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, we were. And Sawyer had his personal social media. He had friends and stuff like that. We actually leveraged that, started off. It had like, I think, 10,000 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. 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 in technology first movers advantage is everything and that's And we were like, oh, is this going to work? Did they already get the first movers to vantage? Are we going to look like copycatters? Is this like what's going to happen here? And I remember just looking over at Sawyer. And I think that's why we spent so much time on the product”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I remember just thinking, oh my goodness, we created a business and it has revenue on day one. And I remember being so excited.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Chocolate chip. And the problem was we didn't have time to do more, like the building was going to get demolished. So it's like if we want to build a full menu, like there's no way. We spent 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 going to launch with one. They're going to be warm. They're going to be big. We wanted them big because they're meant to be shared. So if you're taking them, you're kind of sharing them and all of a sudden people are trying them and that's how the virality grows within the food concept that we were trying to do. 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. And it was like, whoa, wait, people are actually going to pay for this. Like all this energy and all this time. And we had them, you know, I had them change.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We totally did, and I was so nervous about it at the time. I mean, I built the first counter just to show you how frugal I was. We went in there and tore things out and started doing things. And even at the time, 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 kind of get a live peek into a store, local store getting built out. And we started building a following that way.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It does. Well, you put it like that, guy, it does seem a little bit more nuts even when you say it. Yes, it's, in my mind, 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? We were going to 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 was so like alive, like 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, it's like, oh, this is so exciting. Like, I was as much fascinated by the learning experience of what we were doing as much.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But if it was in, because just to put this in perspective, I mean, Logan, Utah. Northern Utah, close to the Idaho border, population 50,000 people. I mean, we're not talking about even Salt Lake City. This is not a huge number of people there, right? And so to me, the idea of 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 50,000 people seems nuts. I mean, right? I mean, I don't.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 really early on.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so I was focusing on, okay, how do we get our first product, which was the chocolate chip cookie, and then how do we build the technology meaning, like routing it to houses?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was it. This is going to be a side hustle. It'll be fun. It'll be great for learning for Sawyer. And really, if the technology ends up being really successful, then we had something really good that we could use.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is soyer lived in Logan, though, and so it was close to Sawyer. And the idea was that I'm going to build the technology, do the marketing, and Sawyer would do the kind of run the store. But while we were getting up and going, I was traveling there all the time.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I often think about how many decisions are $300 decisions that are life changing for you, you know, and I mean, it was clearly would have been worth whatever, right? But the landlord ended up saying yes, he's probably like, who else am I going to get to rent this building that I'm going to demolish? It was a win-win for him too as well.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sawyer called me up one day and said, Hey, there's a building here. There used to be another business in there. It was super popular. It's this particular location. And I think we can get it for really cheap because they're going to 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. And so this was like part of our test and learn culture here. It was like, oh, this will be fantastic. We'll rent it. And so I think he was asking something like $1,200 a month or something for it. And I was like, sorry, we need to get it to $800 or $900. And I still to this day, if that landlord had not lowered the price of that building, I'm not sure where we would be today. I call that the multi-billion dollar decision”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, there wasn't a lot of Grand Master Planner thinking. It was just tenacity of saying we're on a mission and we're going to accomplish this. And we realized that you had to have the equipment for us to actually figure out how to do it. And so 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But there's a leap from making it and then saying, we're going to invest in commercial equipment. Because I think this is like a 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 and buy commercial cooking equipment.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there's a lot of nuance to. 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 and doing it at a home in a home oven versus commercial equipment, we learned 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And that's how we decided that we were going to go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi sweet. Know when you're making the world's best chocolate chip cookie, it's not just about 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 any trade secrets today, but how long it rests for the size of the cookie, the temperature of the cookie, if does it rotate?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. We'd 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 that we were crazy. We're like, hey, 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 were trying to decide between milk, chocolate, chip, or semi-sweet. We're like, this is a big decision. For us, it was like the world depended upon whether the chips were going to be milk or whether they were going to be semi-sweet. And so we put a survey out on Twitter. And the survey results came back. And it was 70% milk chocolate chip, 30% semi-sweet.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, you're thinking, okay, let's figure out how we're going to sell these later, but now let's just kind of work on a recipe and let's just make cookies. And so you guys go down a rabbit hole of cookie making for several months. And what, I mean, what were you trying to do? I mean, what were you trying to figure out during that time?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, 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 home so we'd make homemade cookies, bake it, and then deliver them from our home.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 going to be on it, it has to be the best. All these kinds of things. And so it kind of 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 take their great-grandmother's recipe or a recipe they found a line and tweak it or something like that and create this recipe. And we thought, what if we did something different? What if we take the same methodology that we use in technology, this A-B testing model, and let's taste test our way to the perfect chocolate chip cookie?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's kind of the start of it. But the problem is we had absolutely zero baking experience. We didn't know 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 is the most important. What if we just buy this from Cisco or some other brand”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know, we thought at the time, well, would it be cool to kind of do something? And we thought, well, why not do cookies? 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. 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 can build this technology.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Make 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. 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so Sarah and I were just trying to come up with some ideas, and we thought, and we just our families love, you know, and I think the culture in Utah of people bringing treats and baked goods to each other for parties and family get-togethers and that sort of thing.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think when you get a taste of virality and growth, there was kind of this void in this feeling of, 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? Just not feeling like I was making a difference truthfully. And that was kind of a really painful almost, just to be like, what am I even doing? And is my time valuable and worth it?”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could have been somewhere around there, yeah. But he wanted to pay it all back, though, which was significant for him. At the time, he's a college student. And I was like, sorry, that's not how it works. It failed. If the business would succeed, I would have made money and you would have made money, but it didn't work out. But I was just so impressed by his character and who he was as a person that really made me think this guy's a good guy. We need to start something sometime.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so he wants to start a clothing company, and I gave him some money to do it, and it was called Ember, E-M-B-R. And I didn't know if it was going to be successful or not at all. And for me, it was really just this guy was really excited. And I thought, you know, I wanted to kind of help him along his entrepreneur way if I could. And it didn't work out. And he came to me at the end of it and was like, hey, I need to pay back all this money I borrowed from you.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so move back to Provo. In fact, we had our house up for sale, and we were going to rent it out to somebody, and we ended up just moving back into the same house.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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. You know, walking down the streets, and everyone was just like working on the next big thing. And so for me, personally, it was really, really great. And then we both felt some personal feelings of that we actually should not be living in California. We should move back to your wife.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was acquired by a company called Fundley early for us. It was a nice payday, and it was just something that 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 Foursquare, you know. Then that's when we moved my wife and our early family. We moved out to Tiburon and lived in California for a short period of time.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was actually joked that I always had the idea, I just never had the execution in the early days. That was my curse, you know, to start other companies that someone else executed better on.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. 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 understanding marketing and technology and data and all that sort of thing. So when you start making a tweak or a change to a UX and you realize it increases 5, 10, 20%, all of a sudden you start understanding user psychology, how they interact with the apps, how to make things frictionless. 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yep, he's their local and provo 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 for families sharing photos and that sort of thing. And so at the time, I remember Facebook was growing and I remember it was being very successful. And when I ended up going with Paul very shortly after, all of a sudden Facebook opened up their API. and was like, you can now build on Facebook. And we said, wait, what if we show people how they're connected to each other, show how they're related? And then 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He calls himself Paul Allen the Lesser. Although he went on to create a billion dollar company, multibillion dollar company, he's still Paul Allen the Lesser.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the time, I didn't have much means. I didn't have anything. And so I was just like, well, you know, if they're asking me to not do this, then I'm not going to do it anymore. So at the time, though, I had someone named Paul Allen, and Paul Allen had started ancestry.com. And so he saw what I was doing with BYU.com.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was like a social, it was a social network for BYU students. So we were going to 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 got to do one in BYU here. And so we started building it. And the church noticed it. And when I say the church, I really mean BYU actually noticed it. And BYU sent me a cease and desist letter of like, hey, you know, that's our branding BYU.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Available. Wow. And when I say it's available, someone else had it. So I had to buy it off somebody, leased it from somebody. And it started growing pretty quickly. You started getting people online really quickly. Facebook was going. I'm like, this is social networking. This is where the future is”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's when I started teaching myself how to design and build websites and do all those kinds of things. And I built a couple websites for people and made a thousand dollars here and a thousand dollars there from just little odd jobs for people. And I was like, oh my goodness, I'm making some money. This is fantastic. And so eventually I built a website called Build Your Universe. So the BYU.com was available because the school had not secured it.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I went to a small college. It's called the LDS Business College. My main focus when I got there was to get my GED and try to get back into, I was going to try to go to college and try to get a career. And as I was doing that, I was in class and LDS 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.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I didn't really have a lot of thoughts afterwards. And so when I came home from my mission, I had that other wait, what am I doing? What's the purpose of my career? And what should I do? And then I realized that I wanted to be more part of the culture and where I was back home. There was only a few members of the church. And so I was like, oh, maybe I'll go move where there's more members. And where else other than Utah so I can, you know.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On my bike, it was really, really hot. You know, you learn a lot of tenacity and you learn a lot of being able to be rejected or grit. I remember one moment I had on my mission, I was riding my bike and I had my helmet on and someone had 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 substance started just kind of going down my face and I looked later and realized and from the bottle it was spitting two tobacco so someone had thrown a bottle up my face and I remembered 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 man this is something that was unique and I just the gospel brought me so much joy”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You'd wake up at 6:30 in the morning and you start studying your scriptures and reading the Bible. 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 talking to people on the streets, inviting people to come to church and riding in a suit and tie in Las Vegas weather during the summertime was always an experience I will never forget.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“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 1990s, he came to the United States to serve as a missionary of all places, Sin City, Las Vegas.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sawyer called me up one day and said, Hey, there's a building here, and I think we can get it for really cheap because they're going to demolish it soon. I'm like, oh, I think he was asking something like $1,200 a month or something for it. And I was like, sorry, we need to get it to $800 or $900. And I often think about how many decisions or $300 decisions that are life-changing for you, you know. I still to this day, if that landlord had not lowered the price of that building. I'm not sure where we would be today.”
2025-08-11 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Crumbl: Jason McGowan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT