Explore Joshua Cliffords's journey in the Environmental services Industry

For me, rootless would mean obviously without roots, going the unconventional route. I think that that describes this project well, because I’m self-taught and I didn’t pick any of this stuff in a traditional outlet or school or so. I kind of had to grab everything, bits and pieces from everywhere. So, if I had to say what rootless meant for me, it would be ‘unconventional’. – Joshua Cliffords

I grew up in Los Angeles, California and I think I was just like many of my friends or any kid out that always was an entrepreneur; When I was nine or ten years old, I had a lemonade stand and one day I decided to make a free lemonade stand and I made more than $1,000 in a weekend selling all my baseball, basketball and football cards. It took me a while, but I talked my parents into letting me invest that money into Microsoft when I was ten years old. That did quite well for me at that age and I was able to sell that stock when I turned 18 and I used it to travel the world and from there kind of just have always been an entrepreneur. – Joshua Cliffords

I went and did some junior college. I played sports, I wanted to be an athlete. I’ve always been a horrible student and so the traditional route would never be a good route for me. – Joshua Cliffords

I owned a gym for athletes in Los Angeles, and I specialized in training athletes up until my mid-twenties. I was really bored with that life and so I sold the business, bought an RV and traveled down to America for a year and a half. Then I ran out of gas money, I sold it, and I traveled in South America for a while and then I was still really bored so I enlisted in the Army to go from civilian to Green Beret and I got  training to be in the Special Forces for a while. After that, I was close to 30 and sold everything I owned to do a trip around the world. On that trip, I met some refugees from Nigeria that were in a really tough spot and that kind of really changed my life and ultimately led us to starting this project. – Joshua Cliffords

It didn’t happen overnight, but from traveling around America for a year and a half in the RV, I did notice that you could go in the most backcountry of untouched wilderness that exists, and you could you could carry your tents and everything, and you could walk for three days into the wilderness. Eventually, you’ll make camp somewhere and you’ll look around the corner and you’ll find trash everywhere. So I noticed there’s no such thing as an untouched natural place anymore or at least I’ve never seen it. Same thing on my trip around the world; you can go to places like Petra, which literally are one of the Seven Wonders of the world and you just find trash everywhere. No matter where you go, no matter what you do, there’s always trash. So, that definitely stood out in my mind. I was in Rome for 5 minutes after traveling around the world for about nine months, and I was really touched by the story of two Nigerian refugees who had to leave their country. This was back in 2015 and the sad thing is for us Americans, no matter what your news sources were, it all said that these were bad people, they were all extremists. They were this, they were that and these people that I had met were wonderful. So, I canceled that trip around the world and I started a nonprofit organization in Eastern Europe called “Save the Refugees” and actually met my wife while volunteering. She was also a volunteer. Together with some other people, we volunteered for about a year and a half and we helped more than 10,000 refugees. We would talk to every person we could and ask them to tell us your story. We had translators, the whole nine yards, and we found that roughly 20% of them had left their countries because they didn’t have access to water, food or medicine. We kept researching it. It took a lot of research and we realized that 30 to 40 million people die every year around the world because they don’t have access to these essential goods. When I say medicine, if you just gave everybody on Earth a bar of soap, that would save 10 million lives a year just right there. That’s obviously obtainable. So, at the time I just wished somebody could create a business model that made saving a life or the environment or some sort of cause as easy as eating a free slice of pizza or drinking a free water. From there the brainstorming started and then it took two years to invent everything and then another two years to bring it to market and here we are. – Joshua Cliffords

So looking back, what I did was I worked backwards. What I found, starting with water, for example, it only cost roughly $5 billion. It’s not a little bit of money, but it’s 5 billion $ to solve the global water crisis permanently around the world. That’s building water wells, rain culture systems, whatever you need statistically for that village and the reason why governments won’t ever or corporation won’t ever do it on their own is because water is a publicly traded commodity and with the powers to be have their way, it’s going to be $50 a bottle, definitely way more than it is today. Also, governments use water politics against one another. If they have leverage over their neighboring countries, they might turn the water spigot off if they don’t do what they say. So the goal was to be out of government control because if governments wanted to solve this, they would already have snapped their fingers and solved this because 5 billion is nothing for these corporations and government entities. Then I realized, this is the product for you. It’s going to have a high turnover rate with just 10% of it, if we donate a minimum of $0.10 per bottle, which says on every ‘Free Water’. If we get 10% of Americans to drink our free product daily, we will reach $5 billion after that year of getting 10% of Americans to do this. So it really seems attainable, at least for me, when you look at it from that perspective. We don’t need 10% of Americans to do anything extra, to spend anything extra. We want to save them on average 250 to $350 per year because that’s what the average American spends on bottled water anyway. So, by saving Americans $350 a year, we can solve this problem affirmatively. – Joshua Cliffords

