YouSaid · the spoken record

Arman Oganesyan

lines on the record: 97
first: 2024-06-10
most recent: 2024-06-10
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think it's we got lucky that hot chickens started to trend in Los Angeles but at the same time if Dave hadn't dedicated half of his life to studying culinary It wouldn't have really helped us, right? And then even when it came to the marketing, you know, yeah, we were lucky that I had a little bit of marketing knowledge from doing the comedy and stuff. But at the same time, like you needed the skill, right? So everything is a little bit of the skill and luck and you kind of need the little bit of luck to show your skill. But I think it doesn't matter how lucky you get and it doesn't matter how many people write about you. If your product is not good at the end of the day, none of it matters. And if your product is good, then somehow you're always going to end up getting lucky somehow, right?”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you think about this journey you took and where you guys got to and where you are now, I mean, you're so young, you're going to make a lot of money over the course of your life, even if you drop out and just are passive and owner, how much of where you got to this point do you think has to do with the grind and the work you put in? And how much do you attribute to just the luck of timing with hot chicken and, I don't know, and just the luck?”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so at least for the foreseeable future, Dave's is a pretty corporate company, but at the same time, we're very also mom and pop, right? Like you have Bill and John who are these really experienced people that have done it a million times before. And then you have these four young guys that are like high school dropouts that are more consumers. So we, you know, you combine those two things and this really good balance of understanding that goes on between the partners, right? And it helps the company be really healthy. It was like 30 year old high school dropouts and then these guys that have done crazy huge franchise concepts.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Funny because we're talking about that a lot lately. We're talking about is there potentially a partner out there that we can talk to that is obviously of the quality we want that's willing to franchise Dave's out there. So we're definitely in talks now. I think we kind of underestimated our international abilities. It's not something that we really wanted to do, but kind of looking at how Dubai, Qatar, and Canada are performing, it seems like international could be a great market.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's, I mean, we had like, there was a point where the growth went crazy. So, you know, there was a time where there was, it was like 10, 15 stores and out of nowhere.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know they don't want to take a risk on a one store or two store concept, you know, as popular as they might be in Los Angeles. So, you know, having investors like, let's say, saying, oh, Samuel L. Jackson is an investor and Drake is an investor, it gives them a little bit of assurance of like, okay, so maybe if they've invested, like maybe there's something here. So we would really use that to try to sell stores initially until the stores would open up and then they would kind of, you know, the numbers would speak for themselves. So you wouldn't necessarily have to use Drake's name as much or Samuel Jack's name as much. So then they eventually over time just became investors. But at first they were pretty key to us selling stores to big groups while only having one or two stores open.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Drake was the more critical one. You know, I think what it really helps with this franchise sales, right? Because as you're going after these really big franchise groups that own hundreds of stores,”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm curious about some of the people who got involved in investing were celebrities. Maria Shriver and Samuel L. Jackson and Michael Strahan. And I get pitched this all the time. People are like, our company has all these celebrity investors. And to be honest, my reaction is, okay, I mean, a celebrity is a celebrity. It doesn't make them a good investor because they're famous. It just makes them have money to invest. And then eventually Drake became a significant investor.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mom and pops anybody, which was a big mistake and it's something that they did differently with blazes they only sold to experience franchise groups that bought big territories. That's actually a much better idea is you only franchise to groups with multiple other stores that are running really good operations where this is exactly what they do where when you give them the store and the training manuals and everything, they're going to know exactly what to do with it.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Wasn't a doubt in our mind because that's kind of like what we had built the business to be. Obviously, like talking to Bill and Jung, even just from the first couple conversations we learned a lot, like a mistake dad made with Wetzels is they franchise to anybody that wanted to buy a store, right? Anyone, which.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so along with being franchisors, because the stores were very profitable and because it was our source of income, one of the causes of the deal was as the founders, we want to continue to open more stores, right? So we didn't want to take any territories that were too far away from us. So we just took the Los Angeles area and then we eventually took the Las Vegas territory because we felt like it was close enough for us to operate. So we kind of bought the territory of like Los Angeles and with the founders we own like I think 11 stores now.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You didn't have like a you didn't have like a payout at all. No. No, but you now had, and you retained, so you've got this franchise business that they own a big chunk of, you guys retain the majority ownership over. And now, from what I understand, you guys, you, Dave, Tommy, and Gary become franchisees.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, kind of. Yeah, sorry. No, so what we kind of did was we instead of like buying the company because we kind of had like Rafi to help us out. He was a friend of ours. I was a lawyer that we trusted. So he kind of advised us that it might be smarter to just like kind of just create a new franchise company, right? Like Dave's franchise co instead of just selling the company. We knew that as the founders we weren't ready to give up the company. The only way we wanted anyone to be a part of it is if they were going to continue to let us do things the way we wanted to do them. And we're just going to help us grow it versus take it off our hands.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they were like, what the hell is going on? So we knew pretty early on that, you know, they had the right energy to work with.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So the next day we meet Bill. And again, we loved his vibe. We loved their energy. What we loved about them versus other investors that we had met is we felt like they actually really, they gave credit to the founders, you know, whereas a lot of people came in with this energy of like, you guys got really lucky. And you guys don't know what you're going to do with this. They kind of understood that it doesn't seem like they got lucky. It seems like they knew a little bit of what they were doing, right? So we really appreciated that energy from them. And I remember that time on social media, if we ever posted that we didn't have a line, we'd get like hundreds of people coming in because we always had a line. So I fake posted that we didn't have a line just because I wanted to be extra packed up. So when they came in, there was like 150 people in line.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'll never forget, dude. Like, he was like, he was eating this food, and he was saying things. So it's like, this is, this is going to be huge, guys. I'm going to get the rock. I'm going to get Kevin Hart. He was like throwing out all these celebrity names and stuff like that. And again, I remember thinking either this guy is exactly who we need in life or he's just really crazy and this is just too good to be true. And then after he finished like, look guys, I want you guys to meet Bill Phelps, right? He's like, he's, you know, he's like, he's a guy I've worked with. He's very experienced in restaurants. He's like, why don't you guys meet with him tomorrow? He's like, I'd be really interested to see what he has to say about it, right?”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So I remember we were in our office, and one of our friends that worked for us is one of our partners now Vaje, he came into our office like, hey, somebody left a post-it note for you guys. And we're like, post-it note. And the post-it note said founders of Dave's, please call John Davis. And we're like, who's John Davis? We're like, this is really weird. And Tommy's like, yo, guys, I have a really good feeling about this one. He's like, we should probably call. And we were literally going to throw it away if Tommy hadn't said that he has a feeling about it, you know. So we call and they go, Davis Entertainment, how may we help you? And me and the guys looked at each other like, me doesn't even pick up his own phone. This guy must be big. You know what I mean? So, and then he picked up the phone and he was a really super cool guy. And he's like, hey guys, like, you know.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, as in time, yeah, we were a little naive. So we felt like if we really tried, we maybe might be able to do it on our own. But looking back to it, there was no way. The amount of like... Overhead, you need the training, the scaling. It's almost impossible to do, I think, if you haven't done it before or have people with you that have done it before. It can be really easy to mess it up.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we know we were close. And what's funny is even during the pop up until now, we had so many people that would come, let me invest and make you guys a franchise. Let me do like, oh, I got, so we had a lot of offers going into it. Wow. But I think we kind of realized when it's too early, two, we realize that the right partner is probably the most essential piece of a puzzle. So we were very careful with who we even consider as partners. But most of the people kind of didn't pass that energy check right away. So we just, we didn't want to work with them”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you guys had ambitions even before you had the tent to have a franchise business. So by the time you opened a brick and mortar, you knew that. It was just a matter of time before you could figure out a second location.