Crumbl: Jason McGowan

0:07 Hey, just a quick note before we start the show. In this interview, you're about to hear my voice sounds a little bit off. I was battling a pretty nasty cold that day, but the good news is it's an awesome interview, so you will not Want to miss it. Okay. On to the show. Sawyer called me up one day and said, Hey, there's a building here.

0:27 And I think we can get it for really cheap because they're gonna demolish it soon. I'm like oh I think he was asking something like twelve hundred dollars a month or something for it. And I was like, sorry, we need to get it to you know Eight or nine hundred dollars.

0:40 And I often think about how many decisions are three hundred dollar decisions that are life changing for you. You know? And I still to this day if If that landlord had not lowered the price of that building. I'm not sure where we would be today.

0:57 Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements. They built. I'm Guy Raz and on the show today. How Crumble rewrote the recipe on cookies with A B testing

1:21 Нью рецепс ік. A massive TikTok following. And a thousand stores over just eight years. When most people think about starting a cookie company, they might picture war memories or grandma's recipe, you know, a cozy kitchen, right? But

1:43 Jason McGallon? He launched his cookie business. Like it was a tech startup. He and his cousin, Sawyer Hemsley, would tweak and test the recipe over and over and over again, until it was optimized for sweetness and texture, and eventually Buzz. And then Jason built an app to manage ordering and deliveries. And this was all for just one store in Logan, Utah, a small city about an hour and a half north of Salt Lake City. Now if all this sounds a little bit excessive, it

2:16 might be worthwhile mentioning that Jason had spent his entire career up to that point, Working in tech. Where he learned about viral marketing and network effects. Almost from the beginning, he had big ambitions for Crumble. From that single location in Logan, Utah, Jason and Sawyer opened 300 more stores within four years of launching the business in 2017. 300 locations within four years of launch. Just let that sink in.

2:46 Today the company has over a thousand stores across the US and Canada. And a big part of the appeal comes from a methodical and thoughtful design approach. For example, crumble cookies have always been packaged in pink boxes. The bakeries are clean and gleaming and spare. And each Sunday night the brand is a cookie drop. In which it reveals the six flavors it will sell that week.

3:12 And some of them are weird. But also designed to go viral. Flavors like everything bagel, cornbread. Blue icy raspberry. Not surprisingly, that cookie drop has become a particularly popular event for teenagers.

3:27 Jason and Sawyer saw potential in TikTok back in 2018, and they used the platform to build a massive following. In fact, Crumble Cookies has more followers on the platform than Starbucks, Domino's, and Taco Bell combined. Now I should note that crumble is somewhat polarizing in the food world, and The company has done a pretty good job of embracing that role. Whether you love them or hate them, there's no denying the impact Crumble has had on the dessert world. and on the playbook for how to build a food brand in the age of social media.

4:03 As for Jason, he grew up in Alberta, Canada. He wasn't a focused student and pretty much ended his formal schooling in the eighth grade. But growing up the church was a huge part of his life. Jason's a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. And in the late nineteen nineties, he came to the United States to serve as a missionary in of all places. Sin City.

4:26 Las Vegas. Yeah, you'd wake up and Six thirty in the morning and uh you start you know, studying the your scriptures and reading the Bible and And then also I was going out there and sharing with others kind of what I believed. And so yeah, you were going out there, you were knocking on doors, you were um

4:43 Talking to people on the streets, inviting people to come to church and riding in a a suit and tie in uh in Las Vegas weather during the summertime was always an experience I will never forget. On your bike. Yeah, on my bike. It was really, really hot. You know, you learn a lot of tenacity and you learn a lot of um being able to be rejected or grit. I remember What moment I had on my mission.

5:07 I was riding my bike. And I had my helmet on and someone had a uh a bottle and they whipped it at my head and I put my head and my helmet down and it cracked my helmet and all of a sudden this the substance started just kind of going down my face and I uh looked later and realized and from the the the bottle it was spitting two tobacco. So someone had thrown a bottle at my face and I remember that moment that I was just I wasn't even sad. It wasn't even like it was just a I was there just so focused on helping other people, it just didn't bother me. And I remember thinking

5:37 Man, this is something that was unique and I I I just the gospel brought me so much joy. All right, so you do your mission in Las Vegas. With the intention of going back to Alberta, what what did you think you were gonna do after did you have any thought about what you were gonna do after? I didn't really have a lot of thoughts afterwards. And so when I came home from my mission, I had that other like Wait, what am I doing? What's the purpose, you know, of my career and you know, what should I do?

6:03 And then I realized that, you know, I wanted to be more part of the culture and where I was back home, there's only a few members of the church and so it's like, Oh, maybe I'll go move, you know, where there's more members and where where else uh other than Utah. Right. So I think you know forty, forty five percent of the state is mem our members of the church there, probably was a bit higher. Yes. Back then in two thousand three. And by the way, where in Utah did you go to? So I went to Provo, Utah. Provo, of course, home to BYU, college town. Yep. But you weren't there to go to BYU or to explore it necessarily.

6:35 No, I went to a small uh college. It's called the L D S Business College. You know, my f my main focus when I got to there was to, you know, get my G E D and try to get back into, you know I was gonna try to go to college and Try to get a career and As I was doing that, um I I was in class and

6:55 uh El Dis Business College and they wanted us to write a business plan for another business. And I remember thinking. Wow, that's so much work to do for somebody else's business. Can I just start it? So I just asked the teacher if I could just start something and And I realized at the time it had to be an internet company'cause you know Yeah. Um, that's when I started t teaching myself, you know, how to design and uh build websites and do all those kinds of things and

7:18 And I built a couple of websites for people and made, you know, a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there from just little odd jobs from people. And I was like, Oh my goodness, this is I'm making some money. This is fantastic. And so eventually I built a website called uh build your universe. So the BYU dot com was available. Because the school had not secured it and BYU.com was available. Wow. And when I say it's available, someone else had it. So I had to buy it off somebody, at least it from somebody and You know, and it started growing pretty quickly. We started getting people online really quickly. Facebook was going, I'm like, This is social networking, this is the this is where the future is. And what was it? BYU dot com.

7:57 It was like a social it was a social network for BYU students. So we were gonna go just after BYU students. This is really similar around the time, you know, Mark Zuckerberg and stuff was starting to grow Facebook and I was like, Oh, we gotta do one in BYU here and And so we started building it and the church noticed it and um when I say the church I really mean BYU actually noticed it and um BYU sent me a cease and desist letter of like hey, you know, don't that's our branding, BYU. And um At the time I didn't I didn't have much means. I didn't have You know, a anything and so I was just like, Well, you know, if they're asking me to not do this then

8:32 I'm not gonna do it anymore. Yeah. So at the time though, I had um someone named Paul Allen and Paul Allen had started ancestry.com And so we saw it as doing it, you know, with BYU.com. This is not the Paul Allen who was also with the Microsoft. This is a different Paul Allen. No, he he calls himself Paul Allen the Lesser. So although although he went on to create a billion dollar company, multi billion dollar company, he's still Paul Allen the Lesser. And Paul Allen was local, he was there and provo. Yep, he's there local and provo. Mm.

9:02 and he saw what happened when he was at ancestry.com and how he created the myfamily.com brand under Ancestry and he wanted to try to maybe replicate something, some social experience with family members. Uh for family sharing photos and that sort of thing. And so at the time I remember I if Facebook was was growing and I remember it was being very successful. And when I end up going with

9:25 Halm. Um, very shortly after, all of a sudden Facebook opened up their API. And was like you can now build on Facebook. We said wait what if we

9:35 show people how they're connected to each other, show how they're related. And then they when they come into the app, they can share, you know, family memories and photos and experiences. And Facebook was really meant for college students at the time, but maybe we could be the family part of it within Facebook. And so we launched it. And it was it just started exploding immediately. Well.

9:55 you were just teaching yourself this stuff and this really starts a career of working in tech, like particularly with social media sites. Yes. And and I think that's where I got a lot of my experience and my analytical kind of experience, you know, when you're growing so fast. And you know, Paul was a great mentor too as well to help me you know, with with understanding marketing and technology and data and all that sort of thing. So I you know, when you start making a tweak or a change to a UX and you realize, you know, it increases five, ten, twenty percent.

10:26 All of a sudden you start understanding user psychology, how they interact with the apps. how to make things frictionless, like my learning curve just was exponential at the time and building this product over time. We ended up reaching to about 120 million users. So it was it grew fast. You um eventually left Family Link. And

10:47 when started your o your own next business called Pick. Dot com which I guess was like um It was like a social sh shopping site. I I think it was create around the same time as Pinterest. It was actually. Yeah. I always I always joke that I always had the idea, I just never had the execution in the early days. Yeah. That was my that was my my curse, you know, to start other companies that someone else executed better on. And I read that even before you launched it, it was acquired.

11:13 Yeah, so it was acquired um by a company called Fundly. early for us, uh it was a nice payday and it was just something that was Was a great moment. And at the same time, too, when we were doing fundraising, there was another investor who really wanted us to go do a whole concept with him. So that was hang time. That was the concept to kind of, you know, like it was similar to Four Square, you know. Hm.

11:35 Then that's when um You know, we moved our and moved my wife and our early family, we we moved out to Tiburon and uh and lived in California for a short period of time. And yeah, I should mention you were you married, you were married and you had I think at least one kid at that point maybe two. So you moved to California to uh to the Bay area. Yep and how long were you were you there?

12:00 I was there for a very short period of time, I think it was six months or less. And it was just like It was so exciting just you know, walking down the streets and everyone was just like working on the next big thing and And so for me personally it was really, really great. And um And then we both felt some personal feelings of That

12:21 We actually should not To Utah. And where did you guys move to? Back to Provo.

12:33 Yeah, so move back to Provo. In fact we had our house up for sale. And we were gonna rent it out to somebody and we ended up just moving back into the same house. Wow. So all right, you're back in Utah. And then you go back to well, you return back to the to sort of your kind of your roots, which is you went to go work at Ancestry as a a director of product in twenty fifteen. Yep Meantime, your wife

12:59 As a cousin This is Kid Sawyer who's a s who's at um he's a student in Logan at Utah State University. And I guess he somehow gets connected with you because he's interested in becoming an entrepreneur and has an idea for like a clothing brand while he's a student in college. Tell me a little bit about this idea he had and how he approached you. Yeah, so he wants to start a clothing company and I gave him some money to do it and it was called Ember, EMBR. And I didn't know if it was gonna be successful or not at all. And for me it was really just this guy was a you know, really excited and I thought, you know

13:32 I wanted to kinda help him along his entrepreneurially if I could. And it didn't work out. And he came to me at the end of it and was like, Hey Um I need to pay back all this money I borrowed from you. How much did he borrow from you?

13:44 I don't even remember to be honest with you. Was it less than twenty five thousand or fifty thousand? It's some it could have been somewhere around there, yeah. But You know, he wanted to pay it all back though, which was significant for him, you know, at the time he's a college student and And I was like, sorry, that's not how it works. It failed. You know, if the business would have succeeded, I would have made money and and you would have made money, but it it didn't work out. And but I was just so impressed by his character and who he was as a person, um, that really made me think, this guy's a good guy. We need to start something sometime.

14:14 Just to pause for a sec. You were Working at Ancestry. In the back of your mind were you still Thinking I

14:22 'Cause you'd seen all of these people in the Bay Area and all these people that you'd come across had these huge probably successful Exits and In the back of your mind were you still thinking, I'm still there's still Something out there for me to start.

14:35 Yeah, I think, you know, when you get a taste of virality and growth, there was kind of this void and this feeling of like What am I working on? Like what's my even my purpose here? Am I working on things just to work on things to make money? Am I like what You know, just Not feeling like I was making a difference. Truthfully. And that was kind of a

14:54 really painful almost just to be like, what am I even doing? And is my time valuable and worth it? Alright, so let's get to the cookies here. So you are You are obviously searching for some Interesting. I don't know, it would fill a void that you kind of had and

15:11 And so how did the cookies come about. What what even prompted that? I mean Everything up until this point was around technology, right? Yeah. And That was your background. You'd been in social media and you'd been a

15:25 you know, sort of focused on virality and And then cookies. So how How did that conversation even start? With Sawyer. Yeah, so Sorry and I w were just trying to come up with some ideas and we thought

15:37 And we just were our families um love, you know, and I think in the the culture in Utah of people bringing treats and bakeds to each other and and for parties and family get togethers and that sort of thing. It makes so much sense that baking culture is a big part of the sort of church culture because It's about community gathering and also It's a vice, right? It's like the only vice really.

16:02 As I started to dig into it, it really made a lot of sense to me why small town Utah was the perfect place to start this thing. Yeah, you know, I We thought the time well. would be cool to kinda do something. And we thought, Well, why not do cookies? Uh there's some local cookie shops here that started doing cookies too as well and You had other places in the east coast that were doing large gourmet cookies that were really big and

16:26 But what was actually really exciting for me at the time was not just the cookies, but was the technology behind it. You know, at the time. you know, DoorDash wasn't really prevalent and so it was like I could order pizza Or that's about it for delivery. I'm like, that doesn't make any sense. And so I thought, well, if we create cookies, the most important thing though will be the technology. And we could build this technology. And we could leverage it to potentially deliver other things to homes and that sort of thing. So it was kind of early, you know, it was like the DoorDash thinking earlier on.

16:55 I mean initially it was inspired by delivery. I mean there was we've done insomnia cookies on the show, which is also a great story. And that started out as a del as a delivery brand and The so the initial idea was Let's have a a cookie that people can order like

17:11 to door dash. To their dorm room or whatever. Yeah, that's kind of was the Uh the start of it. But the problem is is we had absolutely zero baking experience. We didn't know

17:22 anything. So although our family ate a lot of treats and we had that culturally there Our personal experience hadn't been that strong at all. And so at the time we were like okay, well delivery's the most important, what if we just buy this from Cisco or for some other brand and and just deliver them to houses and then we you know, the thing that I know and Sawyer felt strongly this way too is if our names are gonna be on it, it has to be the best. All these kinds of things and so it kinda starts down a quest of okay, well how do we create the world's best cookie? What's the methodology for creating the world's best cookie? And traditionally people would just they would take a

17:57 their great grandmother's recipe or a recipe they find a line and tweak it or somet something like that. and create this recipe and we thought, what if we do something different? What if we take the the same methodology that we use in technology, this A B testing model, and let's taste test our our way to the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Right. So it sounds like already you drop this idea of we're just gonna deliver whatever cookie we can get, you know,'cause this is like twenty seventeen. This is early twenty seventeen where you start to talk about it. It sounds like pretty quickly

18:27 you land on the idea that this is gonna be a cookie shop and not a cookie delivery service. Well that was that no that's a great question because earlier we were deciding whether we should actually even have a storefront or whether we should do just delivery. And originally we thought about even just delivering it out of a a home. So we'd make home made cookies. Bake it and then deliver them from our home. Right.

18:48 you know, you're thinking, Okay, well let's figure out how we're gonna sell these later, but now let's just kinda work on a recipe and let's let's just make cookies and So you guys go down a rabbit hole. cookie making for several months. And what I mean What were you

19:05 trying to do? I mean what were you trying to figure out? during that time. We were literally just trying to figure out what tasted the best. What we would do is we would literally take a Chocolate chip cookie.

19:17 We change out an ingredient. And we would go to a friends and family and even we started going to a local gas station, like just random people. People looked at us like we were crazy. We're like, Hey, here's here's two chocolate chip cookies. Can you take a bite of each of these and tell me which one you think is best? And so Then we we were trying to decide between milk, chocolate, chip, or semi sweet. We're like, this is a big decision. Like for us, it was like the world depended upon whether the chips were gonna be milk or whether they're gonna be semi sweet. And so we put a survey out on Twitter. And the survey results came back.

19:47 And it was seventy percent milk chocolate chip, thirty percent. Semi sweet. And that's how we decided that we were gonna go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi sweet. Right. You know, when you're making the the world's best chocolate chip cookie, it's not just about

20:03 um the ingredients, but it's how you prepare the ingredients. It's how you mix, how long you mix for. And I don't want to give anyway trade trade secrets today, but But how long it rests for the size of the cookie, the temperature of the cookie, if does it rotate, does it Do you slam the pan in the middle of it, right? Things like that. Yeah, there's a lot of nuance to You know, how how much you whip the butter will depend on how the shape of your cookie. And we were doing it actually in Sawyer's mom's house at first.

20:32 And doing it a a home in a home oven versus commercial equipment. We learned just two totally different things. And then when we got the commercial equipment, we were like, Oh, we have to do this all over again because it's actually completely different. Well, but there's a leap from making it and then saying, We're gonna invest in commercial equipment. Like 'Cause I think this is like a s five month process, right? Of you guys experimenting with different recipes. But What was the catalyst that got you To say, you know what, let's go to the next step.

21:02 And bye. Commercial cooking equipment. Well, you know, I there wasn't a lot of Grandmaster Planner thinking. It was just Tenacity of saying We're on a mission and we're gonna accomplish this. And we realized that like you had to have the equipment for us to actually figure out how to do it.

21:17 And so We did I w sometimes I think we say we did this backwards, meaning like we rented out the building, we got the commercial equipment, we did all that. And we still didn't even know what the recipe was. When we come back in just a moment, Crumble is finally ready to launch, but just before it does,

21:36 Jason learns of a rival startup in the same town doing exactly the same thing. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Jason is still working on the perfect recipe for his new cookie business. And meanwhile, his partner Sawyer is in Logan, Utah, scouting at a place to build the first store. Sawyer called me up one day and said, Hey, there's a building here. It's um there used to be, you know, another business in there. It was super popular. It's this particular location.

22:26 And I think we can get it for really cheap because they're gonna demolish it soon. I'm like oh And now at the time for me that was actually exciting because If this didn't work, I didn't want a five year lease on my hands, you know. Yeah. And so this like this was like part of our like test and learn ex you know culture here was like, oh, this'll be fantastic. We'll

22:45 You know, we'll we'll rent it and so I think he was asking something like twelve hundred dollars a month or something for it. And I was like, sorry, we need to get it to you know eight or nine hundred dollars and I still to this day if if that landlord had not lowered the price of that building. I'm not sure where we would be today. Well.

23:03 I call that the multi billion dollar decision because I often think about how many decisions are three hundred dollar decisions that are life changing for you. You know? And I mean it was a it was clearly would have been worth whatever, right? But The landlord end up saying yes. Who else am I gonna get to rent this building that I'm gonna demolish? It was probably it was a win win for him too as well.

23:26 Okay, so you you get this shop that's gonna be demolished, and At that point now. What's what I'm curious about is The shop was in Logan, Utah and I think you were living in Provo, right? Yes. Yes. Which is gotta be an hour and a half, two hour drive.

23:41 It is. So Sawyer Lived in Logan though. And so It was close to Sawyer. And the idea was that I'm gonna build the technology, do the marketing

23:50 And Sawyer would do the kind of run the store. But While we were getting up and going, I was travelling there all the time. Right. And you got the lease that you could start to m move the equipment into the

24:01 But before I ask you about like sort of building it out, I mean it's only gonna be around for six months, right? Before they do we can demolish it, but I mean This was gonna be a small business, it was gonna be a small side hustle. Yeah, that was it. This is gonna be a side hustle. It'll be fun. It'll be great for learning for Sawyer and

24:18 And really if the technology ends up being really successful, then then we had something really Good that we could use. And what was the technology side of it going going to be? Like'cause it it was gonna be a a shop selling cookies, but tell me about What were you gonna focus on? Yeah. So I was focusing on on like okay, how do we get our first product, uh, which was the chocolate chip cookie. Yeah.

24:38 And then how do we build the technology meaning like routing it to houses? So this was still gonna be a delivery business, even though there was a shop. It was gonna be delivery business, yes, yes. So you had to hire Drivers and things like that. Exactly. So we hired our own drivers, did our own thing. How do we keep these things warm? All those kinds of things were things that we were working on, um, really early on. But if it was in'cause

25:00 Just to put this in perspective, I mean Logan, Utah Northern Utah, close to the Idaho border, population of fifty thousand people. I mean, we're not talking about Like even Salt Lake City, this is not a huge m number of people there, right? And so To me the idea of

25:15 putting all this time and effort into building out like a Delivery network of drivers and how to keep it warm for a population of fifty thousand people seems nuts. I mean right? I mean I don't know. In my mind, you know, I I often listen to, you know, Paul Graham and he talks a lot about, you know, focusing on a few customers. and making a product or experience really well for them and then it will scale eventually. And so my whole thinking was Okay, how do I build something that will make these people extremely happy and

25:53 We were gonna build it along the way, and I was as much fascinated with scratching that itch of just doing something that could be different and physical and not in the technology world. And it was so Like going from like Pixels. to actual physical things.

26:09 was so like alive. Like my all of a sudden my career and what I was doing was like all of a sudden there was color to it. You know, I was like, oh this is so exciting. Like I was as much fascinated by the learning experience of what we were doing as much as like the business or making money or any of those kinds of things. Yeah. But to justify the time and the effort and even the The money that you're putting in. You had to have thought that this could maybe

26:35 lead to something else. Like it sounds to me that like The cookies were interesting, but that maybe the technology that you were building, the distribution network, that's something that you could sell eventually. Totally.

26:48 Yes. Alright, so you guys had the lease, and what about the store? Did you do a build out? I mean, did you it was gonna be demolished, so But you still have to make it look nice enough, right?'Cause people are gonna go into the store. Oh, we we totally did. And I was so nervous about it at the time. I mean, I built the first counter, um, just to show you how you know frugal I was. Like You know, we went in there and tore things out and started doing things and

27:12 Even at the time, I didn't even this I didn't even know that you were supposed to get like Permits and all those kinds of things to do a lot of these things. So we were doing some of these things without permits. And of course we were on social media. We were just sharing on social media behind the scenes what we were building and pictures of the build out. And at the time that was like Whoa you can kinda get a live peek into you know, a store, local store getting built out and we started building a following that way.

27:37 I think you Open the shop. In the fall of twenty seventeen. And Did you open with like

27:45 One or two. Like how man how many different cookies do you open with? That's it. Just chocolate chip. Just chocolate chip. And the problem was We didn't have time to do more. Like the building was gonna get demolished. So it's like if we wanna build a full menu, like there's no way. We we spend so much time building one product because We just were constantly trying to tweak it to make it better. That we're like, that's it. We're gonna launch with one. They're gonna be warm, they're gonna be big. We wanted them big because you know they're meant to be shared. So if you're taking them, you're kinda sharing them and all of a sudden people are trying them and that's how the virality grows within the the food concept that we were trying to do.

28:19 And I still remember because remember I've been in social media for my whole life. So it was all about grow, grow, grow, grow. We'll worry about profits and revenues later. And I still remember this man came and he had on a plaid shirt. He had bought this box. And this four pack of chocolate chip cookies. And he handed me money.

28:37 And it was like Wow. Wait, people are actually gonna pay for this, like all this energy and all this time. And we had him you know, I had him change and I remember just thinking. Oh my goodness.

28:48 We created a business and it has revenue on day one. And I remember being so excited. And really you were building up I mean, the social media presence presumably it was for a local audience, right? It was you were trying to get people in and around Logan to be aware of it. Yeah, we were and you know, Sawyer had a um had his personal social media, they had friends and stuff like that. We actually leveraged that, started off, it had like I think ten thousand followers or something like that. I don't remember the exact number, but we got in the newspaper too as well. And then our competition opened up one week before us.

29:18 Wow. Mm. They saw what we had done. And they opened up from their homes and they wanted to do delivery. And they launched one week before us. And I remember just being devastated like

29:31 And technology first movers advantage is everything. And that's been kind of built into my core And we're like, Oh, is this gonna work? Did they already get the first movers advantage? Are we gonna look Like copycatters, it's just like what's gonna happen here. And I remember just looking over at Sawyer, and I think that's why we spent so much time on the product. Yeah.

29:51 was because we knew that At the end of the day, it all comes down to the product. And I told Soris just let's ignore the competition completely. They're not gonna be our customers. They're not gonna keep us in business. Let's focus 100% on our customers. If we build products. that our customers love and they have great experiences in the stores. We'll win.

30:12 And so when you opened, right, your a week after your competitor had opened How did it do? It did phenomenal. Lines were out the door. Just for chocolate chip cookies. Oh, it was crazy, guy. I I was still shocked to this day. All the social media marketing and we did digital spend advertising too. So all the stuff that I'd done before in the past. So we we were able to market to everyone.

30:34 And it everyone saw it worked. Tell me a little bit about h this or the thinking around The branding or the look. For example, I think from the beginning you sold the cookies in these pink Boxes.

30:49 Yeah, you know, I think What was interesting is our competition at the time was going after the college market,'cause it was, you know, a college town. The problem was is the people that were coming into our building were women. And we thought Wait a second, what if we're focusing on moms?

31:06 And not on college students. And Sawyer's um had a a a core memory growing up where one of his dad's friends had a Cadillac and it was pink. And he loved the color. From that catalog, and we thought, what if we just take that iconic catalog color? It'll set us apart and we'll be different. Uh and so I really kinda love that.

31:25 Alright, so now you've got this and and you're going back and forth between Logan and Provo, like Every couple of days or once a week, or Yeah, oh uh like yes, I there was times where I was slow driving all the way around Utah looking for pink boxes. And then delivering them. Hm.

31:42 It was really one of those things behind the scenes where we were everything. I was on the phone with customer service. And at the time we had a delivery technology that allowed us to do routing for the deliveries, and deliveries was really big early on. 'Cause people are so excited. You could get something warm delivered to your door. And where the mouth started spreading. Um, but I was behind the scenes on the weekends.

32:03 literally just moving around the routes and had a big map and it had all the deliveries on a map. And I was rerouting to try to make sure that the drivers would be optimally driving. And so a new driver would come show up and all of a sudden they'd pop up online. I'm like, okay, I gotta reroute all these. So we didn't have any of the technology at the beginning to route everything perfectly. We were doing it by hand. I mean you were building a logistics network, like a mini UPS. Yes. It was a lot. But how is that sustainable? I mean delivering is really expensive, right? From what I understand, it really only works

32:34 on a large scale. I mean you got you had drivers being paid hourly to drive to deliver cookies and How did that work in terms of Well what we did early on is

32:47 We made sure that all the cookies were warm. We had these bot these cases and we had these warmers, these gel packs that we'd microwave. Well, what we learned we could do was is we wouldn't send out drivers with the exact order because remember there's only one flavor. We would send them out with way more cookies than they already had current orders for. And so as a new order would pop up, if it was close to them, I would just slot it in. And so all of a sudden the logistics became a lot, you know, lower cost because we were optimizing routes so much. It worked really, really well for l logistics.

33:17 All right, so you've got this store that's really kinda starting to take off. And in I mean I guess not too long into the business. You decided to open a second store, like by the end of twenty seventeen, decide to open one in in our second one we opened up And Or a mutah.

33:37 And what's interesting about this is and so there was another uh a competitor that was in Provo Area. And we were like, Okay, well how can we kinda win Utah? And we came up with the idea of create using this technology and this delivery network to deliver to all of basically a big part of Utah. So we our second location was actually a warehouse. So while the competitors are only opening to a small radius, what if we opened up to all of Utah County and we could start delivering into, you know, ten different cities? It would be a central kitchen, like a central commissary. Yeah, like a commissary. That's exactly right. So we create this commissary in this warehouse, and then we opened up to delivery only. So that became a very logistic

34:16 challenge because we just had tons of deliveries and it kept growing and growing and growing. Demand was outstripping, you know, our ability to produce them. And so, you know, we got some bad reviews and it started being, you know, really troublesome for us to figure out how to actually service these customers. And that's when we thought, okay. We also need to have better experiences. And so that's when we decided, okay, we're gonna we're gonna start opening up in other areas. But The the reason why we opened up in Banafle, Utah. First was because Sawyer's uh mom was gonna be originally a third owner in the business. Then Bountiful was gonna be your third location. Yeah, Bantiful was gonna be our third location. It was our first franchise location.

34:57 And the reason we franchised that first location was so here's mom was gonna be a part of the business early on. And Sawyer's dad was like, Uh, you're gonna spend a lot of time in this bakery, it's not gonna make a lot of money, you're gonna be away from the grandkids, I'm not sure is this gonna be really worth it to you. So she decided to bow out and not do it. But um they came back and Sawyer's dad's like, she's gonna kill me. She sees the success of the business. Is there any way she can buy a portion of the business? Or is there anything that we can do? And so that's when I started kind of, you know, researching and like, well, franchising, that's like we already invest the money. The business was self-sustaining, it was already making money and paying for itself. Um so there was no need for capital at the time, and we wanted to try to build this without outside capital. And so we started franchising. So we went to a franchise attorney, learned how about the franchising, and so we franchised our first location in Bantiful. And I will tell you, I have never been more nervous about spending someone else's money in my entire life. You know, it was

35:54 It was one thing to waste my own money if it didn't work out, but to now have somebody else's money in there. I was so stressed out um that I was gonna lose Sawyer's parents money and we get to the store bountiful, we lease the building, and I remember someone came in and they said, Oh, this is gonna be so amazing. It's gonna be so amazing because every other business that's come here has closed down. And I remember just my gut just dropped and like Oh my goodness, we picked the wrong location.

36:22 But We powered through it and the minute we opened it up The lines are just out the door. So There was no plan, I mean

36:31 Again, like it seems like it just kind of happened organically. It was it did they wanted to open They want it in, you sort of thought, Well let's try franchise model. the beauty of a franchise model is you I mean if you do it right, you don't need to bring in a lot of outside money because the franchisee pays the fees. To build out. And so with the success of that shop.

36:54 immediately you thought to yourself, Okay, we're a franchise business now. Yeah. And we had friends and family who saw this. So I had friends in my neighborhood and sorry, I had some family members and they all wanted to do a a crumble. And so we opened up a few more crumbles and all of a sudden they started doing really well. And then we had someone come in and they wanted to open up twenty locations in Colorado.

37:16 Wow. They came to me and they said, Well, we have two conditions. Jason, my condition number one is that we own the marketing. We want to own our own customers to be able to do our own marketing. And I said, Okay, well maybe we could work on that. And the second thing they said was There's no way this is gonna work outside Utah. If you stay close on Sundays.

37:32 Right, you're closed on Sunday. Yeah. If we let them open on Sunday, they'll open the the twenty locations, they'll they'll grow it across all of Colorado. And they said your business will never be successful outside of Utah. If you don't. And I thought

37:49 we want to be able to give bakers time off. We want them to be able to spend time with their friends and families. And this is just core to who we are. It's spending time with family. And if people want to worship on Sundays or they want to do other things on Sundays. I don't want to work on Sundays. And I remember talking to my wife and uh talking to Sawyer and And we came to the conclusion that Even though it financially didn't make sense that it was important to us because that's really our mission of bringing people together. They said your business

38:15 That's never gonna work outside Utah. And I said, Well if it doesn't, it doesn't. And um that was a big kind of moment for us. Um franchising the franchising model's complex, right? Because and usually people who do it have experience In franchising, first of all

38:32 How did you even start so once this one and bountiful becomes successful? And you know that people want to start and open them up. Did you hire like consultants to help you understand how to do this? Who did who did who helped you figure this out? You know, so a lot of it we just looked up online and a lot of the people were our friends and family. So it was like they were very forgiving and patient with us because we would give them recipes, you know, at that time we started having more recipes And we started giving them recipes like two or three days before they're supposed to be made. And there was a lot of scaling pains and problems early on.

39:05 Of us trying trying to just grow it. And so after we got like, you know, six, seven, eight stores open, that's when things actually really changed because everyone kept saying, Well, only people in Utah like sugar. You know, sounds crazy when you just say it like that. But that was kind of the thinking and it's not gonna succeed outside of Utah. It's hot cookies, they're not gonna succeed outside of, you know, in in warm climates. But then when it started working in Vegas and a couple other places. We really got to this moment that was okay. Sorry, this has been fun side business.

39:36 But we're now gonna take over the nation. We're gonna go from a franchise business with our friends and family and trying to do something fun and cool to Let's create a real business and let's take over the United States with this concept. When we come back in just a moment.

39:53 Jason learns that almost all publicity is good publicity. Even when it's about flavors. That flop. Stay with us, I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to how I built this, I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2018, a year after launch, and Crumble Cookies is growing into more than just a side hustle.

40:32 It went from, hey, this is a cool concept. So, you know, we we said, Okay, we nailed it. Now how do we scale it? Because it's a whole different skill set and a whole different business, right? And so we went from these cookies and and and teaching people how to do it, how do we build this big franchise business? And we had one rule which was we need to fire ourselves. Every single day I wake up, I've gotta fire myself from from jobs that can be easily done by somebody else. You know, so customer support. We gotta fire ourselves, we've gotta find who's the best customer support person we could find. You know, it's like I can't be doing deliveries anymore. I gotta work on the business, not in the business. How do we fire ourselves from delivery drivers? How do we and One of the things that we we often would say to ourselves is we need to quit making ten store decisions. We need to start making one hundred store decisions, one thousand store decisions.

41:20 You know, like for example, let me give you a a a specific example. How are we gonna train all the bakers on the recipes because at this time we had a rotating menu, which basically rotated every single week. How we're gonna train the entire nation We need we have a thousand stores and thirty, forty thousand bakers. And so like that led to like the decision of building technology. So we have our own custom

41:42 app that shows people how to train. We we invested in videography and training tools and so And people can c see how many people are trained in their store and what their level is and their knowledge skills and their stuff. But I'm I mean I'm curious In twenty eighteen, this is your first full year in business, by the end of that year there were sixteen locations, right? Which is a really fast growth. I mean not as fast as as it would eventually become, but still like You know, and You had a brand and you had a quality product and you had to ensure that all those sixteen stores

42:16 were doing the same things, right? That they were Making the dough exactly the same way that they were Frosting the cookies. Maybe you weren't frosting them quite yet, but And then when you had a new cookie uh you had to unroll you to roll that out to all those stores like in that first year

42:33 How did you manage Teaching people how to do that. A lot of it was us sending over the rep recipes to them. And doing just content videos of just sharing with them like how how they should make this, how this should be done, um, and how the recipe should look. And the second thing that we did is we had everyone send their pictures in. So they'd have to take pictures of the product. And we had people here that would just critique it and say, That doesn't look right.

42:56 Let's see what you're doing here. Are you mixing wrong, or you're over mixing, or what happened? And so we were constantly like gathering data digitally, and we were really relentless. And so a lot of it was manual. The processes were manual. But that w that couldn't last forever. But for the first hundred locations, for example. I did the real estate. So I went out And I w met with the entrepreneurs and the the franchisees and I'd watch I'd go tour the locations and we'd look at them and we would talk about them and we'd, you know, eventually I couldn't do that anymore, but

43:29 I was there. We were boots on the ground. We were in it. Yeah. Well I mean you you had to because if the more stores you're opening the more risk there is that one of them is gonna isn't gonna be up to scratch, right? And you s could start getting negative reviews by people who are like, Oh, this crumble cookie place sucks, right? If one of those franchise So it's like

43:49 you really had to make sure that their standards were what you I'm curious, like. By the end of twenty eighteen I mentioned. Um You'd sixteen locations and I read that your revenue was about under a million dollars.

44:03 But you were growing, obviously, and by the by the end of twenty nineteen, so your second full year You had fifty five locations and you're you'd earned about four and a half million dollars. In revenue. Do you think being in Utah at the beginning is a major reason why it was able to scale that that because culturally it was the right fit and there was a fan base and

44:25 It's baking and it's Do you think had you started it I don't know in Los Angeles? Maybe it wouldn't have worked. I think you're probably right. I re member reading the the book about some Walton in Made in America and how he went to the outskirts of Walmart. It's almost like the Walmart strategy.

44:43 And where you go to all these smaller towns and, you know, populations of sixty thousand, a hundred thousand So yeah, I do think that It also created this energy excitement. You know, when you go to North Dakota And you and there haven't been a lot of other brands that have gone to North Dakota? Man, you should see sales go crazy in North Dakota, right? Because

45:01 People are talking about it. Like there's a thousand other concepts in in let's say LA or New York, and you're just one of many But when you're in these towns and you're taking care of these customers that maybe don't have a lot of options, it's also really exciting for them. Yeah. Tell me about social media now. I'm I mean, you came from this background, like you had All this experience with social media. Tell me a little bit about how you started to think about

45:29 leveraging social media to turn what was a basic cookie, a good cookie, but there are lots of good cookies available in America. But how do you then use social media to really differentiate it. How did you start to think about that? Well, you know, I think one thing that we had done really early on, which sounds very simple

45:48 But lots of brands don't do it. Is we actually engage with our customers. It surprises me today that so many brand and businesses spend so many dollars trying to attract new customers, and then when they come talk to them on social media, they're just like Ignore them. They don't answer their DMs and they just are constantly trying to grind and find new audiences or create new splashes. And so for us, we carefully over long periods of time have built relationships with our customers. And people are like, well, you have a cult like following. We have a we call them caught like relationships here, which we respond back to our customers. We respond to their feedback. If they have ideas for cookies, guess what? We actually implement them. When they have complaints or frustrations about a product, if it tasted a certain way they didn't like.

46:31 We take that feedback, we actually fix our products. And it gets harder and harder over time, but even today we have over thirty people that are just dedicated to responding to people. So I think As you build a social presence, you cannot underestimate the compounding effects. Of constantly talking to your customers. That compounds Exponentially over time. How did you land on what I think a lot of people think of crumble cookies as sort of like a frosted cookie? It's almost like

46:59 You know, I think there like there was a cupcake craze. It's still still around, right? People still go to eat cupcakes. But You know, a lot of your cookies have a you know, a layer of frosting on top, which is Different, unusual. How did that

47:12 come about because I think again that when I think of crumble cookies, I think of that sort of Really Sort of lavishly decorated cookie. You know one of the things that uh You know, sorry and I think about a lot. So we constantly ask ourselves, how are cookies different, unique, and special?

47:28 And it allows us to just try crazy things, you know, and because our menu rotates every week. If something doesn't land, guess what? Who cares? At least we were trying something fun and it was different and unique. That's kind of been our mantra. You know, we started doing things like adding a frosting. And I remember when we added the frosting for the first time, like operationally it was extremely challenging. Customers love it, which created demand, which created more than it's a good thing. Some people hate it. Right, too, which which also works to your advantage because it's controversial. There are people who do see this and they're like, that's disgusting. That's too much sugar. You're right, it does create this controversy and this conversation online.

48:05 But at the end of the day, we look at the data and say, what do customers want? And you know, we we say this a lot here at Cremble is Our critics don't pay for our business. Our fans do. I think that's a really important point'cause I think a lot of brands and you know, folks do pay attention to their haters and and that's not who who's buying your product. I m I wonder about

48:25 How did you start to think about really getting this idea of crumble as a brand, like when people think of cookies and for example, who are you targeting particular because initially it was It was women, it was moms coming into the store and Logan But I imagine eventually it was like well, it's actually

48:42 Kids, teenagers. Yeah, it it's a combination of both. Those are our two strong demographics. It's both moms is kind of our primary and then teenagers is our secondary. But how we so how do we think about brand? You know. being in the tech world and being around, you know, Steve Jobs and and you know, a lot of people call us the apple of cookies sometimes and especially early on with our stores and their white and like unlike other cookie concepts, you can actually see them making the ingredients.

49:07 Right. You can smell the store when you get in there. But a big part of the brand is The rotating menu was born after Bountiful, after the first week in Bantiful. By that time we had something like eleven flavors. We couldn't keep them all in stock. People were frustrated to come get their favorite flavor, but they couldn't get them. And we sat down at the end of the week in that bountiful location and we said What if we rotate the menu? We drop it on this Sunday when no one can get it. People will freak out. They'll want the product. They'll be talking about the product.

49:34 But then everyone across all of our locations can experience the same flavor at the same time and have conversations around them. You know, people are not gonna remember the exact flavor that they had that week, or they're not gonna remember the exact taste, although those things are d really important. They're gonna remember how they felt, what the experience was like, you know, and so and and sometimes it even works. even on product that is completely people don't like. One one good example was Everything But Bagel. We launched this Everything But Bagel and all of a sudden people are like, what the heck are you even doing, crumble? But the amount of conversation and the amount of people coming to try it and then telling us why it was horrible It actually facilitated our mission.

50:16 When you make an everything but the bagel cookie, that's gonna generate a lot of conversation. I mean it's it's from a marketing perspective, like it makes a lot of sense. Totally. It makes a ton of sense. You know, and sometimes they may not even be the biggest sellers. But the earned media behind them becomes a really big deal. When you're like a year or two in, right? I mean, from the outside it looks like wow, you're just crushing it at fifty five locations. you're a year and a half in, four four and a half million dollars in revenue, but actually That's when you're extremely vulnerable. I mean there are tons of examples, not tons, l lots of examples of

50:51 franchise models that failed that went under after you know expanding or selling tons of franchises So in a sense like you're actually still very vulnerable at that point. Yeah, I know definitely. And I think I think people see it on social media. And all of a sudden they're like, Oh, I could do this. This is just cookies, it's simple. Yeah.

51:09 So of course you have people, you know competition of there's wanting to open up stores. And so for us though that became How do we become really nimble and really quick, even as a larger company? And how do we grow the the store footprint?

51:24 to cover across the United States as fast as possible. That was the that was the realization that you had to do this very fast. Scale. Scale and speed. So scale and speed. you know, it creates this moat and it creates this experience that you know, discourages competition uh if you become the first movers. And you see this with, you know, In and Out or Wadaburger, how one has the East Coast, one has the West Coast, and they're they're kind of, you know, several brands. And for us, our belief was how do we how do we go across the nation as fast as possible? So that that that doesn't happen.

51:56 Yeah. Let's talk about TikTok because You really figure out how to Get virality, like a massive viral. I think you've got ten million TikTok followers on your channel, more than Starbucks, right, for example. Starbucks and Nucky combined. I think we have more than both those combined, yeah. So вот you what did you do on TikTok?

52:13 That worked. And that was able like was it just images of cookies breaking? Was it just crazy cookies with w wild frosting, like weird flavors? What were you putting out there that caught fire. Well, I think it's first and foremost that one of the most important decisions we made was to go on the platform early on. And you see the engagement numbers, you see everything else, and you're like, This is gonna be huge.

52:36 go all in on TikTok. So we had a first early movers advantage over a lot of brands. And the second thing that we did is I think a lot of brands companies, they try to take their their content And they try to just disperse it across all the social networks. Yeah. It's all the same, right? It's like the same video. Let's drop it on all five platforms. Well The problem is is the customers on X are different than the customers on TikTok and are different than the customers on Instagram and what they're going for and their motives and their desires are different. So how our photos look and the photography in Instagram, really big deal. TikTok Nobody cares, right? So so what the second thing that we did other than just the early, you know, movers advantage is we tried to find out what the customers were already doing and leverage that. So one thing that we did was the customers were really excited about, you know, sharing their reviews. This is kind of where reviews started really taking off on TikTok. And so a couple of things started happening like wow, how do we champion these reviewers? And so we started, you know, putting their videos in the stores. So people physically would walk in and be like, Oh my goodness, there's TikTok videos of like in the stores. In the stores. On a screen.

53:46 Just on like replay. Just yeah, replay doing it, right? We started kind of highlighting the TikTok, you know, customers. We started reposting them, and then we started just doing reviews. And I remember I did a review and I neg I did a a positive review and uh I did a negative review on a cookie I didn't like. 'Cause everyone has different taste buds. And they're like the CEO is doing a negative comment on a cookie. And like it just we were authentic. We were just who we were. It wasn't like we were trying to do something or we were just trying to be authentic to the audience that was there. So this is the other kind of I think differentiator, which is You change all of the cookies every week except for the chocolate chip cookie. That stays, right? And everything else is changed every week. Every single week.

54:28 And you drop that. those flavors it's like a drop, like a Like a new purse or a new sneakers. Like you you have a flavor drop every Sunday. And literally I mean, even if you could have a week, right, where Only the chocolate chip cookie is selling well, but the other ones are not like

54:45 I'm looking at it this week here in my area, like blueberry cheesecake is a flavor, and that might not be popular. Or it might be super popular, but it's gone in a week. Exactly. You know, and you have people that they don't want to miss it that week. And so there's FOMO that plays involved in it. All those all those things come into play. But yeah, people People will freeze them. People will buy them in droves. If it's their favorite flavor, they'll buy them and they'll freeze them so that they can have'em later. But this is interesting to me because I I have

55:12 spoken to a lot of conferences of franchise owners and You know, they always have some criticisms of the parent company. And I'm thinking if I'm a franchise owner and I'm paying you know you eight percent or nine percent And you know, you're telling me I've gotta make the almost everything bagel. cookie that week and no one's buying it. And I'm like Well last week we had the

55:33 Butterscotch crisp cookie and that was crushing it. Like I'm annoyed. Because I'm making less money that week. Yes. Well and I think That's the part of the business. And so yes, you have some franchise partners who probably are frustrated and wish we had this flavor versus that flavor.

55:49 One thing that we've done recently is We've brought our franchise, we bring a council together of franchisees. So we have several franchisees who've run extremely well, you know, well run stores, and they come together and they help us pick the flavors together. We do it as a team. I mean sometimes like what is the criteria for pr like You've had like pineapple dole whip cookie, right? Or Cornbread cookie, which doesn't to me or strawberry limeed with nerds candies. That just sounds really gross to me. How do you um Have you tried it?

56:20 I haven't noticed. Yeah, see, you've got to try one. You've got to try it. I could tell you haven't tried that one,'cause you probably would like that one. Um You know, like How weird are you willing to go? Yeah, I think we can go pretty weird.

56:31 Buena. It's fun. So we will we w our brand will always do that. I mean the flip side of I mean innovating obviously, but the flip side is is that you do too many things, right? Is that you're pushing too many things out. But I guess that your what you're saying is You experiment.

56:47 And if it doesn't work, you just move on. You just kill it. Yeah. I think that's why our franchise partners are willing to work with us and willing to try new things. They know equally equally that we're trying new things, that we'll kill something. When it's a bad idea That's culturally like just part of who we are. Yeah.

57:06 Um, I know Covid was a huge you know, like actually was a huge sort of boost for the brand because a lot of people were on social media, they were noticing the brand and In many states the stores could stay open, but And that also Inspired and continues to inspire

57:23 copycatters, right, which I think is a form of flattery, but also can be threatening to the business. And and you did file lawsuits against competitors that you felt were were copying your brand or your look or the boxes and things like that. Um and this was g it was it was dubbed the Utah Cookie War by the newspapers at the time because these were both Utah based companies. on both of which are still around. In your view, like Is it worth it to go after somebody who's copying your uh'cause we've had founders in the company who's just say At the end of the day, it's not worth the time and the effort to do that. You just focus on

57:58 your brand and others say no you've got to go after every single one because they can threaten your business. Yeah, you know, I think that's a great question. I think My answer before and after all this experience is probably different. There the biggest struggle we actually had was what's my fiduciary responsibility as CEO. because it was not like people were just copying us. We had we had somebody that came and worked for our company and stole our recipes. Your trade secrets. Yeah, stole our trade secrets and then started so f for us we of course felt like we had a very strong case and the the the judge felt like we did too as well, and but the court of public opinion is different. It's in about some bites, and you know, by this time we got larger, so they try to create it to be a a David versus Goliath experience.

58:49 Cookie's so good we're being sued. Yes, and that that was the company that actually had an employee that worked for us that took the recipes. But but looking back on it, I think I don't think it was worth the time and the energy. our our whole career has been built on not focusing on competitors. And then all of a sudden this happened and it caused us to lose focus for a little bit, to be honest, too. So

59:09 I would probably lean more into the camp with not being worth it. Uh By the end of twenty twenty two, you reached a billion dollars in sales. So listen, roughly five years. After launch, which is absolutely incredible. I mean this the growth was just

59:26 Astounding and entirely self funded, right? I mean there were no investors at that point? No investors, yep. We had no investors. Um still to this day, right? Well, we actually took on a minority partner just a few weeks ago, and that's the first time we've had a minority partner. Thanks. It was a It's a pretty exciting thing and we d we're not really announcing any of the details of the deal, but you know, it's the the company value is amazing and um We had just, you know, a few of us in the cap table and that was it.

59:58 So I'm curious about something and I don't want to rain on the parade, but you know, part of my job is to ask questions that might sound like that, but you know, when I was growing up the big cookie brand was Mrs. Fields. Mm-hmm. And it was started in Palo Alto by Mrs. Fields and Debbie Fields and It was everywhere. And they were good cookies. I remember N I can't remember the last time I saw Mrs. Fields. I'm sure they're around somewhere, but I don't know where Um, it can't be as big as it once was. Mm-hmm. Um I mean there is always a a risk that you know the the sort of the

1:00:32 virality or the excitement or the Novelty of it. wears off. And so how do you I mean I know, for example, you've slowed expansion, which again doesn't suggest that that's happening, but you're you've got over a thousand locations and you were growing very rapidly, and now you're going to slow down expansion a little bit. How do you protect the future? of the business. Like how do you make sure that in twenty years this isn't Mrs. Fields, if you care.

1:00:58 at all about that. Well, and how I look at it, no, of course we care about that. We care deeply about that. We want crumble to be a brand that's around forever. Uh we're really excited about it and we're very optimistic, you know. Even just now we took a minority investment. Could we have taken the whole company off the table? Yeah, that's that's That could have been a possibility. But it doesn't matter what business you are, you know, if you stop innovating, you stop growing, you start dying. So for example, today, a lot of times people don't even know it yet, but we're not just cookies anymore. You have cakes, too. We have cakes, yeah, we've got pies, you know. One of our slowest times of the year used to be Thanksgiving week. Well, guess what we did last w last year?

1:01:34 We just sold pies for Thanksgiving week. They love the pies. The sales were off the charts, right? And so You know, we did slow the growth, but some of the growth had to be slowed because we were opening, you know, two, three hundred units a year. Right. That's like doesn't matter what brand you are or how big you are. There comes a point when, you know, you've got to open the right amount. And so we still plan on growing, right? We still plan on growing a hundred units or so a year, but we wanna be a little bit more strategic in how we do it. Um and and where we place them and and all those kinds of things. That's how we stay ahead.

1:02:08 Jason, when you think about the journey you took and where you got to now, how much of of this do you attribute to the work you put in and the the grind and how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky in the in the right timing? Yeah, I think I For me, it's been the combination of three things. One, it is just tenacity and hard work. Can get you through a lot of stuff.

1:02:30 And second is in the timing. There is luck involved in there and and What would happen if I would have started meeting BYU dot com before Facebook and I mean but Then I think the other thing too is the learnings from my faith and and having that be a part of, you know, my focus and Those are the three things that I think about. Um, but if we just had luck and and not all the other things, it wouldn't have worked. If we had all the tenacity in the world and all the faith in the world.

1:02:56 And we didn't have a little luck along the way, you know, that and it wouldn't have happened. So I think it's a combination of all those things, and any successful entrepreneur You know, may they may may or may not admit it. They have those things in their life. You know, and And I think that's what helps make them successful.

1:03:14 But Jason McGowan, co founder along with Sawyer Hemsley. O crumble. By the way, remember how Crumble's pink packaging was inspired by that 1959 Cadillac owned by a family friend of Sawyer's? Well, in twenty twenty one, Sawyer actually had the chance to buy that very same Cadillac. Pale pink with those classic tail fins over the wheels, and

1:03:37 It's now become kind of a mascot for crumble. They call it the Pink Caddy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons, particularly for small business, sign up for my newsletter at guyros.com or on Substack. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramteen Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Carla Esteves. Our engineers are Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Carrie Thompson, Catherine Cypher, Noor Gill, Ramel Wood, Andrea Bruce and Elaine Coates.

1:04:19 I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening. to how I built this.

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