customer support queue because it's very much like that.
I love the emails.
I mean, our product is not expensive.
A lot of parental programs are even arbitrarily expensive.
Our product, we try and keep it fairly low price and you get the emails from customers.
If you add these seven features, I will become a subscriber.
It's like, okay, well, but now we do get that quite a bit and we do take all the feedback to the point where we've Heard a lot of it over and over again.
How we think about it is it goes back to our core user.
So we're not a big company that can be all things to all people.
We know the limits of just our capacity.
What we focus on is addressing the core user, that knowledge worker who just needs to sit down at their computer and not be distracted by their phone and just get a couple hours of work done.
We focus in on that customer because there's lots of those customers and they're the ones that we know and choose to support and focus on.
A lot of our work is aligned around hitting that Persona and we know that there are lots of other types of customers that we could hit.
Yes, we could build an enterprise version.
Yes, we could make this for parents and parents do use our product.
But yeah, you also get the here's the 10 things I need kind of feedback from parents because I know how complicated that marketplace is and the solutions are.
Where it's kind of going with this is we.
The question about simplicity is interesting.
A lot of our work actually goes on behind the scenes in making the products more robust so you don't have to think about or run into the edge cases where it's not working or you've got a VPN on and it's getting around the software.
We try not to introduce too much complexity into the ui.
We just try and build the product so it can kind of handle everything for you.
And that, that gets us to a really robust place where I think, you know, if we hit those goals, having a very robust, you know, well, working product, then we can probably and potentially jump into other markets or start exploring other markets.
But, you know, we're a small team.
We know the limits of our size.
We, we know our core customer.
You know, we're not an enterprise company.
We are, we have no background.
I mean, a bunch of us are parents but like, I no way call myself an expert on the parental space, you know, and so we focus on what we're good at and you know, to a degree where, you know, when we do our roadmap meetings we say, is this moving us forward in the right direction?
You know, we have lots of ideas but we're just going to focus in kind of laser focused on getting that product done.
And it's always a work in progress because it's not just rolling in new features.
It's the fact that the operating systems are constantly changing underneath the software and the distractions are changing as well.
So it's a lot of work.
It's a lot of always hitting a moving target and it's very technically challenging, but that's, you know, we try and at the end of the day just say, okay, are we making that core customer happy?
And can we see, you know, meaningful improvement in their, you know, net promoter score?
You know, can we see meaningful improvement in their usage?
And that drives a lot of our decision around it.

Omer (39:33.800)
Yeah, I think that's really smart.
I mean, I, the number of times I've had a conversation with my wife where I've been moaning about parental control software and doesn't do this or this is, this sucks or whatever, and she said to me, well, why don't you go and build something better?
And then I'm.
Because I understand the technical complexity behind that.
I was like, no, no, you don't understand how complicated this is.
Like, I moan about it, but it's also a very difficult problem to go and solve, you know.
Now I want to talk about pricing.
Now you don't charge that much for freedom.
I think it's about what, 29 bucks a year for the product.
And at the same time you have built this into a seven figure business, which is awesome.
And I guess, like one question for you I have, is for people who are maybe listening to this, who've maybe been told, you know, you, you can't build a viable business business if you're only charging, you know, five bucks a month for a product and you know, you're doing even less than that, what would you say to them?
Like, how would you help them maybe think differently or see the opportunity differently?

Fred Stutzman (40:49.850)
Okay, so when we were thinking about how we were going to price our product and engage with customers, you know, we thought about what is the market going to look like.
So we were able to leverage the data that we had already and, and use that to make some good assumptions about what our funnel was going to look like.
Our pricing for most every user that we have, if you use freedom for an hour a year, if you use it for two hours a year, three hours a year, you're coming out in positive.
If you get a couple hours of good work done with Freedom, you've come out positive, you've made money on the deal.
So we know that you could possibly charge more.
But our goal is to bring lots of customers in the funnel, learn from them, support them, build a business with them.
So we wanted to keep our pricing really accessible and to a degree there's, it's also, we're not doing things that are so technically complex that allow us that Require us to have large infrastructure costs.
Like I said, kind of before all of our blocking is done on the computer, we're not passing stuff around the network.
So, you know, we also kind of built the business in a way that kept some costs low and we're able to pass that on to the, you know, that savings onto the customer.
But, you know, we, we tested, we ab tested pricing.
We did a lot of experiments sort of going into deciding what the final price was.
Ran various economic model or econometric models to sort of see what we think things are going to work out with.
And that's where we are now.
So it was a lot of data, but I mean, we're a pretty data intensive team and testing.
And then of course, just some gut.
We're like, okay, does this number look good?
Okay, it looks good.
All right, okay, fine, let's go with that.
So there's always going to be some of that, and it may be completely viable if, you know your customer, just roll with that.
And you've got to realize that as you mature your business, those price points are going to change.
But you really have to think about the price from a fully loaded standpoint.
Yeah, you may want to charge your customer $100 a month, but, you know, to get those first couple customers in, what would you be paying for customer acquisition anyway?
And then, you know, if the price is going to bring them in, you just factor that discount in into your customer acquisition costs.
And, you know, so, you know, we get people.
I think they really do kind of think of pricing as precious.
But, you know, the companies that I, that we, you know, mostly on the B2B side that we engage with and use.
Yeah.
They change their pricing yearly or, or sometimes even more than that.
Not that I like that.
But if they're doing a good job, if they're kind of hitting their goals, and if they have a good logic for why their pricing is going to increase, you can bring that pricing up.
And there's also a lot to support that.
When you bring the pricing up and you've got a robust product, you're going to open yourself up to a new customer base as well.
I think you think of pricing as a journey, not really as a fixed thing.
When you get started.

Omer (44:17.620)
All right, it's time for our lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven questions.
Just try to answer them as quickly as you can.
Are you ready?
Okay, let's go.
What's the best piece of business advice that you've ever received?

Fred Stutzman (44:32.740)
I think it was one of My advisors who said these things take a lot of time.
Startups just take longer than you ever think.

Omer (44:40.180)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

Fred Stutzman (44:43.600)
I'm sure it's been recommended before, but I am going to recommend Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Omer (44:49.520)
What's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

Fred Stutzman (44:55.200)
It's resilience.
It's just being able to roll with the punches, keep level head and focus on the things that matter every single day.
That's what it is.

Omer (45:04.320)
Okay, this is a tough question to ask you.
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

Fred Stutzman (45:13.470)
Well, let's just say habit, but it really is.
It is 45 minutes, just offline, away from distractions.
You do that a couple of times a day and you change your life.
And that was the first pattern of freedom.
And that is still the pattern that works for me.
It may work differently for other people, but that's what I keep going back to.
But I remember Stack.
I just go offline for 45 minutes and work away and I get so much done.

Omer (45:42.130)
What's a new or interesting business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Fred Stutzman (45:50.210)
The idea that I just, I never stopped talking about is there's this one ice cream store up in my hometown of Albany, New York, and I'm, I'm always just interested in transplanting it down to where I am in North Carolina because it would just make a million dollars.
Like it would just so, so, you know, when I, when I have all the free time to start an ice cream store, I think that's a natural thing.
Once you've done a couple technology businesses, get into retail.
Yeah, that's the thing I dream about.
I'm like, oh, if I was just running an ice cream store, what's an

Omer (46:18.010)
interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Fred Stutzman (46:23.250)
I am a bike racer, a cyclist, and so I, I watch the Tour de France and dream about being in there.
That will never be the case.
I'm way too old and past that point.
But I'm a competitive cyclist and I love doing that.

Omer (46:44.570)
Awesome.
And finally, what is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Fred Stutzman (46:51.930)
It is my young boys and my wife.

Omer (46:56.170)
Good answer.
All right, so, Fred, thank you.
I really appreciate you making the time to join me and share your story.
I love the story.
I love how, as we said, you've taken something that was just a personal point, frustration for you and turned it into a business.
I think it's also kind of funny that you're at, you know, you're a professor teaching courses on social media, where these products.
Social media products are designed to do exactly the opposite in terms of getting people to, you know, spend more time and more frequently go in and get sucked into this stuff.
And at the same time, you've built a business by offering a product which does the complete opposite, and you're improving people's lives as a result of taking away their functionality.
Right.
That's awesome.

Fred Stutzman (47:57.710)
It's the truth.
It is the truth.
I wrote a whole dissertation on Facebook and.
Yeah.
But, you know, it is the circuitous and interesting journey of life.
Yeah.

Omer (48:07.630)
Now, if people want to check out freedom for themselves, they can go to freedom to.
And if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Fred Stutzman (48:19.150)
Yeah.
I'm Stutzman, so F s T u T Z M a N at Twitter.
Or you can drop me an email at fredfreedom.

Omer (48:27.520)
To wonderful Fred.
Been a pleasure.
Wish you all the best.

Fred Stutzman (48:31.360)
Well omer, thanks for having me.
This was a lot of fun.

Omer (48:33.440)
It was a pleasure.
Cheers.

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