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and we saw that scene that how they were kind of like developing their kitchen system like with chalkboards and stuff. And we kind of took that inspiration and we went into our kitchen and we kind of tried to like understand like how we could set things up to have the fastest possible operations within the restaurant. And we eventually came up with this island system where there was like a table in the middle that everything would be put on chicken, fries and stuff. And then from there, you would kind of spice them up and then categorize them into mild, medium hots and then the person on the line would just turn around. So we kind of like using the inspiration from the founder developed our little like island system in our kitchen that we felt was like the most efficient for getting food out.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually really funny as we were getting closer to opening, we watched the movie The Founder, the one about McDonald's.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's hand done by the same artists, and every single store has their own mascot Dave. So every store will have a Dave after a pop culture figure. You have like Muhammad Ali Dave, like Bruce Lee Dave or Darth Vader Dave. So you have all of these. Every store has like their graffiti wall, their white walls, their neon lights, and then their particular Dave.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All goes back to when we were working on the recipe. So, Splatterhouse, the guys that do our art, Demkin Art, they're really close friends of mine from before Dave's, from when I used to stand up comedy. And they do amazing artwork. So I remember as we were working on the recipe, and I talked to them like, hey, I'm like, we're doing this chicken thing and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, one day if we have a store, like, would you guys be down to do art on the inside? And like, yeah, of course we would, you know, like, why wouldn't we? So as the store obviously came, they're the first people we called. So we kind of like, you know, came up with the first design just together.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very important, very important. And I think Los Angeles not only played a big role in Dave's hot chicken, but hot chicken in general. Because if you think about it, the second place that Hot Chicken really came after Nashville was Los Angeles. Los Angeles is kind of what helped it really blow up into this nationwide thing. Everybody in the US wants hot chicken now.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know what's funny is we had this understanding of you would rather own, let's say, 10% of a cow than 100% of a grape. So, you know, you would rather own 25% of a store than 33% of a pop-up. So to us, it wasn't how much, what was the percentage we owned? It was what did we own the percentage of, you know? Was that a pie that we on the percentage of? So a store was obviously much more valuable than a pop up.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Evenly, yeah, evenly. And even in the parking lot, it was evenly between the three of us It's the most fair way to go. If everybody has an equal portion, then everybody puts an equal effort.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he kind of started helping us out on the legal end a lot. Even till today, he's actually partners with us on our stores. And he helped us so much. Him and Gary were kind of the ones that came in and helped us a lot, like getting us to a mature state.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had money. He was the one that actually invested 60% of the first store's funds, and then we put up the rest of it. Got it. And obviously, he was seeing how big Dave's getting. And I mean, at the time, the pop up was falling apart because we were seeing so many people. Our friar was almost like it was bad. Like it was, we weren't able to handle the amount of people coming in. Every night we were turning away a couple hundred people because we were sold out. So we were like, we really need to get to a store. So Gary was very on board. So we kind of started like store hunting. And what's funny is like Gary was like, well, first we need to like, he's like, we need to get at least a little bit legal, right? So like you guys need to at least establish Dave's business, you know what I mean? So he sent us to a friend of ours, Rafi Babayan, who was a lawyer.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Kind of. So the first couple months, obviously because we weren't that used to money, we just kept paying ourselves. Yeah. And I think by the fourth month, we realized, hey, if we're ever going to get to a store fast, we have to stop paying ourselves and, you know, kind of put the money towards the store. And then that's kind of also where Gary came in, Tommy's older brother, because he was the oldest one. He had a little bit of experience with business.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I remember I got the money, and I was really happy. So I got out of the dumpster and I was like, Tommy, I got the money. And there was a guy there that was using the bathroom because there was a bar right there. And he looked at me and there was a guy like, and I think about it now, I was wearing like an apron and I had this like red dripping money and I was in a dumpster and he saw me and he freaked out and he ran away. And I'm sure till today that guy thinks he like witnessed the murder or something like that. So we found the money and we were, I mean, we were spending red money. It looked like we had robbed the bank because we had like money with like red dye on it. So, you know, we'd have to like slip it in as we were shopping. You know, we'd give like five greens and then one red in there.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This big dumpster, and I told Tommy, I'm like, keep lookout. I jump in the dumpster. And the funniest thing is the money happened to be in the bag that we threw away our oil mix in. So we make an oil mix and we put spices in there when it's boiling and we mix it up and it becomes like this red oil mix. And we throw that away at the end of the night. And that's where the money was. So the money was covered in like red oil.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Cash business. So at night or throughout the night, what we do is we put our cash away in like a styrofoam container, like one of our to-go containers. At the end of the night, we take that home with us. So it was like inconspicuous. So one of the nights laid into the pop-up, again, very tired. Spent a whole week and, you know, we're cleaning up. And then we get to Tommy's house and we're like, okay, we're like, who has the cash so we can count it? And then Tommy's like, I think Dave has it. And I'm like, hey, Dave, do you have it? He's like, no, I thought you had it. And I'm like, dude, what do you mean? I'm like, where's I kind of started panicking because it's a lot of money, especially for us at the time? Because we're like, you know, saving up. So we started looking around everywhere. It's not on the car. We're like, okay, we go back to the pop-up. And we kind of realized pretty early on that we probably threw it away with the other styrofoam containers. But what sucks is we throw away like 150 styrofoam containers a night. We would throw away maybe 10 bags of trash a day. So we had to go across the street to our main dumpster.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Did it actually do so? Will we finish every night? Because it wasn't the best neighborhood, right? And we were always kind of afraid that like somebody might try to rob us or something like that”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it was the second month, dude. I was sitting outside of my house that night looking at the money and I was like, dude, what did we do? I'm like from a parking up, from a pop-up in a parking lot selling chicken. I'm like, we made this much cash. And I remember I went home and we had all these like overdue bills and I put all the money in every single bill and I put a couple thousand on each of my parents' nightstands. And the next day they woke up and they're like, where did you get all this money? And I was like pretty much like don't worry about the bills from now on. Like we got everything covered from now on. So it was like that was probably like one of the best nights of my life. It was just like everything like coming together, you know? Yeah.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I remember the first month we started in the middle of it. We were still getting all of our operations and stuff down. And our parents, as proud as they were of us, were like, hey, well, are you guys making any money? Like has been doing it for a month and there's all these people, but where's the money? And obviously at the time we were just kind of reinvesting most of it back into the pop-up. But the second month was the first month that we actually paid ourselves. And at the end of the month, we had each made like, I think it was like 10 or 11 in cash. And it was the most money I'd ever seen in my life at the time.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Tommy's grandparents would actually help us. So, like, his grandpa would pour out all of the sauces into the containers for us, into like the little boxes. And his grandma would help us make the lemonade every morning. And then from literally like 10 or 11 until like five o'clock, we were just prepping the food. But yeah, it was a lot of prep because obviously like each individual tender, you know, you got to wash it. You have to brine it. You have to spice it. You have to put it into flour. So it was like a long process. So we'd barely finish in time.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was really cool, actually. So me and Dave would have to wake up early to go shopping for the food. So we'd wake up at like maybe seven or eight o'clock. Yep. And we kind of go to Restaurant Depot. We buy our chicken there. We'd buy fries. Obviously the spice mixes, you know, all the different peppers to make the spice mix with. You know, just all the like food stuff. And then we kind of come back. So we would do our prep at Tommy's house because Tommy had like the biggest backyard out of all of us.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the thing, like, dude, he came in like a month in and he saw he's like, what is this? Dude, he's like, you guys got a whole restaurant over here because there was like 100 people. He's like, I thought this is a hot dox. He's like, I'm going to have to start charging. And every month he charged.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Obviously, because we only had a limited amount of time, right? The chicken took like 16 minutes to cook, so you'd have to set up 18 plates. You'd have to put bread in all of them. If it was sliders, you'd have to start toasting the buns. And then you'd have to, so it took a while to set everything up. And then once the chicken came out, you needed to spice it and get it on the bread one second earlier so it could be piping hot and then the fries would go on it and it would go out so you it was very clockwork if you missed the second you could ruin the next badge”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, that was part of our strategy too. We did tenders at first because we knew that if a month later we added sliders and we can get a whole new wave of media. You know what I mean? So you start off with tenders. You get all the media coverage you can. Then you add sandwiches to your menu and kind of get another lapse of. And then people like,”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Here's the thing, right? One article can have a massive impact, but oftentimes that impact can be very short-term. Like, you know, you could have, okay, 80 people come and then 100 people come. Know for a couple weeks, it's like a line of 80, but then eventually it kind of tapers off, right? And there are very few restaurants anywhere. That can sustain long lines. So, how are you going to kind of sustain them? I mean, now you've got this thing. And it's still two tenders, right? Chicken tenders, and it's not sandwiches yet.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, we didn't. What's funny is as we got there, we were really nervous and we kind of didn't know what to do. And then our dads kind of gave us a little courage like, don't worry, you guys got this. And we're like, wait, we got this. And as we started setting up, I kind of like walked everybody in line. I said, hey, thank you guys so much for coming. We're a very new operation, so it's going to take us a long time to set up. And I'm like, our friar makes about four orders every 20 minutes. We might not be able to serve everybody. And that first day was hectic, dude. It was hectic. But we adapted quick. So after that night, me, Tommy, and Dave, we kind of got together. We're like, hey, we need to adjust our system, dude, because this is not going to work. And we had just enough to buy another fryer. So we went and we bought a bigger fryer that made like 18 orders every like 10 minutes. So now we were ahead of the curve. So now even though we have this long line, we were actually producing orders really fast.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's not set up, and it takes us like maybe 15 minutes to set up or 20 minutes to set up. And our dads were there too, and they were like, what are all these people doing here? And yet people from the other businesses were coming out. And, you know, because they'd seen us for four or five days there just cooking. And then the sixth day, there's like 100 people in line.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Happens so we obviously get to our pop up late knowing us. We're supposed to be open at seven. That's what it says in the article. We get there like 7.15 and there's maybe like 90 people in line at the top of lane.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like we made it, dude. Like, everybody that had doubted us was like, dude, you guys got an article. And it was so weird to us. Like, we'd never been a part of anything like that. Like somebody writing about something we did, you know, reading the article and the things he said was so overwhelming to us because he was saying so many nice things.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he had a tender and he didn't give an overwhelming reaction. So we couldn't gauge whether he loved it or not. You know, he was like, he was like interesting. He was kind of like more like that. And just he wanted to kind of get to know us, right? And I remember mentioning to him, I'm like, hey, if you're going to write an article, and I'm like, I don't know if you're like, but please, if you are, please make sure to mention that we're like a weekend. We have a very small friar. And if anybody comes, they should expect very, very, very long wait times, which is funny enough when he wrote his article and he wrote late night chicken sandwich. Down at the bottom, he had written, you know, get ready to wait because they're a very new operation.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I talked to him and me and him had like a conversation. I was like, yeah, he's like, I'll come around. And sure enough, he showed up. And I don't think he realized what a small operation it was. Because he kind of looked at it and he's like, This is what you guys are doing. He's like, he's like, why? And he was really curious, like, why do it like this? And, you know, we kind of explained like we have no money and we just had a recipe and we felt like the recipe was good. And this is the only way that we could sell it to people was just kind of setting up in the middle of the street and just, you know, bootstrapping it.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, funny enough, Farley contacted us on Instagram. Like, I remember I saw the message and was Farley. He's like, hey, I heard about what you guys are doing and I really want to come check out the food. And I was like, oh man, I'm like, that's crazy. But it was pretty early on. This was like five days in. So to us, it was still early because we wanted at least like a few weeks or a month under our belt, you know?”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So here's the interesting thing. We wanted him to come, but we knew we didn't want him to come really early on. We knew as much as a Farley article would help us if it came at the wrong time where we weren't ready for it and we got an influx of customers and we couldn't serve them, then it was actually going to be detrimental to us and not help us. So we knew that we needed him to come when we were a little more familiar with our operations and when we felt like we could actually serve people in like a speedy pace.”
2024-06-10 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dave’s Hot Chicken: Arman Oganesyan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT