There are innovators, free thinkers, and crazy disruptors in every segment of society, some get digested by the system very early on, others break through, cause a stir then sell out to embrace a life of ease, and others relentlessly jump from one crazy idea to the other pursuing that greater goal that is the fire in their belly, and they stick around.
I’d like to think that Josh Cliffords falls into the latter and that his fire will move him from one great crazy idea to the other creating a ripple effect of impact.
Josh is the founder of FreeWater.io and if you don’t know it, you may have seen some viral tiktok videos of bottles of water handed out to people for free.
How can you possibly afford to run a company that gives out free products? if something is free we are often told we are the product, but Josh has a different view, he is a bit of a radical thinker, as he truly believes we can tip the scale and help the people in need with an honest approach.
Free Water is a company that bottles fresh spring water (a fancy terminology for just regular tap water), in a totally legit way, (you can check where the water comes from on the bottles) and covers the cost of production and distribution through advertisements printed directly on a sleeve around the bottle.
The bottles are 100% aluminum, recycled as per US laws, and therefore sustainable.
How Josh got to this is pretty much the zigzag story of every change maker trying to walk a straight line to a solution and instead ending up traveling the world, setting up an NGO to help refugees, thinking free taxis could be the next big thing, but then setting on free water as a middle ground starting point.
Let me untangle the above with a few more details.
Josh was traveling around the world, a kind of sabbatical to nurture the spirit and recharge mind and body with newfound inspiration, pretty much every sabbatical starting point.
Only four months into this trip he landed in Italy ( yay, my home country) and there came across some African refugees ( definitely not yay and I apologize for how you are treated) and they met, bonded, shared stories, probably over some delicious Italian bread, and while Josh was trying to understand what made them leave the country they were born in, he was saddened to hear that lack of basic needs safety like healthcare, water, and food were the causes across the spectrum.
He was so moved by their stories that he felt his trip had to end abruptly and he should have stayed and tried to understand the issue deeper and better.
Fast-tracking a little, the outcome of that random encounter pushed Josh to set up an NGO that ended up helping and impacting 10,000 refugees but the politics of the foreign country it was set up in (not Italy, but not that we don’t have the same politics) forced him to shut it down and rethink his strategy.
Now the determination to build a scalable solution to help the needy communities was even bigger.
Back home in US, there are no shortages of problems to focus on, so he narrowed the approach, looked locally, and realized that the very same thing that pushed refugees to leave their homes, lack of water, healthcare, and food, is also a problem for a segment of society in the free world.
Josh is determined to lift up the segment of low-income Americans who struggle to make ends meet by building a system that can provide resources for free, through a clever combination of tech, advertisements and, b2b strategies.
Freewater is just the first product, Josh envisions an ambitious future of possibilities, offering free groceries and deliveries, and eventually down the line, back to those free taxis he originally wanted to set up.
“Why Free though? Why is it so important to make it free, and how can it be truly free?” I asked.
