How FreeWater aims to be the world’s first free beverage company

Interesting interview with Josh Cliffords, FreeWater, Founder

Can you explain to us what your project is trying to do?

There are many unique features about this endeavor, but the one that has to standout the most is that we earn a profit while paying you to consume free products and services. Initially, our members will receive FreeWater and the good feeling of knowing that ten cents from each beverage will be donated to charity to build water wells for people in need. However, when we scale into manufacturing our own products, we are also going to offer free local delivery as well as profit-sharing via our future digital security. At that point, our product will be discounted at 125% yet equal to or more profitable than companies who currently sell competing goods.

It’s our goal to be the catalyst for competition at earning a profit while distributing “better than free” products and services. The only way to accomplish this feat is by incorporating revenue streams that usually aren’t associated with these industries as well as to improve on the aggregate efficiency of manufacturing which currently operates at a 80%+ loss. Technically, this isn’t Capitalism, Socialism or the Sharing Economy.

We call this the Giving Economy which means the perceived value of a good is better than free while profitable. Which is why our parent company was named Better Than Free Inc.

Can everything be profitable when distributed freely?

There are two categories of free: below the value of the real estate and above the value of the real estate. Below means the product or service is worth less than its layers of physical and digital advertising. Some examples of this is FreeWater, soda, beer, cannabis, most fruits, veggies, grains, toiletries… This category is growing exponentially by the day as the marginal cost of countless products continues to drop, simultaneously while the value of advertising continues to rise.

Above the value of the real estate represents products and services that can only be subsidized by converting it’s physical and digital real estate layers into ad space. Also, many popularly consumed brands will not approve of converting their product into ad space. So, this category of free or better than free can only be achieved via an advanced YouTube model.

In the third version of our software app we are going to enable our members to earn $30,000+ annually by watching ads, playing games and training AI.

This value will be in the form of our future digital security and the features are discussed by me in the video link below. Long story short, everything can be extremely profitable while distributed at a free or better than free value as long as it’s obtainable within an $18-20 dollar per hour salary.

Why is your project open source?

Because it isn’t ethical to patent free food, water, medicine… and a means to solving some of the world’s most pressing issues.

Also, because I created these models to be copied. After we prove ourselves in our upcoming FreeWater launch startups from around the world will follow our lead using our open source materials which I post videos on weekly. This way, they won’t have to struggle as I did to bring these business models to life.

Collectively, we will mount a front that will put a ton of pressure on the old guard. This will result in a PR nightmare for Coke, Pepsi, Nestle, WallMart, Amazon, Google, Facebook… and they will also be forced to follow suit out of a sense of Darwinism.

And, when companies such as a Coke or Pepsi start contributing even a penny per unit back to society it will be the largest redistribution of wealth in human history, and this value doesn’t include the positive impact it will have on the environment as those companies improve their aggregate efficiency in order to compete.

And finally, our long-term goal is to be the world’s first fully transparent company using open source blockchain ledgers to report our earnings in real time. This way, each time you consume one of our better than free products you will know how much money we earned, how much you will earn via profit-sharing and the ability to track our charitable donations down to the penny.

What is your own background briefly?

I’ve been an entrepreneur since I started investing my own money into Microsoft at the age of ten.

I founded a sports performance gym in Los Angeles in my early to mid-20’s.

I was an airborne infantryman for two years.

I founded two non-profit organizations in the past: the first was to help obese children to lose weight in Los Angeles and the second was to help struggling migrants along the Balkans Route in Eastern Europe.

I was one of the first people to bring the stand-up paddle board to the small country of Montenegro.

I’ve spent about 5+ years of my life traveling or on some sort of adventure. Two notable adventures were when I traveled around the USA in an RV for more than a year and a trip around the world that consisted of more than 30 countries. During that trip around the world was when I started volunteering with refugees and is when I first got the inspiration to make a free supermarket.

Does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Yes, because this project is a representation of all of my good and bad life experiences in regards to business, non-profit organizations, the military and travel.

How was the last 12 months?

The last 12 months was a rollercoaster. I spent 6 months living in a crowded and sometimes smelly hacker house in Silicon Valley. A Chinese hacker tried to blackmail me for our IP before the project was open source. There have been times when people have offered hundreds of thousands or millions of potential investment just to retract their offer the following day when their friends told them they were nuts to invest in a free supermarket.

I was separated from my wife for six months while she waited for her visa so she could immigrate to the United States from Europe. The highs have been extremely high and the lows were rock bottom. The only thing that kept me moving forward at the lowest points is that when we solve free water and food on a global level, we will save 36M lives annually.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

Our startup is opening the world’s first free supermarket and our first product is FreeWater. The water is free because it’s paid for by ads that are printed directly on aluminum cans and paper-based cartons. Scan the QR codes or tap NFC chips with your smart device to collect coupons, watch videos, catch the latest breaking news, shop, order food, donate, or download music, movies, tv shows, video games and software.

Most importantly, our long-term goal is to make our entire packaging from 100% hemp while ten cents from each beverage will be donated to charity to build water wells for people in need.

We only need 10% of Americans to stop buying bottled water so we can build water wells for a billion people. After we prove ourselves with water, we are going to scale into other free products and services, each one contributing to a different charitable cause.

Why did you get involved with this project?

In 2015, I launched a non-profit organization in Belgrade Serbia called Save the Refugees to help the migrants who were struggling along the Balkans Route. While we were extremely proud to have helped thousands of people, we didn’t solve the underlying issues behind mass migration which generally stems from a lack of safe drinking water and food.

In this model, the experience around solving the world’s greatest issues is now as simple as drinking free water, free beer, or eating a free slice of pizza… because when it’s that easy everyone will do it!  Where this becomes most counterintuitive is that advertisers don’t want to help poor people unfortunately, but by giving 10 cents per unit to charity while targeting the advertiser’s top 10% of most desirable audience the donations to charity are staggering. Using FreeWater as an example, our goal is to limit everyone to 3 units per person daily.

When you do the math, we only need 10% of Americans to stop buying bottled water so we can build water wells for a billion people and we believe that the global water crises will be solved in less than a decade from our upcoming launch. Each time we introduce a new better than free product or service it will donate to a different charitable cause.

Why do you think it is such a powerful idea?

Many people around the globe are trying to solve Universal Basic Income. However, the vast majority of their answers involve raising taxes to pay citizens a monthly check. That is a top down solution that is extremely nationalistic and doesn’t pertain to individuals from poor nations. Our solution will solve this problem without a penny of tax revenue while helping people in all countries rich and poor.

Additionally, some of the wealthiest countries such as Switzerland have proposed ideas of distributing up to $3500 per month while what we propose is far more valuable. Because in the future, we will be distributing free water, food, clothing, computers, medicine, transportation, internet, and renewable energy. The calculated savings involved with our answer to UBS “Universal Basic Sharing” will represent more than $20,000 annually.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

They can check out our FreeWater website at freewater.io

They can take a look at our live Kickstarter Campaign

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/freewater/freewater-is-making-water-free-for-everyone

or they can email me at Josh@freewater.io

Who and where do you get inspiration from?

I draw my inspiration from my two favorite inventors: Nikola Tesla & Elon Musk. My wife is Serbian and I was living in Belgrade when I initially designed these business models for free food and water. During that time, I visited the Nikola Tesla museum on a weekly basis and drew inspiration from his biggest failure which was to give everyone wireless energy for free.

The museum claims that his investors pulled his funding when he explained that he had created a way to give everyone free energy. After frequenting his museum more than 30 times, I realized that Tesla may have failed his goal because he was unable to package free energy correctly. Because if Tesla was a savvier businessman, he might have told his investors that he figured out a way to give everyone free wireless energy, BUT before you say anything, we will earn 50X the profit via performance-based contracts! Maybe, just maybe if he had packaged it correctly, we might have free wireless energy today.

For me, this was an extremely important lesson because I’m that guy who wants to earn a profit while paying you to consume free products and services. From that moment on, I knew that I needed to make my business models extremely efficient to ensure that better than free goods and services are at least ten times more profitable than selling goods today in order for this to scale.

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