I’m in a really good spot to be honest. It was really hard just to invent these things and when I first decided to do this initially and do this full time back in 2017, I couldn’t even type or use a computer. It was a matter of whether I was really going to do it?. Was I able to teach myself how to use a computer from scratch and then somehow be the founder of a tech company? It was really daunting. So at that time, what I told myself is that odds were that I was not going to make it, but I had two ways to be successful. Number one was to do such a great job that Coke, Pepsi, Nestlé, Amazon copies you and squishes you like a bug and you become the MySpace of Free Supermarkets and somebody opens a better free supermarket that gives more money to charity than you. Option two was that it would be great to get my return on investment and be the CEO of a company that I do think will ultimately make Amazon obsolete and we are at a point now where I think one of those two outcomes is guaranteed. I think if I quit today and closed our doors today, people would copy us and they would solve what we want to solve anyways. If this was Vegas, I would bet that we’re probably going to be recognized as the next Google in the next year or two. So we’re in a really good spot but it was 0% easy. – Joshua Cliffords

I think the most important element for a startup, the difference between a business, a small business and a startup, is that one is designed to scale globally and the other one isn’t. My gym business could have grown to be like the next 24 hour fitness, so technically a global or whatever brand, but a startup, a true startup is designed from the very beginning to scale globally. So, you have to look at it from a completely different perspective on scalability. If you’re going to do a small business or a startup, I think what’s most important is the ‘why’. If you’re just doing it for money, odds are it will never happen. For me, it had to be more than money. I believe we will save those 35 plus million lives that die every year within the decade and that was really the only thing that motivated me from the very beginning to teach myself these things. There’s just been so many ups and so many downs with this project, especially a couple of years ago. If there weren’t millions of lives potentially on the line, I would have just quit 100,000 times over. The best advice I could give is to have the ‘why’, do something for more than money and that will drive you beyond all of the obstacles that in the beginning you might perceive as impossible or nearly impossible. – Joshua Cliffords

So about seven months ago, we met a girl at the University of Texas and she asked if she could be our Tik-tok intern. At the time I didn’t even have a TikTok. I knew what it was but I had erased it because it was so addicting and I didn’t want to use it. So, she had a bunch of followers and just wanted to make us a video. She ultimately just made us four videos but one of those videos got about 50,000 views in a couple of days, which then led to a couple of thousand people subscribing and signing up on our website. Some of those people wanted to support this and wanted some free water when it’s available and a few people were asking for quotes and this or that. So, comparing those results against Google advertising, Facebook ads and YouTube ads where I spent thousands of dollars and got literally nothing from those and so then the light bulb went off. Also in that video, she was giving out water. We were already giving out thousands of waters so what if we could just get some of these people on camera to make videos for us. Going back in time, even before that, I was in Silicon Valley with this project for a year a couple of years ago, and I had spoken to some really wealthy people, a couple of different billionaires, and they had both told me the same thinGreta: americans don’t want free, organic groceries. Americans want to pay more for everything, only homeless people want free organic food. That’s what they said. I’ll believe that people don’t want free groceries or free computers or whatever until I see thousands of happy testimonials. Until then, Americans want to pay more. Keeping that in mind, having that one successful video, I thought let’s make these thousands of testimonials and let’s see if the Tik tok “gods” appreciate what we do. So, the very next day we got someone on camera and the video got 100,000 plus views and that led to thousands of more people visiting the website. Then from there, we started posting five plus videos daily. Now, in less than six months between three accounts, we have 175,000 followers. That helps us to get the word out and obviously that’s how we met. – Joshua Cliffords

Everything is about the why so I think we’re mainly targeting people who believe the same concept, which is that  food, water and medicine should be free for everybody. I think all of our users and myself agree that we wish that it wasn’t in an ad supported manner because I personally hate advertising and I’ve actually created ways to make all this stuff free and profitable in the future with zero ads. However, we just need to be a much larger company to incorporate that. I think we’re targeting people that believe what we believe but while I guess the consumer believes we’re targeting them, we’re really targeting the advertiser because advertisers only care when you have a large audience and so it kind of goes hand-in-hand. – Joshua Cliffords

A lot. We offer different types of packaging and a little bit of bottles and paper cartons, but each has their pros and cons. We’re about to line up a different type of container as well soon.so just finding a manufacturer who will white label for you at the beginning because we don’t own our own factory yet, it’s really hard to track those companies down. With water in general, it’s really easy to find manufacturers that do things in plastic bottles but we didn’t think it was very ethical to make water free and do it in a plastic bottle. so that means that 99.9999% of our manufacturing options go out the window. First, it’s a matter of finding the manufacturers. Then it’s a matter of if they even have any available capacity for you. There has been a small number of manufacturers that say they want to work with us because they sell water and that will make them obsolete in time. That’s rare, but it also happens as well and so it’s tricky. So I think it’s trickier for us than most. Once you find your manufacturing connection, they’re going to give you two choices. Choice number one is the best possible price you could get from the manufacturer, but you’re going to have to guarantee an annual minimum number of units and if you don’t sell those, you still owe them that money or option B, which we went with. It’s much more expensive, but ‘pay as you go’, no minimum. Most manufacturers obviously want a guaranteed minimum pay. They want you to guarantee a million beverages a year or 10 million beverages a year. It’s really hard to find the right relationships and get it going. It’s definitely not easy. – Joshua Cliffords

So we have a couple different business models to date. We have “direct to the business, which means we help design the aluminum bottles, paper cartons, we ship it to them and they distribute it themselves. Then we have “direct to the consumer, which people often see on Tik-tok. We only offer that in Austin at the moment and we’ll scale out there. It will be a long journey, but initially we can’t be on supermarket shelves. The reason being not because they won’t make any money. We could explain why supermarkets would actually make more money with our free products and selling other water brands, but really because it’s hard to get on a supermarket shelf and then every time you change the look of your product, you do a stack of paperwork. This looks different every time we order it and  because of that, the industry, as is, isn’t designed for a company like us. We just bought our first ‘Free water’ truck for last mile delivery, which will help us deliver directly to the house and basically do massive giveaways. We’ve had some brands in the past that say when we were asked to give out 10,000 water in a single day for us and I declined because that’s £12,000 and we can’t physically move it but now we can with a few trips and the truck. We’re also going to launch our first free vending machine prototypes this year. Those free vending machine prototypes will get used a lot in Austin. That will also enable us to kind of smooth out the software processes, get the bugs out, and those three vending machines would be scalable in any city around the world. It’s kind of a stepping stone process. We start with the world even knowing that we exist, then we deliver it to the doorstep, the vending machines, the trucks and then scale out from there. – Joshua Cliffords

I guess the only answer to that question would depend on if you are born rich. If you are born in a very wealthy situation, I guess you wouldn’t need any help. For everybody else, including us, you probably do need to line up investors and it’s extremely hard and it’s an extremely humbling process. You will hear a lot of nos. Also, I guess there’s what I call the “Silicon Valley investor playbook”, which most angel investors and theses kind of say the exact thing word for word. The playbook is really old school and it’s really generic. Whatever you say to potential investors they always say they would like to see a little bit more traction. Then you reach those milestones and do some more traction. By the time some investors are willing to write you a check, you probably have done enough work where you could literally go to the bank and get a loan and not give up any equity. So, there’s safe investors and then there’s investors who are more risk averse or just really believe in what you believe. My wife and I tried to do the entire project out of pocket. We really tried, but we were really hurting ourselves financially and then around September, we just had so much demand to start selling shares that we just went with it. It just seemed like the right thing to do. – Joshua Cliffords

I think it’s a trick question because it took me so many years to get this off the ground and it literally took me two years to invent most of these concepts. There was zero attempt to make a sale those first two years, and there was zero money coming in, only money going out. Other founders are able to just invent something and try to bring it to market in six months or so but this is a lot more complex. There’s a lot more moving parts. I had to reinvent a bunch of wheels. The first piece of advice I would give is when you’re in the idea stage, which for me lasted two years, I would actually recommend getting out of America or any rich country or city that you’re in because the cost of rent and living is so high that if you pay your rent or if you make one mistake, you’ve probably spent all of your money. On the other hand, when I invented this stuff, I was actually living in Montenegro and Belgrade in Serbia, and so my rent was $200 a month. When your rent is $200 a month, I had all the time in the world to invent these things. The first piece of advice I tell anybody is that in the idea phase, unless you’re married or really tied down to something, get out of Austin, get out of Silicon Valley, get out of wherever you are. Go to Thailand, go wherever will make you happy, where you can live on the beach for $300 a month with an equal or better lifestyle but give yourself the ability to make mistakes. When I first moved to Silicon Valley, I made a couple of mistakes and they almost doomed the entire project financially. If I could go back in time, I would tell myself to stay in Eastern Europe longer, make more mistakes there before I brought it to the market. Now, fast forwarding to where we are today, there’s been many famous tech companies such as Facebook, Netflix, Twitter, Snapchat, Uber. Uber is a multibillion dollar company and they still haven’t turned a profit. Our trajectory and this early stage is as good or better than Twitter or Snapchat or Facebook because we’re actually bringing in revenue. So, we’ll reach profitability, knock on wood, by midway or in the third quarter of this year, but then we’ll go back at that again where we pay for manufacturing and it will be a back and forth. I spoke to one of the founders of Netflix, I’ve spoken to some other big time founders and they didn’t have any revenue for more than a year or two years sometimes. So, we’re in a really, really good spot compared to those legacy start ups and I think what’s important other than revenue, is fundamentals and a road map to showing why what you’re doing is so much better, if that makes sense. For us, our only revenue stream is physical advertising today, and we earn roughly $0.20 a bottle. However, when we manufacture the same products or sell them in the future we will earn upwards of  $0.50 – $ 0.60 per bottle. Furthermore, when we build out our platform which we call ‘Amazon 2.0’, then we start bringing in all these tech revenue streams such as commission when products are sold. As an example: imagine if there was a Lexus advertising on a box and that already paid for the entire ad space where we’re profitable. Then if you scan that QR code and you buy that Lexus, we’re going to charge 2% for all transactions on our platform in the future, which means $50,000 a car. We will make $1,000 in commission off of ‘Free Water’, a free slice of pizza, and a free cup of coffee. So, having the fundamental models that show a clear road map to how it is not only free water, it donates to charity and it can be more than a thousand times more profitable than selling  water when done correctly. I think that having those metrics and being able to concisely explain that is just as important, if not more important than revenue, if that makes sense. – Joshua Cliffords

Good question. When I first invented all that stuff, the first thing I tried to do was patent all of these things. I worked on a provisional. And then I realized, or at least I felt that it wasn’t very ethical to take these things because when you patent something, you’re essentially giving yourself a monopoly and I don’t want a monopoly at trying to save those lives. I want everybody to join and do it, too. Our goal is actually to get Pepsi, Nestlé and Amazon to copy as soon as humanly possible. So we tag them in most of our videos. They definitely know we exist. Here’s the beauty: Coca-Cola would never solve the global water crisis. They don’t want it, they just want to charge more money for their water, not less but what really is going to make them upset is if we make more money than them doing what the world perceives as the right thing. We don’t use plastic, it’s free and we’re saving lives with our charitable donations. Eventually, it will be such a PR nightmare for them that they’ll have to copy. Someone’s going to think of me as a dumb ass for not patenting any of these things. At first when they copy, they’ll probably still sell Coca-Cola or Pepsi, but they’re going to put ads on it and maybe they’ll discount a nickel or a dime because that’s what’s going to make them the most money. Just to add to the PR, they’re going to say that they’re going to donate one penny per cans for whichever causes are important to the Coke CEO, probably. When you do the math on their economies of scale, that would be one of the largest redistribution of wealth in human history and not through a sense of socialism or anything but in the sense of them volunteering as a force, as a way to survive. So, that’s the goal I guess, raising the bar of business ethics higher. We can do that by showing that it is more profitable to do that and then getting these major companies to copy. So, there’s zero protection. I give all of the toughest secrets or anything that was really difficult for me to figure out, I just blab about how to do it more easily on the Internet and I hope that they copy that.  If Coca-Cola beats us in saving the world or saving millions and millions of lives, is that really a bad thing? I don’t think so. – Joshua Cliffords

It wouldn’t be about the beverage industry, It would just be start-ups in general. I got lucky because I invented this stuff while working with refugees in Eastern Europe, I was living in Eastern Europe. Again, that gave me a long runway as long as I needed to expand this stuff. When I went to Silicon Valley, I was in too big of a hurry. Why was I in too big of a hurry? Because it was so expensive to be there. And B, millions of people are dying just because they don’t have Americans saving money. So I better hurry up because those lives lost are kind of my fault. So, I got into business with the wrong people. They seemed like the right people at the time. On paper, they had a really tremendous resumé but all they cared about was the money and not the social impact. It ultimately caused me to shut down my first startup. I left, I had to walk away from my own startup because I didn’t feel that those people were being very ethical. Then I had to start over again from scratch. When I started over again from scratch, it turned out that it was only 90 days before the pandemic started. So, it wasn’t the best timing. What did I learn from that experience? You have to be really careful in a startup about who you get involved with. The people I really regret hiring were beyond or at the peak of their career on paper but had zero drive or they were at the peak of their career but basically from all their hard work that they had done in the past, they really didn’t have that drive to do whatever it takes. If you ask back then I would have said that I was looking for the most qualified people to get involved. If you ask me today, it has to be that right balance between qualified and hungry. Even if they’re 0% qualified, I would rather take the hungriest person who really cares about changing the status quo and the way that the world works. As long as they have a good personality that’s who I’d choose over that person who’s got that really fancy resume because with a startup, especially if you’re doing something that no one’s ever done before, you’re making it up as you go along a lot of the time anyways. So, everybody needs to learn a lot. You need to try something, fail quickly, throw it away, start over, repeat that countless times, and if you’re really not hungry, they’re not going to be good people to work with because you really have to keep iterating. – Joshua Cliffords

My branding advice would be counter-intuitive compared to most companies because we make money by sharing our real estate with others. Usually, you use your real estate to brand yourself but the most counterintuitive thing is that if you brand your competition, you would make a lot more money. So, if every can of Coca Cola had a Pepsi ad on it, Coke would make more money than if they just sold it with the Coke logo on it. I would say be careful what you do with your real estate, because there’s always a lot of opportunities, even if it means adding some QR codes for yourself that play videos, that make appointments. Everyone has their own piece of real estate and you have to be very precise with what you do with it. In regard to just branding in general, I would just say it needs to make sense. Why we chose the name ‘Free Water’ is because the name explains itself. If it was different, I think it would be harder to understand. – Joshua Cliffords

There’s zero room for being pessimistic. I mean, in not just a startup, but if you want to achieve anything that’s difficult in life, you can’t be pessimistic at all. My typical day usually starts at around 8: 15 in the morning and I don’t end until about somewhere between midnight or three in the morning. So I’ve been working seven days a week and I’ve been doing this now for a year. That’s why you have to have the ‘why’. I would never be able to do any of this stuff if I didn’t think that it would not save a bunch of lives. So if it was just for money, I would not be doing this. I would still be living in Eastern Europe or somewhere in Europe. If you don’t have the ‘why’ behind your movement and if you’re not positive, I just think that it’ll be 0% possible to achieve any of it. I guess everyone has their own motivation for creating their own company or own project. If the ‘why’ is not there, I would say don’t do it and go live in another country and enjoy life because life is a lot more than making money. Using Albania as an example, I would much rather go live on the beach in Saranda for a year or travel through Berat or Tirana or wherever, then literally do the stuff that you have to do to be successful as a business owner or even harder as a startup, because that startup, again, is meant to scale globally. However hard you think you’ve ever worked before, it’s going to be that x100 and it’s literally going to break you down over and over and over and over again. That’s why most people quit, because it’s just so hard. So if you don’t have that,’why’, if you don’t have a problem that bothers you so much to the point of insanity that you have to solve it, don’t bother. Just go enjoy life, go to the beach, do whatever makes you happy. Don’t do this. – Joshua Cliffords

Obviously, not everybody is born in the same situation. Being middle class in the US is much different than being middle class in Eastern Europe or in Southeast Asia or wherever. So everybody feels different, I guess. However, we happen to live in an interesting time. I learned just about everything I know from YouTube. So, YouTube and places like it can be a wonderful source, a wealth of information if you find yourself looking in the right places. If you look in the wrong places, it could obviously drive, you know, drag you down as well. So I’m pretty optimistic that it doesn’t matter how hard you throw your boat if you row it in the wrong direction. So, as long as you’ve got a good direction with your compass and if you’re relentless and you use free resources such as YouTube or free Code Camp or whatever is out there, there’s definitely a high probability of success in doing something special. – Joshua Cliffords