YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Woolverton

lines on the record: 126
first: 2023-04-17
most recent: 2023-04-17
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

“The one thing I regret is that when I sold the company, I did not get Free ice cream for life, or something like that. So when I get Halo Top, I still have to go to the store and buy it, which I think is kind of unfair.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I found that the company in 2011, and it took until like 15, 2016 to see signs of life. And so, I mean, it's hard to attribute anything of that to luck. That was pure grind, probably. Level of psychosis of not giving up and still believing in the stuff. And then I knew it could be successful, but the fact that it was that success that it was like a phenomenon like that, that was, there was a lot of luck involved in that. You know what I mean? I was fully confident that it could be a pretty good ice cream that could, you know, get into the top 10 or something like that and provide a good living. But becoming a phenomenon, there was a lot of luck, a lot of right place at the right time involved in that. So I'm going to give you the cliched cop-out answer and say 50-50.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's a good question. I guess I would have to say it was about. I would have to say 50 50, I guess. I mean, what a cop out that is, huh? But it took.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's a really personal question, but I'm happy to answer it. And you touched on it. People come out of the woodwork, and there is all people are much nicer to you, but when you do meet new people, I've met a lot of people who are like, oh, man, this guy's genuinely nice. And, you know, three days later, he sent me an investment deck. You know what I mean? It's like, do people like me for me or do they like my money? So yeah, that's definitely... Your hackles go up a little bit on that point. Like friends with startups, I've had a couple awkward experiences. Yeah, so it does affect things a little bit.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, let's just say I'm looking for something else because it's, you know, I've got hobbies and I play basketball, but there's nothing I'm doing that's impressive right now that people would care about, let's put it that way.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, yeah, I have a lot of passive investments out there. I'm happy to give some advice to people who need it. I got a wonderful girlfriend finally. I gave up on girlfriends for 10 years while I was doing Halo Top. Not a chance. So have a wonderful relationship.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I am, but it's absolutely fantastic, and you've got all the Halo Top rock stars, you've got like... I mean, exactly what I should have done. You've got 20 people at the start. You're not trying to do it solo. You've got all this expertise in terms of grocery stores and everything. I think it's going to be a big success and it's a great product.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, more or less. And they actually just released a product line called Gatsby, which is like a chocolate version of Halo Top. Yep.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm done. I woke up and I'm thinking like, oh my goodness. You know it's over. What the hell am I going to do with my life? For two or three years, I seriously just vegged. It had taken so much out of me that I did. It's like remember that movie office space when he's like, what would you do with a million bucks? And he said, nothing. And they were like, nothing. That was me. I was like, I am doing nothing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was able to buy my parents a house and I was able to pay off my student loans and seriously those were the two things that I don't have a lot of I don't have expensive tastes those were the two things that made me very very happy”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm 100% dead because it wasn't 2017 anymore. You know what I mean? There was no place to go but down, to be honest. Revenue and earnings is like the end all be all during a sales process, right?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“100%. That was one of my conditions because, like I said, one of the reasons I wanted to sell was that I was just flat out burnt out. And so one of the conditions was... I'm not doing a thing. I mean, I was willing to stay on for three to six months to transition to the next CEO or whatever. But I was like, there's not going to be some two year standard earnout where I've got a boss and I'm sitting there obsessing over our earnings in order to hit a certain earnout. That wasn't going to happen. So we were clear about that upfront during the sale process. Yeah.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, of course, of course, of course. Yet everything was drawn up to where it was a very easy process. I did have 100% control. So when it came time to the cell, it was extremely easy. I mean, if we like the term. Your callment.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was either going to look for a new CEO, or I just needed to sell the company. So I'm telling you, if I were refreshed, I probably would have just held onto the company and kind of relished the challenge of getting through all these competitors and having a competitive market. But I was just burnt out, to be perfectly honest. And I was like, I cannot deal with this anymore.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you are right, but that's actually not the full story. I had been. I was burnt out. I had been doing this thing since 2011. You know, the first two years doing it alone had taken years off my life and probably given me mental issues I'm still dealing with. And by the time you can tell. I'm just kidding. And the time 2018 rolled around.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's basically right. And they were approaching us. We weren't actively looking to sell at that time, but it was like if an offer came along that we couldn't refuse, well, we wouldn't refuse it. It was in 2018 that we decided to actually go on an offensive sales pitch rather than just being defensive.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and what was unique about that sales growth for Halo Top is we grew so fast that actually we were flush with cash to where we didn't have really cash flow issues.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what's funny is when I first founded Halo Top, it was in my cheap little apartment in this place in West Hollywood on Genesee Avenue. And I'm talking about it's in an area where it's like next to a liquor store and two pawn shops. And I would have my neighbors take pictures of this kind of very low-rent place of like a one venture capital guy showed up with a gigantic human-sized golden spoon and basically sat outside my door for an hour and my neighbor was filming him and sent it to me. And it was like,”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did. We constantly had suitors. In 2017 is when we got real offers to sell the full company. But even before then, I mean, every venture capital firm in America was in some cases sending people to my house to knock on the door.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“1,000%. Yeah. I mean, I had unlimited passion for the stuff when I made it. I mean, it was like my life. I had such a fire to get it done, but it was never, I want to have an ice cream business that I can hand down to my son one day or anything like that. I wanted to get it big and to sell it to a company.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And of course, they were cheaper, and they got the better shelf space. We had a copycap brand come out and they copied our design so much that we actually sent them a cease and assist, but they copied it so much and their calorie counts on the front, they put the lower number, the per serving number. And to be clear, there's four servings in a pint of ice cream. So if there's 280, we would have 280 in the pint. We'd put 280 on there. They would put 70. And so it was like kind of an underhanded, clever trick”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. The real worry was exactly what happened, which is we somehow managed to fly under the radar of the big guys. They let us exist. They didn't squash us like the bug that we were for five years. And then suddenly in 2016 and then in 2017 especially when we became the best-selling ice cream, the cat was out of the bag. And so every single ice cream maker, even from startups to Unilever, were just straight up making copycats. And the one that hurt the most, and yes, I use the derogatory word copycat instead of competitor because it makes me mad. Why you can't patent a food that people can just write your same song. I mean, it makes sense and nobody will empathize with me because everybody likes competition and I get it, but it's still, I'm still raw about it.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes, it was dark. It was weird. It was a very love it or hate it. The marketing world loved it. And that was partly the reason I did it was partly because I could kind of sense that we were becoming very uncool. And it was honestly kind of like a band trying to stop making pop music and release something already like their jazz record. That really was kind of the impetus for that. I could sense that we were becoming uncool.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And actually, that's why I made a very, very weird ad that talk about polarizing. I mean, it is a very weird ad, a very avant-garde ad where it's like the sci-fi dystopian future and there's a robot trying to feed this woman saying there is only ice cream.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, and to me I always think of bands like nickelback. If everybody loves them at first, then they're just top of the charts. And then everybody poor Nickelback. Poor Nickelback. Poor Nickelback.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Absolutely. We never got defensive over that. I mean, think about how bad of a look that would be if we came on and said, oh, well, you're not real ice cream. I mean, who? We just kind of, there's just nothing you can say to that. Some people are purists. I can tell you that in 2017 there was a period where I could tell that we had peaked and it's kind of like a band. It had gotten too popular. And the sentiment of us kind of being like a cool brand was starting to shift. It started to become cool to hate on Halo Top a little bit more. Does that make sense?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I should add that the ice cream was very polarizing, still is. It was definitely polarizing. Some people were like, oh, this is an ice cream. This is just stevia. It's not like, if you want ice cream, get real ice cream. Just have a couple spoonfuls of it. You had haters out there.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and that was my focus was efficiency. I think so many of the kind of corporate habits are just such time wasters and just inefficient. And so that was always something to get away from.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, exactly. In the co-packing thing, there are quite a few really successful ice cream companies that don't own their own factories. So the co-packing thing is a little bit normal. But yeah, there was a lot of outsourcing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, you didn't have an office, you had no physical office space, you had no physical factory. You outsourced the factory, the production, you had, everybody was working remotely, and the distribution was handled by a distributor. And it was a lot of the things you were doing were outsourced”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want to know what a crazy part of that is? Our brand awareness at that point when we became the best-selling ice cream, our brand awareness was just over 50%. That means half the population didn't even know what Halo Tuff was. I mean, compare that to like Ben and Jerry's where 100% of people know. So the people who like Talo Top freaking liked it. You know what I mean? And it was a daily ice cream that other ice creams just simply weren't. You can't eat a pint of Hagen dolls every day. Lord knows we all wish we could, but you can't.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And I'm not too sure if there was a single ice cream, a serious ice cream co-packer in the nation that wasn't working with Halo Top at that point. We needed everybody.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I can't quite remember if we had one or two COPACs. I think we had a, I think we had more than one, but it was just immediate all hands on deck. This is where Doug really shined because he was COO. There are only so many ice cream factories in the nation, and they're all taken up. So we had to beg and cajole to get space. And our co-packers were like, what is happening with this brand? There's no way you're possibly ordering this much product. And so we were working out ways to build on to their factory, not by our own factory, but to do a kind of build and lease thing where we put a new line in their factory dedicated to Halo Top.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and to be honest, I think what fueled it a little bit was when you go to a store to buy something and it's always sold out, that just drives the fervor even more. So when you do see it, you're like, screw this, I'm getting every single pint here, you know? So it's. It's a plus. It's a pro and a con. I mean, it's mostly a con. You want to sell it if people want it, but there are some upsides to not having availability.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“People for the first time were buying an ice cream for every single day of the week and buying 14 pints at a time in some cases.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like for the supply chain had problems, like Whole Foods couldn't keep it on the shelves, but these stores only have so much room allocated in the back for extra overflow ice cream. And so they couldn't order enough of the stuff, and they had to change their entire design, how they store foods to hold more ice cream. Because what you do with ice cream is you buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's, you go Sunday and you watch Game of Thrones and you eat the pint of Ben and Jerry's. It's like a once-a-week thing or once a month.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was just insane. And the issue with it is it's not just any company that hits a big. There were unique challenges because it was ice cream. For example, nobody knew how to handle this. So the stores, let's take a whole food. They couldn't keep it on the store.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, we set cells records, obviously. I think we might have set all-time cells records. A company isn't supposed to grow that fast. It became a phenomenon.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so it was all primed. All the good stuff was on the shelves from, like Shane was in New York City, in LA and everywhere, pretty much on the shelves at 2016. In March 2016, in that month alone, in March isn't a great month for ice cream. March 26th alone, we did more revenue than the entirety of 2015. And then 2016, just from March just went up and up and up and staggering levels. It was just unbelievable.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, yeah, I can give you an example. In twenty fifteen is when the new product, both on the inside and the outside, hit the shelves. The new form we left”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“If I remember correctly, Shane was very good at actually putting in the advice of a nutritionist who indeed told him, you're being stupid. Don't eat. Don't do this. But he was very honest about everything. Obviously, he was like, by day five, I'm sick of this stuff, but he's talking about how he hit new records in the gym. And after day 10, he's like, I don't even want to see Halo Top. But you know what? I found myself a week later getting more of it. So it was just like a fantastic viral article.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm just thinking that's not a good thing to do because, you know, we need fiber and roughage. I'm just thinking about, you know, things that I can't talk about here on the air. But just what would happen to you after 10 days of just eating pints of halo top?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, not just eat it for 10 days, eat nothing but Halo Top for 10 days and talk about his experiences every day. So it was a really unique article.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was actually a fantastic article. A guy named Shane Snow, who I absolutely, I don't know, but I still love him. Even if I wasn't, you know, the founder of Palo Top, I would still want to read this because all that he did was eat HaloTop for 10 straight days.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I knew nothing. Nothing. That's what made it so funny I got a Google alert for Halo top, realized GQ had written about it, and I opened the article with my hand covering my eyes, like with a little crack between my fingers like, oh God, what a thing.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, that brings us to 2016, which was unprecedented. One of the unprecedented moments in the history of food, I think, in Let's start with what happened, which started with an article. So what did you know about the making of this article”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our main target was I always just basically said soccer moms, the type of people who liked Greek yogurt, you know, more or less it wasn't ice cream gourmet people who tended to be the people who hated on top the most We tended to really do well with millennials, but I didn't quite foresee that coming. I didn't quite realize that they were so health conscious and stuff.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, you know how everybody is mortified by figuring out just how much data Facebook knew about us? The only people who liked that were us marketers. And it was so, I was like, man, this is so invasive but so useful. Yeah. They could track if you liked a page on Facebook. They could track that, link it to your wallet, and find out what type of products you were buying at the store. But it was also very useful in making sure that our ads got in front of the right people.”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So in like 2015, you're definitely still a relatively small ice cream brand, right? In a sea of ice cream brands. But one of the things that you, because you didn't have a whole lot of advertising dollars, right? And you really start to lean into Facebook and Instagram ads, which is like 2015, 2014. And this is sort of like the peak of really hopping on that train, right? Because you could target people based on their backgrounds and their interests and their zip codes and things like that, right?”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. Look, there's no way to minimize it. Whether that was 50% of our stores or 20% of our stores, it was crushing financially and mentally. It was a big deal. I'm trying to remember if that happened before or after we were actually raising money because it came at a really awkward time. We might have just closed our second and final round for about 750 grand and then got kicked out of sprouts and it was like oh sorry guys are bad so just embarrassing too it's just embarrassing”
2023-04-17 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Halo Top Ice Cream: Justin Woolverton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT