YouSaid · the spoken record

Jason McGowan

lines on the record: 95
first: 2025-08-11
most recent: 2025-08-11
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

“Yeah, I think 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. And second, in the timing, there is luck involved in there. And what would happen if I would have started BYU.com before Facebook? And then I think the other thing, too, is the learnings from my faith and having that be a part of my focus. And those are the three things that I think about. But if we just had luck 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 and we didn't have a little luck along the way, you know, it wouldn't have happened. So I think it's a combination of all those things and any successful entrepreneur. They have those things in their life, you know, and I think that's what helps makes them successful.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 year? We just sold pies for Thanksgiving week. They loved the pies. The sales were off the charts, right? And so, you know, we did slow the growth, but some of those growth had to be slowed because we were opening, you know, two 300 units a year, right? That's like, doesn't matter what brand you are or how big you are, there comes a point wherein, you know, you've got to open the right amount. And so we still plan on growing, right? We still plan on growing 100 units or so a year, but we want to be a little bit more strategic in how we do it and where we place them and all those kinds of things. That's how we stay ahead.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, 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. And we're really excited about it. And we're very optimistic. Even just now, we took a minority investment. Could we have taken the whole company off the table? That could have been a possibility. But it doesn't matter what business you are. If you stop innovating, you start 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Thanks. It was a pretty exciting thing, and we're not really announcing any of the details of the deal. But, you know, the company value is amazing. And we had just a few of us in the cap table, and that was it”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Took By the end of 2022, you reached a billion dollars in sales. So listen roughly five years after launch, which is absolutely incredible. I mean, the growth was just astounding and entirely self-funded, right? There were no investors at that point”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and that was the company that actually had an employee that worked for us that took the recipes. But looking back on it, I think I don't think it was worth the time and the energy. 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 I would probably lean more into the camp with not being worth it”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, the solar trade secrets and then started. So for us, we, of course, felt like we had a very strong case. And the judge felt like we did too as well. But the court of public opinion is different. It's sound bites. And, you know, by this time we got larger, so they tried to create it to be a David versus Goliath experience.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I think that's a great question. And I think my answer before and after all this experience is probably different. 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 somebody that came and worked for our company. And stole our recipes”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. I know COVID was a huge sort of boost for the brand because a lot of people were on social media. They were noticing the brand. In many states, the stores could stay open. And that also inspired and continues to inspire copycatters, right? Which I think is a form of flattery, but also can be threatening to the business. And you did file lawsuits against competitors that you felt were copying your brand or your look or the boxes and things like that. And it was dubbed the Utah Cookie War by the newspapers at the time because these were both Utah-based companies.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know equally that we're trying new things that will kill something when it's a bad idea that's culturally like just part of who we are.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you got to try it. You got to try it. I can tell you haven't tried that one because you probably would like that one.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. Well, and I think that's 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. 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. 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 things come into play. But yeah, people will freeze them. People will buy them in droves. If that's their favorite flavor, they'll buy them and they'll freeze them so that they can have them later.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you drop those flavors, it's like a drop, like a new purse or new sneakers. You have a flavored 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, 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the stores. Yet, replay, doing it, right? We started kind of highlighting the TikTok customers. We started reposting them. And then we started just doing reviews. And I remember I did a review and I did a positive review and I did a negative review on a cookie I didn't like because everyone has different taste buds. And they're like, the CEO is doing a negative comment on a cookie. And 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And leverage that. So, one thing that we did was the customers were really excited about sharing their reviews. This is kind of where reviews started really taking off on TikTok. And so a couple of things started to happen. Like, wow, how do we champion these reviewers? And so we started, you know, putting their videos in the store so people physically would walk in like, oh my goodness, there's TikTok videos of like.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I think it's first and foremost 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 going to be huge. 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 and companies, they try to take their content and they try to just disperse it across all the social networks and just like it's all the same, right? It's like the same video. Let's drop it on all five platforms. Well, the problem 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 are photos look in the photography in Instagram? Really big deal. TikTok, nobody cares, right? So what the second thing that we did other than just the early movers advantage is we try to find out what the customers were already doing.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Scale, scale and speed. So scale and speed, you know, it creates this moat and it creates this experience that discourages competition if you become the first movers. And you see this with In and Out or Whataburger, how one has the East Coast, one has the West Coast, and they're kind of several brands. And for us, our belief was how do we go across the nation as fast as possible so that that doesn't happen?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, no, definitely. And 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. Of course, you have people, competition others 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 store footprint to cover across the United States as fast as possible?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You're like a year or two in, right? I mean, from the outside, it looks like, wow, you're just crushing it at 55 locations. You're a year and a half in, 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, lots of examples of franchise models that failed that went under after expanding or selling tons of franchises. So in a sense, you're actually still very vulnerable at that point.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Totally from a marketing. Totally. It makes a ton of sense. Sometimes they may not even be the biggest sellers, but the earned media behind them becomes a really big deal.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the same time, and have conversations around them. You know, people are not going to remember the exact flavor that they had that week, or they're not going to remember the exact taste, although those things are really important. They're going to remember how they felt, what the experience was like, you know, and so, and sometimes it even works even on product that is completely people don't like. One good example was everything but bagel. We launched this Everything Babagel, 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 come in to try it and then telling us why it was horrible, it actually facilitated our mission.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a combination of both. Those are our two strong demographics. Is both moms is kind of our primary and then teenagers are secondary? But how do we think about branding in the tech world and being around Steve Jobs and a lot of people call us the apple of cookies sometimes and especially early on with our stores and they're white and unlike other cookie concepts you can actually see them making the ingredients 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 bountiful by that time we had something like 11 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 the Sunday when no one can get it people will freak out they'll want the product they'll be talking about the product but then everyone across all of our locations can experience the same flavor”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, it does create this controversy and this conversation online, but at the end of the day, we look at the data and say, what do customers want? And, you know, we say this a lot here at Kremble is our critics don't pay for our business. Our fans do.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, one of the things that Sawyer and I think about a lot. So we constantly ask ourselves, how are cookies different unique and special? And it allows us to just try crazy things. 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 add the frosting for the first time operationally it was extremely challenging. Customers love it, which created demand, which created more. Some people hate it, right? Oh, yes.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, I think one thing that we had done really early on, which sounds very simple, but lots of brands don't do it, is we actually engage with our customers. It surprises me today that so many brands and businesses spent 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 cult-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, we take that feedback. We actually fix our products. And it gets harder and harder over time. But even today, we have over 30 people that are”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People are talking about it. Like there's a thousand other concepts 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think you're probably right. I remember reading the book about some Walton and Made in America and how he went to the outskirts of Walmart. It's almost like the Walmart strategy and where you go to all these smaller towns and populations of 60,000, 100,000. So yeah, I do think that it also created this energy excitement. You know, when you go to North Dakota and there haven't been a lot of other brands that have gone North Dakota, man, you should see sales go crazy in North Dakota, right? Because”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Needed them to be. I'm curious, like by the end of 2018, I mentioned you'd 16 locations and I read that your revenue was about under a million dollars, but you were growing, obviously. And by the end of 2019, so your second full year, you had 55 locations, and you'd earned about $4.5 million in revenue. Do you think being in Utah at the beginning is a major reason why it was able to scale that? Because culturally it was the right fit and there was a fan base and it's baking and you're close on Sunday and all these things like, do you think, had you started it, I don't know, in Los Angeles, maybe it wouldn't have worked.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of it was sending over the recipes to them and doing just content videos of just sharing with them how they should make this, how this should be done, 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 critique and say that doesn't look right. Let's see what you're doing here. Are you mixing wrong? Or are you overmixing 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 couldn't last forever. I couldn't even open every store physically. But for the first hundred locations, for example, I did the real estate. So I went out and I met with the entrepreneurs and the franchisees and I would watch, I'd go tour the locations and we'd look at them and we would talk about them and we'd eventually I couldn't do that anymore. I was there. We were boots on the ground. We were in it.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That would come. I mean, that would come later, obviously, as you scaled, but I'm curious in 2018, this is your first full year in business, by the end of that year, there were 16 locations, right? Which is a really fast growth. I mean, not as fast as it would eventually become, but still like... And you had a brand and you had a quality product, and you had to ensure that all those 16 stores 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. And then when you had a new cookie, you had to roll that out to all those stores. Like in that first year, how did you manage teaching people how to do that?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The recipes because at this time we had a rotating menu, which basically rotated every single week. How are we going to train the entire nation when we have a thousand stores and 30, 40,000 bakers? And so that led to the decision of building technologies. So we have our own custom app that shows people how to train. We invested in videography and training tools. And so, and people can see how many people are trained in their store and what their level is and their knowledge skills. That would come.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It went from hey, this is a cool concept. So 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 teaching people how to do it to 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 got to fire myself from jobs that can be easily done by somebody else. So customer support. We got to fire ourselves. We got to find who's the best customer support person we could find. It's like, I can't be doing deliveries anymore. I got to 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 often would say to ourselves is we need to quit making 10 store decisions. We need to start making 100 store decisions, 1,000 store decisions. For example, let me give you a specific example. How are we going to train all the bakers on?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know so a lot of it we just looked up online and a lot of the people were our friends and families 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 of us 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 going to succeed outside of Utah it's hot cookies they're not going to succeed outside of you know 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 but we're now going to take over the nation we're going to go from a franchise business with our friends and”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If we let them open on Sunday, they'll open the 20 locations. 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, we want to be able to give Baker's 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 talking to Sawyer. 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. And they said, your business that's never going to work outside Utah. And I said, well, if it doesn't, it doesn't. And that was a big kind of moment for us.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And we had friends and family who saw this. So I had friends in my neighborhood and sort of had some family members. 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 20 locations in Colorado. They came to me and they said, But we have two conditions, Jason, my condition number one is that we own the marketing, we want to own our own customers and 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 going to work outside Utah if you stay closed on Sundays.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that I was going to lose Sawyer's parents' money and we get to the store bountiful. We leased the building and I remember someone came in and they said, oh, this is going to be so amazing. It's going to 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. But we powered through it, and the minute we opened it up, the lines were just out the door.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my entire life, you know, 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”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reason we franchised that first location was Sawyer's mom was going to be a part of the business early on and Sawyer's dad was like, you're going to spend a lot of time in this bakery. It's not going to make a lot of money. You're going to be away from the grandkids. I'm not sure is this going to be really worth it to you. So she decided to bow out and not do it. But they came back and sawyer's dad's like, she's going to 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. I'm like, well, franchising, that's like we already invested the money. The business was self-sustaining. It was already making money and paying for itself. 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 to build the franchising. And so we franchised our first location in Bountiful. And I will tell you, I have never been more nervous about spending someone else's money.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, like a commissary. This is exactly right. So we create this commissary in this warehouse, and then we open up to delivery only. So that became a very logistical challenge because we just had tons of deliveries and it kept growing and growing and growing. Demand was outstripping our ability to produce them. And so, you know, we got some bad reviews and it started being 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 going to start opening up in other areas. But the reason why we opened up in bountiful, Utah first was because Sawyer's mom was going to be originally a third owner in the business.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, actually our second one we opened up in Orem, Utah. And what's interesting about this is, and so there was another competitor that was in Prevo area, and we were like, okay, well, how can we kind of win Utah? And we came up with the idea of using this technology and this delivery network to deliver to all of basically a big part of Utah. So 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 10 different cities?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, what we did early on is we made sure that all the cookies were warm. We had these cases and we had these warmers, these jail packs that we'd microwave. Well, what we learned we could do was 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 lower cost because we were optimizing your route so much. It worked really, really well for logistics.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, there were times where I was solely driving all the way around Utah looking for pink boxes and then delivering them. 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 because people are so excited. You could get something warm delivered to your door. And word of mouth started spreading. But I was behind the scenes on the weekends, literally just moving around the routes and had a big map and I 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 got to 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, I think what was interesting is our competition at the time was going after the college market because it was 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 and not on college students? And Sawyer's had 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 Cadillac. And we thought, what if we just take that iconic Cadillac color? It'll set us apart and we'll be different. And so I really kind of love that.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, it was crazy, guy. I was still shocked at 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 were able to market to everyone. And everyone saw it. It worked.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was because we knew that at the end of the day, it all comes down to the product. And I told Sori says, let's ignore the competition completely. They're not going to be our customers. They're not going to 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT