The FreeWater Story

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FreeWater began with a question:

What if access to water, food, and medicine was a human right—not a privilege?

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In 2015, my wife and I volunteered with refugees in Europe. Over the course of 18 months, we met thousands of people from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. One story kept repeating: many had left their homes not because of war, but because they didn’t have access to basic necessities like clean water, food, or medicine. It felt like we were witnessing the effects of global famine in real time.

 

That experience changed everything. I started sketching solutions in my notebook, working backwards from the root cause: the global water crisis. Nearly 800 million people still lack access to clean drinking water. And yet, the cost to solve the problem permanently is estimated at $20–40 billion—a sum well within reach for many governments or corporations.

 

So why hasn’t it been fixed? Because water is life—and whoever controls it, controls everything. In many developed nations, water is publicly traded like oil or gold. Bottled water is often just filtered tap water, sold for up to 2,000 times its actual cost. The system isn’t broken—it’s working exactly as designed.

 

I realized this wouldn’t be solved through traditional charity or policy. It needed a completely different approach. The idea was simple: What if donating to charity was as easy as drinking a free bottle of water? If advertisers could cover the cost of the product—including manufacturing, logistics, profit, and a donation—then people could help solve the water crisis just by saving money. 

 

We moved to Silicon Valley to test the concept. Surrounded by brilliant minds focused on AI and social media, it became clear that no one was building anything like FreeWater. But we ran out of savings. So we relocated to Austin, Texas, just as the pandemic hit. We were broke and burned out. I started driving Uber to make ends meet and save for our first batch of prototypes. Then I got the call: my mother had passed away. She was my biggest supporter, and the loss was devastating.

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With the small inheritance she left behind, I took one last shot. In the summer of 2021—six years after this journey began—we finally launched. At first, no one noticed. Then we started posting on TikTok, and everything changed. We went viral. Our new community helped us land our first advertisers, build a team, and fund our first clean water wells in Kenya. Within a year, we were meeting with some of the world’s largest companies. Some were curious about advertising with us. Others wanted to understand how negatively priced products—goods that are FREE + CHARITY = PROFIT might disrupt their industries.

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We also tried to expand into retail, but hit resistance. Distributors and big-box stores rely heavily on bottled water profits, and many didn’t want third-party advertising on our packaging. So we began developing free vending machines and other advanced technologies to bypass those barriers. But behind the scenes, I was burning out. My health deteriorated, and so did my personal relationships. I couldn’t even bring myself to post on social media. So we hit pause.

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For over a year, we went quiet. During that time, I took care of my health, rebuilt my life, and reworked the parts of our system that had held us back. I also began mentoring other FreeWater-inspired teams around the world—working on projects involving free transportation, medicine, and of course food and beverages. Seeing their success helped reignite my passion.

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This is FreeWater’s second act. We’ve already proven the model works—across industries, continents, and cultures. And now, more than ever, the world is hungry for bold solutions that bypass the corruption and inefficiency of traditional systems. We’re releasing two books and a whitepaper which is all open source:

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• A how-to playbook that helps anyone launch their own free or negatively priced company or nonprofit.

• A book of new theories and ideas inspired by this journey—designed to challenge the old rules of business, economics, and societal norms.

• And a whitepaper outlining our long-term vision and open-source tools for building a new kind of OS.

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But we can’t do this alone.

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If you believe water and food should be human rights…

If you believe the world can do better…

If you believe that corporations and governments must do more…

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Then we need your help.

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Share our story. Spread our ideas. Read the books. Start your own free or negatively priced product.

Let’s build a new system—together.