YouSaid · the spoken record

Curt Jones

lines on the record: 100
first: 2019-09-09
most recent: 2019-09-09
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, no, they did not give a cash advance. And what happened is my dad and my mom said, you know, we want to. We want to try to help you raise a little bit of money and see if we can make this thing work. And so they went to the bank and the value of land at the time wasn't really, really strong, but it was strong enough that we could get a $30,000 loan. And that was really, my wife and I had already run out of money, and we were in credit card debt. And by then, we were all kind of partnered together. My dad and my sister had a little bit of ownership in the company. And so we started converting this little garage into an ice cream plant. And we're expecting to make all this cash from Offri Land, but it didn't work out that way.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They estimated they would sell 100 gallons a day. And my little machine would only make four gallons an hour. So I figured, okay, well, we're going to have to go into the ice cream business. We're going to have to actually build a bigger machine. And so we made the decision to kind of move back home because we had a little two-acre piece of land that my dad had given all his kids two acres of land and we put a trailer on there when we got married. And then, of course, my daughter grew up there the first four years. But we had built a garage on that piece of land.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, they look for new things and they really like the taste of it. And they got so excited about it. They were building a new ride in the park called Chaos, which was an indoor roller coaster And they wanted to feature it in this. And they started doing these projections about how much they would sell.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And it was a very nice park. So she called down there and she got a hold of the food service supervisor. And she described what we had, and he would ask, it's almost funny to hear her tell the story, but he would ask her questions like, well, how long has it been around? I know it's brand new. Well, how do you do with sales? We don't sell very much of it. Every question he asks, she didn't have a good answer for it. And then she knew that we weren't going to get an appointment. But then at the very last, he said, well, why don't you guys come down to see us, you know, on such and such date?”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I mean, at that point, I knew that we had had enough positive reactions that it had a chance to work. I mean, we had a few other things going on while we were running the store. Like we took it to the State Fair up in Illinois and gave out samples up there and got reactions. And so eventually we started doing a few little fairs and festivals. And we start talking about theme parks. And of course, we thought, well, there's no way we can get into a theme park. Nobody knows us or what we're about. My sister Connie, she said, well, I'm going to call around a couple places. So she actually called down to Opri Land Theme Park in Nashville.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and my five year old daughter, she would run the cash register for us sometimes, and she'd take a nap in the corner sometimes. But yeah, so we ran the store.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It didn't do that well. We ended up on the wrong side of town. Remember, we had taken the advice of this guy that ended up being kind of a shyster. But I think our total sales for that whole nine month period was like $52,000. And of course, we had more than $52,000 in expense, I can assure you. So even though we did all the work ourselves, I think we did hire just three or four part-time employees from time to time for weekends. But for the most part,”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the beginning, on ice cream, it was vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, Neapolitan, which is a mixture of all three. We had a peanut butter, mint chocolate, but we also had a lot of yogurts. I think we had a strawberry cheesecake yogurt. We had a pi ⁇ a colotta yogurt, and of course vanilla and chocolate. So almost more yogurts than ice cream. We first got started.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we would just add flavorings to that, and then we would pump it, let it drip through. And so after I ran two and a half gallons, I would take everything loose and I would pour it in the bigger container and then scoop it into like quart containers and put it in the freezer.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, during that time when we were waiting on the store to be built, I designed a piece of equipment that could be described as a large cylinder. It probably held 30 or 40 gallons of liquid nitrogen. So I pumped the ice cream mix with a little peristaltic pump which basically squeezes a hoe so it never comes in contact with the product. You basically use a hose. And I would run a two and a half gallon bag, which is pretty standard in the restaurant industry of a mix that I had made from a local dairy.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I kind of learned my lesson. Stick with what we had, and you know, but what we found over the next few days, especially because we opened on a Friday night, so we weren't very busy, but Saturday we got a few customers in. And then when the TV spot ran, it was totally different. We had people kind of coming into the shop and actually trying it.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's pretty much crickets because remember, we had no money left to do any advertising with. Fortunately during our little test market we did, we got a little newspaper article. And so when we opened the store, we actually had a local TV station within a week or two. But basically, the first customer that came in, we gave her a sample and she asked if she could buy a Coke. And so we sold the Coke was our first sale. My wife always tells this story, but not too many customers later someone came in and they said, Well, you know, I don't get it. I want my ice cream to be soft. And I said, oh, I can make it soft. And so I went back and I actually took the beads and I added some ice cream mix. And I basically made her a.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we, you know, yogurt was very popular at the time, like TCBY was very popular. And so most of our flavors were actually yogurt flavors. And we actually were going to call it the yoglet shop.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes, I was very much doing all of that. I was experimenting with different pieces of equipment to make it on a little bit larger scale. I was working on the branding. When I quit my job, we really didn't even have a name for the product yet. And in fact, when we were going home for Christmas, we ended up having a naming party with some of our friends back in Southern Illinois. I actually came up with the name Dippandots during that time. Someone had written down dip and dot like two characters. I heard it as dipping without a G in my mind, and that to me that was like the perfect name for it because I was wanting to describe the product just a little bit, but yet have a very fun name.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right And so we were about four months with no job, and all of our savings pretty much tapped out by the time we opened the store.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found out that this guy had skipped town with our money, but we were able to locate him and kind of got, we basically got control of our store again. We paid our subcontractors off and we started finishing out the store ourselves. But we did not get that store open until March.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. And as it turns out, this center that he was talking about, it did have about 20,000 cars a day that drove by, but that's exactly what they did. There was not a good way to get in. And so, you know, we made a lot of mistakes in the beginning, but the first mistake we made was working with this guy because he was basically somewhat of a shyster. He basically took a down payment, which we didn't have a lot to work with anyway. But about a month after I'd quit my job thinking we'd be open by Christmas, the store still wasn't finished and I was starting to get contacted by some of the subcontractors that they hadn't been paid yet.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I really thought so, yeah During that time, we collected some business cards of people that found it interesting. And this one guy left his business card. He was from Indianapolis. And he said, I'm putting one of my stores. He said, there's a space open next to me. And if you want to hire me as your contractor, I can build out the store and we can get you into the ice cream business. I thought, okay, well, maybe it's time to do it. And I think that was even part of my reason for quitting my job in November because he thought we could get open before Christmas, which is a horrible time to start an ice cream business, by the way.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, we had at one point, I think we had between $30,000 and $40,000 in credit card debt with With a business that wasn't making money. So we were struggling. The first few years, we've struggled quite a bit.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what happened? I knew that we had the $10,000. I knew that we had a second vehicle that we could probably get by with one vehicle. And we did sell that our second car. We got $4,000 for it. And before I quit my job, it was during a period of time where we were just starting to get these mailouts from credit card companies. Well, we ended up, I think, getting like five or six credit cards and maxed them all out within the next year.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You quit your job 1987. You tell your wife, you quit, and you say, I'm going to go for this. I'm going to go for it. I'm going to start to do this. So what'd you do? I mean, you mentioned you had $10,000 in savings, but that was everything you had.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really, not all I think about, but it's really something that I think I'm going to have to try. And she says, well, I know that. She said, you know, and you do whatever you think, I tell people sometimes, I said, you know, it was probably the perfect time for me to start a business because I think we had maybe $10,000 of savings. And I sometimes say if we'd had $100,000 in the bank, we might not have wanted to risk it, but I felt like if it didn't work, I was still young enough that I could probably still get a job somewhere. I don't know for me, it was just like, you know, if I'm going to do this, I got to try it 100% to give it a chance. And, you know, my wife was very supportive of it. And she knew that we would get by, you know, somehow.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Now, as much as I like my job, she knew that I was also growing a little bit frustrated because it was a very fast-growing company and it was a very demanding job. I mean, I was working many, many hours a week and even she was a little bit like, wow, I didn't know I signed up for this, but I wasn't just looking to quit my job right away. In fact, I took the idea to my boss and said, you know, is this something you'd be interested in? I know you're not in the food business, but he. He said, Well, you know, it's a cute idea, you know, basically get back to work. We're doing something else. So he didn't really have an interest in it. But at the same time, I knew that for me, it was something that would percolate in my mind for a while. And it did for about six months until finally I told my wife one day, I said, you know, this is.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, she really liked it. The thing with my wife is that I think she knew when she kind of saw my excitement, it was kind of like, uh-oh, here we go. Here we go. What's going to happen next, right?”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, can I not add any air and not have a super high butterfat concentration, but then still have a smooth creamy taste? And that's what I found. I used a 10% butterfat mix because you have to use at least at that time you had to have at least 10% butterfat to call it ice cream So I was pretty excited because now you're going to get a very dense flavor from that because you're not diluting it with anything But to be honest with you, what was the most exciting is that it was just a new way to consume something. And that's what I really wanted to find out. I wanted to find out what this really intrigued people. I had no idea if it would really catch on, but that was the initial seat of excitement, is that it had the possibility to catch on.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In your mix. So you can add butterfat, or you can add air. And both of those disperse ice crystals. So if you go to the Dairy Queen, for example, you get a very smooth, creamy taste because it's got not a lot of butter fat, but it's got a lot of air in.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were two things. People like Hagenas, like Ben and Jerry's, they get to a very smooth consistency in a couple different ways. If you add butter fat, that basically masks the fact that you have ice crystals.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah, well, it actually will weld your tongue to your cheek, for example. It just sits there and sizzles for a minute Know once we learn not to burn our taste buds and once we let it kind of warm up to 30 or 40 below zero, it was really, really good. And what I was really hoping to find out was to see if I could detect any ice crystals in there, you know, with homemade ice cream, you had that real icy taste. And the first thing I noticed is that when I bit into the little beads, it was a totally different texture.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And I actually had a childhood buddy of mine with me that Sunday when I was telling him that I want to go try something. So we grabbed about a, I think it was a little quart mason jar of the mix and drove out to the lab. And I pulled out probably about a half a gallon of liquid nitrogen into a cylinder and I took a pipette and I took some of the ice cream mix and I dropped it in, you know, drop by drop. And probably after 100 drops or something like that, I said, well, let's try it now. And I meant, let's let it warm up and try it. But both of us were so interested in it. We grabbed some before they really warmed up enough. So that was something I learned very early on is you don't want to throw it in your mouth right after it comes out of liquid nitrogen.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Alright, so I think this is like 1987. You take. Take like a cup of the mix that you were going to churn for the ice cream before you churned it, and you take it back to your office or to the lab at Altik and you start to drip it into the nitrogen, the liquid nitrogen?”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. But at some point, you know, my mind finally went to, well, wait a minute, you know, an even quicker way to freeze it would be using liquid nitrogen. And the reason I remember that is that for about the next two or three weeks, I thought about what it would be like to make turn ice cream into beans. The next opportunity we got to make”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, really, my first thought, to be honest with you, was how can I make this ice cream churn colder? And so without even thinking about liquid nitrogen, I started thinking about what if I put dry ice in here instead of ice? Well, dry ice is 109 below zero”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, a few seconds, you can actually watch it. It's like introducing heat. So you'll see this nitrogen just boil like crazy. And then when all the heat has been extracted, you'll see it just kind of fall to the bottom and it's as cold as it's going to get.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Watermelon is actually a little bit different than like a grape because of the surface area of the watermelon. But yeah, like if you were to put a grape in there, you could, I mean, you could basically drop that grape and it would shatter. I mean, that's what it would be like.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Almost but not quite it still took me a month or two to really have that idea. I actually started playing with other things first like I was interested in freezing things like watermelon and you know”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, anytime we got together, like my wife and daughter, we would make ice cream on a weekend and invite the neighbors over. And I think at some point we actually had an electric maker. But I do remember still having a hand crank even with my wife and daughter.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, now our family ice cream maker was exactly that. It had a little handle that you turned on a gear and it would turn the middle container through the ice. And you can kind of feel it when you're cranking it, it'll get a little harder to crank. But yeah, that's great when you open that up and see all that firm ice cream in there. That's a good feeling.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me time, we're foreshadowing a little bit here. You used to churn homemade ice cream, even like as a teenager, like on the farm, right? And this is before we had one touch button electric ice cream makers, right? I'm assuming this is like salt and rock salt and ice and just turning and turning a churn ice cream maker.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, just in the opposite way. Yeah. It is dangerous, but what I tell people, because we've had a lot of people that worked around it over the last 30 years, I tell them it's just like, it's kind of like handling boiling water. I said, you have to treat it with respect, but everybody works with boiling water if they're a cook. But the other danger that you have with liquid nitrogen is if you're in a very closed in area, it can displace oxygen, so you're not getting enough oxygen into your lungs. But other than that, it's a lot like hot water. You wouldn't want to fall in Nevada hot water either.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I found that you could pour the nitrogen into the cultures and freeze a big blob, or you could pour the cultures into the nitrogen and freeze a big blob. But I found that if you dribbled it in a little at a time, that you could actually form pellets. It's kind of like freezing raindrops, in other words.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and you want to freeze them as quickly as you can. Because if you ever notice like an ice tray and you put it in the freezer and you come back 30 or 40 minutes later, you'll see little needles across the surface. That's from freezing something very slow. If you freeze that very fast, those ice crystals are smaller. So if you freeze the bacteria cells quickly, you get tiny ice crystals and then there's a good chance that those cells can come back to life So I started playing with liquid nitrogen, which I had never really worked with before, but I knew that it was very cold. It was 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were starting to get off into the animal feed business making bacteria cells that could actually be put back into the animal feed. So in other words, you know, if we eat yogurt and it has lactobacillus in it and that's good for us and they call it probiotics. We would concentrate those down. We would freeze them and then we would freeze dry them into a powder. So that's kind of how I got started with Altech was in the animal feed side, which is what they really grew with over the next several years.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, just outside of Lexington in a little town called Nicholasville, and we lived in Lexington about eight or nine miles from where I went to work at.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. When I went to school, I studied microbiology because I really was interested in farm-related things like making ethanol from corn and, you know, just things like that. But at the end of the day, it allowed me to get a job that actually had a salary, which was really felt pretty good because I saw something steady there and I did enjoy the steady paycheck. when I had it.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He had ordered a hundred chickens to put on his farm, and I ordered 100 on mine, and we were going to go together and gather eggs and work together on it. And then me and another friend had a straw business we called it, which is where you take wheat straw and bail it. And we sold that to a lot of the people that worked on roads because they would do their landscaping when they finished a project and they put, you know, they'd chop up straw and put down over the grass seed. And so just always coming up with some little way to make a little extra money.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, when my dad had a radio and TV repair business, and so we had all these old tubes laying around. So, me and a friend of mine actually started our own little radio repair business probably in grade school, like 56th grade, and then me and him also decided to get into the chicken business one time. We ended up.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it felt like a struggle. You're exposed to all the talks about, you know, if it doesn't rain by Friday, you know, the crop's not going to get made or you have diseases that can get in your, you know, your pigs, that kind of thing. We never went hungry or anything like that, but we always knew that we were dependent on a lot of factors that were actually out of our control, you know, like weather and things like that. So I think I just, maybe that was good in a way. I kind of learned to live with risk a little bit.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Remember driving a tractor for the first time from one barn to the other when I was seven years old. And, you know, I played sports and stuff in school, but I always felt like when I got home, I had to work, you know, to help, you know, feed the pigs and do things like that. So it's kind of a very early age, I guess, learning that responsibility. But looking back, I'm glad I grew up the way that I did. I have no regrets at all. It's really a good way, a good way to grow up.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Researcher. And in the lab were vats of liquid nitrogen, which you may know pretty much freezes anything it touches almost instantly. Kurt also happened to be a guy who liked to make his own ice cream, and one day, hanging out in the lab, he wondered, could I use that liquid nitrogen to reinvent ice cream? So a few weeks later, he brought in a jar of ice cream base, basically sugar, cream, and some vanilla. He gently dripped a bit of it into the liquid nitrogen and instantly those droplets froze into teeny, tiny ice cream beads. Now, they didn't look like ice cream, but once Kurt tasted them, he knew he was onto something. Pellets got him so excited, he quit his job to turn that little experiment into dipping dots, the ice cream of the future.”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were 13 or 14 million dollars in debt, and they were trying to force us to pay that off. And of course, again, being a little bit stubborn, I'm like, well, just go to another bank. Well, that's when the banking crisis was starting to hit. So by the time we did all of our paperwork and everything and had one or two banks that were interested, all of a sudden,”
2019-09-09 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Dippin' Dots: Curt Jones · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT