Co-founders TJ Driver and Zach Nasgowitz have created a physical device that pairs with a smartphone application and allows users to block certain applications and tools they might find too distracting.

Driver and Nasgowitz are both UW-Madison graduates who have known each other their entire lives after growing up in the same Germantown neighborhood. In college, the pair began discussing starting a business together. The idea of the Brick device came from both founders’ struggles with putting their phones down.

“We didn’t start by trying to create a business,” said Driver. “We had just been complaining about our phones and saying, ‘Man, I’m always on this thing. I have screentime limits set up, but I always ignore them.’”

Driver even considered getting a secondary flip phone so he could still communicate without having access to other distracting smartphone apps. The logistics behind that idea proved to be impractical.

“We started talking and thought maybe there’s a way to turn our iPhones into flip phones,” he said.

At the start of 2023, Nasgowitz began conceptualizing a physical device that pairs with a smartphone application and, when tapped, shuts off access to other distracting applications.

Users can select which apps they want blocked through the downloadable smartphone application and they’re not able to unblock those apps until they return to the physical device. The Brick application does not gather any data from users.

“This physical device is the key, so once you leave that device, you have no choice,” said Driver. “It’s as if you have a new phone. There’s no cheating.”

The startup’s first physical devices were finished by June of 2023, but Driver and Nasgowitz had to wait several more months before officially launching the product so the smartphone application that pairs with the physical device could gain approval from Apple. Brick then launched in mid-September.

Around 2,000 Brick devices have been sold so far at a price point of $49. Each one is 3D-printed in Nasgowitz’s basement. The venture has been totally bootstrapped thus far.

Figuring out a scalable way to continue manufacturing the devices is the startup’s biggest immediate goal.

“We’d like to have a real plastics manufacturer create these for us,” said Driver.

Increasing their marketing efforts and expanding beyond Instagram is another aspiration for the startup.

“We take our phones everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we should also have to take our distractions everywhere,” said Nasgowitz. “Technology can both empower and hinder us; we’re offering a tool that brings back control to the user.”