How I Built This with Guy Raz - Crumbl: Jason McGowan

Episode Date: August 11, 2025

Crumbl may be a cookie business – but Jason McGowan turned it into a fast-growing restaurant chain by building it like a tech startup. He and co-founder Sawyer Hemsley meticulously A/B tested the recipe, launched a delivery app early on, and went viral with weekly drops of wild new flavors like bubblegum and Almost Everything Bagel. In just eight years, Crumbl has opened over 1,000 stores, and has dominated the cookie conversation on social media, with more TikTok followers than Starbucks, Domino’s, and Taco Bell combined.This episode was produced by Alex Cheng with music composed by Ramtin Arablouei. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Carla Estevez. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keeley.You can follow HIBT on X & Instagram, and email us at [e-mail]. Sign up for Guy’s free newsletter at guyraz.com or on Substack.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Hey, just a quick note before we start the show. In this interview, you're about to hear my voice sounds a little bit off. I was battling a pretty nasty cold that day. But the good news is it's an awesome interview, so you will not want to miss it. Okay, on to the show. 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, you know, $8 or $900. And I often think about how many decisions are $300 decisions that are life-changing for you, you know, 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. Welcome to How I Built This, a show of a about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Crumble rewrote the recipe on cookies with AB testing, new recipes each week, a massive TikTok following, and a thousand stores over just eight years. When most people think about starting a cookie company, they might picture warm memories or grandma's recipe, you know, a cozy kitchen, right? But Jason McGowan, he launched his cookie business like it was a tech startup. He and his cousin, Sawyer Hemsley, would tweak and test the recipe over and over and over again until it was optimized for sweetness and texture and eventually buzz.

And then Jason built an app to manage ordering and deliveries. And this was all for just one store in Logan, Utah, a small city about an hour and a half north of Salt Lake. Lake City. Now, if all of this sounds a little bit excessive, it might be worthwhile mentioning that Jason had spent his entire career up to that point working in tech, where he learned about viral marketing and network effects. Almost from the beginning, he had big ambitions for Crumble. From that single location in Logan, Utah, Jason and Sawyer opened 300 more stores within four years of launching the business in 2017. 300 locations within four years of launch.

Just let that sink in. Today, the company has over a thousand stores across the U.S. and Canada. And a big part of the appeal comes from a methodical and thoughtful design approach. For example, crumble cookies have always been packaged in pink boxes. The bakeries are clean and gleaming and spare, and each Sunday night the brand does a cookie drop in which it reveals the six flavor, it will sell that week. And some of them are weird, but also designed to go viral.

Flavors like everything bagel, cornbread, blue icy raspberry. Not surprisingly, that cookie drop has become a particularly popular event for teenagers. Jason and Sawyer saw potential in TikTok back in 2018, and they used the platform to build a massive following. In fact, Crumble Cookies has more followers on the platform than Starbucks, Domino's, and Toffee. O'Bell combined. Now, I should note that Crumble is somewhat polarizing in the food world, and the company has done a pretty good job of embracing that role. Whether you love them or hate them, there's no denying the impact Crumbull has had on the dessert world and on the playbook for how to build a food brand in the age of social media. 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 in, of all places, Sin City, Las Vegas. You know, you'd wake up at 6.30 in the morning and you'd start, you know, 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. On your bike? On my bike, it was really, really hot. You know, you learned 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 the substance started just kind of going down my face and I looked later and realized and from the the bottle it was spitting two tobacco so someone had

thrown a bottle at my face and I remember that moment that I was just I wasn't even sat it wasn't even like it was just the 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 I just the gospel brought me so much joy. All right. So you do your mission in Las Vegas. With the intention of going back to Alberta, what did you think you were going to do after? Did you have any thoughts about what you were going to do after? I didn't really have a lot of thoughts afterwards. And so when I came home from my mission, I had that other like, wait, what am I doing? What's the purpose, you know, of my career and, you know, what should I do? And then I realized that, you know,

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 it's like, oh, maybe I'll go move, you know, where there's more members and where where else other than Utah? Right. Right. So I can, you know, 40, 45% of the state is, our members of the church there probably was a bit higher. Yes. Back then in 2003. And by the day, where in Utah did you go to? So I went to Provo, Utah. Provo, of course, home to BYU, college town. Yep. But you weren't there to go to BYU or to explore it necessarily. No, I went to a small college. It's called the LDS Business College. You know, my main focus when I got there was to, you know, get my GED and try to get back into, you know, 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 LDIS 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. Can I just start it? So I just asked the future if I could just start something. And I realized at the time it had to be an internet company because, you know, yeah, that's when I started teaching myself, you know, how to design and build websites and do all those kinds of things. And I built a couple of websites for people and made, you know, $1,000 here and $1,000 there from just little odd jobs for people. And I was like, oh, my goodness, this is, 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 and BYU.com was available. Wow. And when I say it's available, someone else had it. So I had to buy it off somebody, at least it from somebody. And it started growing pretty quickly. We started getting people online really quickly. Facebook was going. I'm like, this is social networking. This is where the future is. And what was it, BYU.com? 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,

we've 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. And at the time, I didn't have much means. I didn't have, you know, 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. Yeah. 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 it, you know, with BYU.com.

This is not the Paul Allen who was also with Microsoft. It's a different Paul Allen. No, he calls himself Paul Allen the lesser. So although he went on to create a billion dollar company, multi-billion dollar company, he's still Paul Allen the lesser. And Paul Allen was local. He was there in Provo. Yep. He's there local in Provo. and he saw what happened when he was at Ancestry.com and how he created that 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 just started exploding immediately. Wow. You were just teaching yourself this stuff. And this really starts a career of working in tech. particularly with social media sites.

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 to as well to help me, you know, with understanding marketing and technology and data and all that sort of things. So, you know, when you start making a tweak or a change to a U.S. And you realize, you know, it increases 5, 10, 20 percent, all of a sudden, you start understanding user psychology, how they interact with the apps, how to make.

make things frictionless. Like 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. You eventually left FamilyLink and when started your own next business called Pick.com, which I guess was like a social shopping site. I think it was created around the same time as Pinterest. It was actually.

I always joke 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. And I read that even before you launched it, it was acquired? Yeah, so it was acquired by a company called Fundly. 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 four square, you know. Then that's when, you know, we moved our, and moved my wife and our early family. We moved out to Tiburon and lived in California for a short period of time. And I actually mentioned you were married, you were married and you had, I think, at least one kid at that point or maybe two. So you moved to California to the Bay Area. and how long were you there? 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, just, 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. You and your wife felt it. Yeah, me and my wife. Yeah. And we felt feelings that we should be moving back to Utah.

And where does you guys move to? Back to Provo. 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. Wow. So, all right, you're back in Utah.

And then you go back to, well, you return back to sort of your kind of your roots, which is you went to go work at Ancestry as a director of product in 2015. Yep. meantime, your wife has a cousin. This is a kid's Sawyer who's at, he's a student in Logan at Utah State University. And I guess he somehow gets connected with you because he's interested in becoming an entrepreneur and has an idea for like a clothing brand while he's a student in college. Tell me a little bit about this idea he had and how he approached you. Yeah.

So he wants to start a clothing company and I gave him some money to do it. And it was called Ember, EMBR. 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. How much did he borrow from you?

I don't even remember, to be honest with you. Was it less than $25,000 or $50,000? It could have been somewhere around there, yeah. But, you know, he wanted to pay it all. back, which was significant for him. You know, at the time, he's a college student. And I was like, sorry, that's not how it works. It failed.

You know, if the business would have succeeded, I would have made money and you would have made money, but it didn't work out. And, but I was just so impressed by his character and who he was as a person. And that really made me think, this guy's a good guy. We needed to start something sometime. Just to pause for a sec, you were working at ancestry. In the back of your mind, were you still thinking, I, because you had seen all of these people in the Bay Area and all these people that you'd come across had these huge,

probably successful exits. And in the back of your mind, were you still thinking, I'm still, there's still something out there for me to start. Yeah, I think, you know, when you get a taste of virality and growth, there was kind of this void and this feeling of like, 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? Am I like, you know, just not feeling like I was making a difference truthfully?

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? All right. So let's get to the cookies here. So you are, you are obviously searching for something interesting, something that would be, I don't know, would fill a void that you kind of had. And so how did the cookies come about? What even prompted that? I mean, everything up until this point was around technology, right?

Yeah. And that was your background. You'd been in social media and you'd been a, you know, sort of focused on virality and and then cookies. So how did that conversation even start with Sawyer? Yeah. So Sawyer 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 in the culture in Utah of people bringing treats

and bake goods to each other and, you know, for parties and family get-togethers and that sort of thing. It makes 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.

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. 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 could build this technology. And we could leverage it to potentially deliver other things to homes and that sort of thing. So it was kind of early, it was like the DoorDash thinking earlier on. I mean, initially it was inspired by delivery. I mean, we've done insomnia cookies on the show, which is also a great story. And that started out as a delivery brand. And so the initial idea was, let's have a cookie that people can order, like, through DoorDash, to their dorm room or whatever. Yeah, that's kind of was the start of it. But the problem is, 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 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 question. 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, they would take a, 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 do something different? What if we take the same methodology that we use in technology, this AB testing model? And let's taste test our way to the perfect chocolate chip cookie. Right. So it sounds like already you drop the site idea of we're just going to deliver whatever cookie we can get, you know, because this is like 2017. This is early 2017 where you start to talk about it. It sounds like pretty quickly you land on the idea that this is going to be a cookie shop and not a cookie delivery service. Well, that was, no, 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 out of a home. So we'd make homemade cookies, bake it, and then deliver them from our home. Right. 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? 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 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. Like 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. And that's how we decided that we were going to go with milk chocolate chips instead of semi-sweet.

Right. You 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. I don't want to give it anyway trade secrets today, but how long it rests for the size of the cookie, the temperature of the cookie. Does it rotate? Does it... Do you slam the pan in the middle of it, right?

Things like that. Yeah. There's a lot of nuance to, you know, 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 and a home oven versus commercial equipment. We learned us 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. Well, but there's a leap from making it and then saying we're going to invest in commercial equipment. Like, 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? Well, you know, there wasn't a lot of grand master planter thinking. It was just tenacity of saying, we're on a mission and we're going to accomplish this. And we realize that, like, you have. to have the equipment for us to actually figure out how to do it. And so we did, 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.

When we come back in just a moment, Crumble is finally ready to launch, but just before it does, Jason learns of a rival startup in the same town doing exactly the same thing. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2017 and Jason is still working on the perfect recipe for his new cookie business. And meanwhile, his partner Sawyer is in Logan, Utah, scouting at a place to build the first store. Sawyer called me up one day and said, hey, there's a building here. It's, there used to be, you know, 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. Yeah.

And so this was like part of our like test and learn culture here was like, oh, this will be fantastic. We'll, you know, 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, you know, $8 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. Wow. I called that the multi-billion dollar decision because I often think about how many decisions

are $300 decisions that are life-changing for you, you know? Yeah. 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 probably it was a win-win for him too as well. Okay.

So you get this shop that's going to be demolished. And at that point, now, what I'm curious about is the shop was in Logan, Utah. And I think you were living in Provo, right? Yes, yes. Which has got to be an hour and a half, two hour drive. It is. So Sawyer lived in Logan, though. And so it was close to Sawyer.

And the idea was that I'm going to be able to 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. Right. And you got the lease. So you could start to move the equipment. into the facility. But before I ask you about like sort of building it out, I mean, it's only going to be around

for six months, right, before they could demolish it. But I mean, this was going to be a small business. It was going to be a small side hustle. 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. And what was the technology side of it going to be? Like, because it was going to be a shop selling cookies, but tell me about what were you going to focus on. Yeah. So I was focusing on like, okay, how do we get our first product, which was the chocolate chip cookie? Yeah. And then how do we build the technology meeting like routing it to houses? So this was still going to be a delivery business, even though there was a shop?

It was going to be a delivery business. Yes, yes. So you had to hire drivers and things like that. 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. 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 like 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. It does. Well, when 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, you know, 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? And 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, what I was doing was like all of a sudden there was color to it. You know, I was like, oh, this is so exciting. Like I was as much fascinated by the learning experience of what we were doing as much as like the business or making money or any of those. kinds of things. Yeah. But to justify the time and the effort and even the money that you were putting in, you had to have thought that this could maybe lead to something else. Like it sounds to me that

like the cookies were interesting, but that maybe the technology that you were building, the distribution network, that's something that you could sell eventually. Totally. Yes. All right. So you guys had the lease. And what about the store? Did you do a build out? I mean, did you, it was going to be demolished. So, but you still have to make it look nice enough, right? Because people were going to go into the store. Oh, 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, you know, frugal I was. Like, you know, 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 buildout. And at the time, that was like, whoa, you can kind of get a live peek into a store, a local store getting built out. And we started building a following that way. All right. I think you opened the shop in the fall of 2017. And did you open with like one or two? Like how many different cookies do you open with? We opened with one. That's it. Just chocolate chip. Just 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 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 we're going to be warm they're going to be big we wanted them big because you know they're meant to be shared so if you're taking them you're kind of sharing them and all a sudden people are trying them and that's how the virality grows within the the food concept that we were trying to do and i still remember because remember i've been in so social media for my whole life. 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 the 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 it them changed. And I remember just thinking, oh my goodness, we created a business and it has revenue on day one. And I remember being so excited. And really you were building up, I mean, the social media presence, presumably, it was for a local audience, right? It was you were trying to get people in and around Logan to be aware of it. Yeah, we were.

And, you know, Sawyer had a, had his personal social media. They had friends and stuff like that. We actually leveraged that, started off. It had like, I think 10,000 followers or something like that. And 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. Wow.

They 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. And technology, first-movers advantage is everything. And that's been kind of built into my core. And we're like, oh, is this going to work? Did they already get the first-movers advantage? Are we going to look like copycatters?

It's just 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 was because we knew that at the end of the day, it all comes down to the product. And I just told Soros, 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% of our customers. If we build products that our customers love and they have great experiences in the stores, we'll win. And so when you opened, right, a week after your competitor had opened, And how did it do? It did phenomenal. Lines were out the door.

Just for chocolate chip cookies. Oh, it was crazy guy. I was still shocked to 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. Tell me a little bit about the sort of the thinking around the branding or the look. Like, for example, I think from the beginning, you sold.

the cookies in these pink boxes. Yeah, you know, I think what was interesting is our competition at the time was going after the college market because it was, you know, 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 Sawyers had a core memory growing up where one of his dad's friends had a Cadillac and it was pink. And love the color from that catalog. And we thought, what if we just take that iconic catalog color, it'll set us apart and will be different.

And so I really kind of love that. All right. So now you've got this. And you're going back and forth between Logan and Provo, like every couple of days or once a week or? Yeah. Oh, like, yes. There was 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.

I 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 beginning to route everything perfectly. We're doing it by hand. I mean, you were building a logistics network.

It's like a mini UPS. Yes, it was. And it was a lot. But how was that sustainable? I mean, delivering is really expensive, right? From what I understand, it really only works on a large scale. I mean, you got, you had drivers being paid hourly to drive to deliver cookies. And how did that work in terms of not, not, not.

losing on you. 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'd just slot it in. And so all of a sudden, the logistics became a lot, you know, lower cost because we were optimizing your route so much. It worked really. really well for logistics.

All right. So you've got this store that's really kind of starting to take off. And I mean, I guess not too long into the business, you decided to open a second store. Like by the end of 2017, decided to open one in... 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 Provo area. And we were like, okay, well, how come?

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? It would be a central kitchen, like a central commissary. Yeah, like a commissary. This is exactly right. So we create this commissary in this warehouse and then we opened 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, you know, our ability to produce them. And so, you know, we got some bad reviews and it started

being, you know, 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. And Bountiful was going to be your third location. Yeah, Bountiful was going to be your third location. It was our first franchise location. And 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. It's just 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 researching and like, well, franchising. We already invested the money. The business was self-sustaining. It was already making money and paying for itself. 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 about 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 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 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 is closed down. And I remember just my gut just dropped and like, oh, my goodness, we picked the run location. But we powered through it and the minute we opened it up, the lines were just out the door. So there was no plan. I mean, again, like it seems like it just kind of happened organically. It was they wanted to open.

They wanted it in. You sort of thought, well, let's try franchise. model. The beauty of a franchise model is, I mean, if you do it right, you don't need to bring in a lot of outside money because the franchisee pays the fees to build out. And so with the success of that shop, immediately you thought to yourself, okay, we're a franchise business now. Yeah. And we had friends and family who saw this. So I had friends in my neighborhood and so I had some family members and they all wanted to do a crumble. 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. Wow. 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 to 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. Right. You're closed on Sunday. Yeah. The only way if you 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 bakers 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. The franchising model is complex, right? Because usually people who do it have experience in franchising. First of all, how did you even start? So once this one in Bountiful become successful

and you know that people want to start and open them up. Did you hire, like, consultants to help you understand how to do this? Who helped you figure this out? You know, so a lot of it, we just looked up online, and a lot of the people were our friends and families. So 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 were supposed to be made. And there was a lot of scaling pains and problems early on of us trying to,

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 that went to 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 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. When we come back in just a moment, Jason learns that almost all publicity is good publicity, even when it's about flavors that flop. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to how I built this. Hey, welcome back to how I built this. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2018, a year after launch, and Crumble Cookies is growing into more than just a side hustle. It went from, hey, this is a cool concept. So, you know, 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, from jobs that can be easily done by somebody else. You know, so customer support. We've got to fire ourselves. We've got to find who's the best customer support person we could find. You know, it's like, I can't be doing deliveries anymore. I've 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. You know, like for example, let me give you a specific example.

How are we going to train all the bakers on 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 1,000 stores and 30, 40,000 bakers? And so that led to like the decision of building technology. So we have our own custom app that shows people how to train. We invested in videography. 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 and that would come i mean that would come later obviously as you scaled but i mean 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 you know 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 unroll, 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? A lot of it was sending over the recipes to them and doing just content videos of just sharing with them like 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 it and say, that doesn't look right. Let's see what you're doing here. Are you mixing wrong or you're over mixing 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 mean, so I couldn't even open every store physically. But for the first 100 locations, for example, I did the real estate. So I went out and I met with the entrepreneurs and the franchisees and I'd go tour the locations and we'd look at them and we would talk about them and we'd, you know, eventually I couldn't do that anymore. But I was there. We were boots on the ground.

We were in it. Yeah. Well, I mean, you had to because if the more stores you're opening, the more risk there is that one of them isn't going to be up to scratch, right? you could start getting negative reviews by people who are like, oh, this crumble cookie place sucks, right? Totally. One of those franchises. So it's like you really had to make sure that their standards were what you 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 it's, 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? I think you're probably right. I remember reading the book about Sam Walton and Made in America and how he went to the outskirts of Wall.

Walmart. It's almost like the Walmart strategy and where you go to all these smaller towns and, you know, 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 you, 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 people are talking about it. Like there's a thousand other concepts in, and 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.

Yeah. Tell me about social media now. I mean, you came from this background. Like you had all of this experience with social media. Tell me a little bit about how you started to think about leveraging social media to turn what was basically a cookie, a good cookie, but there are lots of good cookies available in America. But how do you then use social media to really differentiate? How did you start to think about that? 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, I've built relationships with our customers. And people are like, well, you have a cult like following. We call them caught 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 just dedicated to receive. 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. How did you land on what I think a lot of people think of crumble cookies as sort of like a frosted cookie? It's almost like, you know, I think there was a cupcake craze. It's still around, right? People still go eat cupcakes. But, you know, a lot of your cookies have a, you know,

layer of frosting on top, which is different, unusual. How did that come about? Because I think, again, when I think of crumble cookies, I think of that sort of really sort of lavishly decorated cookie. You know, one of the things that, you know, Sawyer and I think about a lot. So we constantly ask yourselves, how are our cookies different, unique, and special? And it allows us to just try crazy things, you know. 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, like operationally, it was extremely challenging. Customers love it, which created demand, which created more customers. Some people hate it, right? Oh, yes.

Which also works to your advantage because it's controversial. There are people who do see this and they're like, that's disgusting. That's too much sugar. You're right. It does create this controversy and this conversation online. But at the end of the day, we look at the same. the data and say, what do customers want? And, you know, we say this a lot here at Cremble is our critics don't pay for our business. Our fans do. I think that's a really important point because I think

a lot of brands and, you know, folks do pay attention to their haters. And that's not who's buying your product. I wonder about how did you start to think about really getting this idea of Crumble as a brand, like when people think of cookies? And for example, who are you targeting particularly because initially it was it was women, it was moms coming into the store and Logan. But I imagine eventually it was like, well, it's actually kids, teenagers. Yeah, it's a combination of both. Those are our two strong demographics is both moms as kind of our primary and then teenagers are secondary. But how do we think about brand, you know, being in the tech world and being around, you know, Steve Jobs and, you know, a lot of people call us the apple of cookies sometimes and especially early on with our stores and they're white and like 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 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 even works even on product that is completely people don't like. One good example was everything but bagel. We launched this everything but bagel 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. When you make an everything but the bagel cookie that's going to generate a lot of conversation. I mean, it's totally. From a marketing perspective, like it makes a lot of sense.

Totally. It makes a ton of sense. You know, and sometimes they may not even be the biggest sellers, but the earned media behind them becomes a really big. deal. When 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 for 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, you know, expanding or selling tons of franchises. So in a sense, like, you're actually

still very vulnerable at that point. Yeah, I know. definitely. And I think people see it on social media and all of a sudden they're like, oh, I can do this. This is just cookies. It's simple. Yeah. So of course you have people, you know, competition of 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? That was the that was the realization that you had to do this very fast. Scale, scale and speed. So scale and speed, you know, it creates this moat and it creates this experience that, you know, discourages competition if you become the first movers. And you see this with, you know, in and out or Wadaberger, how one has the East Coast, one has the West Coast. And they're kind of, you know, several brands. And for us, our belief was how do we how do we go across the nation as fast as possible so that that doesn't happen. Yeah. Let's talk about TikTok because you really figured out how to get. virality like massive viral i think you've got 10 million tickto followers on your channel more than starbucks right for example starbucks and nucky combined i think we have more than both those combined yeah so what do you what did you do on tic talk that worked and that was able like was it just

images of cookies breaking was it just crazy cookies with wild frosting like weird flavors what were you putting out there that caught fire well i think it's first and foremost the one of 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 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, 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 our 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, you know, move's advantage is we try to find out what the customers were already doing and leverage that. So one thing that we did was the customers were really excited about, you know, sharing

their reviews. This is kind of where reviews started really taking off on TikTok. And so a couple of things started happening like, wow, how do we champion these reviewers? And so we started putting their videos in the stores. People physically would walk in like, oh my goodness, there's TikTok videos of like... In the stores. In the stores. On a screen. Just on like

replay. Yeah, 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 like it just, we were authentic or 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.

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. Every single week. And you drop those flavors.

It's like a drop, like a new purse or a new sneakers. Like you have a flavor 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. Exactly.

You know, and you have people that they don't want to. I 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 it's their favorite flavor, they'll buy them and they'll freeze them so that they can have them later. But this is interesting to me because I have spoken to a lot of conferences of franchise owners. And, you know, they always have some criticisms of the parent company. And I'm thinking if I'm a franchise owner and I'm paying, you know, you, 8% or 9% and, you know, you're telling me I've got to make the almost everything bagel cookie that week and no one's buying it. And I'm like, well, last week we had the butterscotch crisp cookie and that was crushing it. Like, I'm annoyed because I'm

making less money that week. Yes. Well, and I think that's the 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 franchisees. We bring a council together of franchisees. So we have several franchisees who've run, extremely well-run stores, and they come together and they help us pick the flavors together. We do it as a team. I mean, sometimes, like, what is the criteria for, like, you've had, like, pineapple doll-whip cookie, right?

Or cornbread cookie, which doesn't, to me, or strawberry limeade with nerds, candies. That just sounds really gross to me. How do you... Have you tried it? I haven't. Yeah, so you're going to try it. Fair point. You got to try it.

I can tell you haven't tried that one because you probably would like that one. you know, like how weird are you willing to go? Yeah, I think we can go pretty weird. Why not? It's fun. So we will, our brand will always do that. I mean, the flip side of, I mean, innovating, obviously, but the flip side is, is that you do too many things, right? Is that you're pushing too many things out.

But I guess that you're, what you're saying is you experiment and if it doesn't work, you just move on. You just kill it. Yeah. I think that's why our franchise partners are willing to work with us and willing to try new things. Because they know you're going to kill stuff if they don't work. They 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. Yeah.

I know COVID was a huge, you know, like actually was a huge sort of boost for the brand because a lot of people were on social media. They were noticing the brand. And 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 it 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, both of which are still around.

In your view, like, is it worth it to go after somebody who's copying your – because we've had founders in the company who's just say, at the end of the day, it's not worth it? the time and the effort to do that. You just focus on your brand and others say, no, you've got to go after every single one because they can threaten your business. Yeah, you know, I think that's a great question. 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. Your trade secrets. 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 in sound bites. And by this time we got larger, so they tried to create it to be a David versus Goliath experience. I think even one of your competitors that you sue took out billboards or considered doing it that would say things like, Cookies So Good Were Being sued.

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. By the end of 2022, you reached a billion dollars in sales. So less than roughly five years after launch, which is absolutely incredible. I mean, the growth was just astounding and entirely self-funded, right? I mean, there were no investors at that point? No investors, yep. We had no investors.

Still to this day, right? 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. Congrats. 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, you know, a few of us in the cap table, and that was it. So I'm curious about something. I don't want to rain on the parade, but, you know, part of my job is to ask questions that might sound like that.

But, you know, when I was growing up, the big cookie brand was Mrs. Fields. And it was started in Palo Alto by Mrs. Fields and Debbie Fields. And it was everywhere. It was in every shopping mall. It was everywhere. And they were good cookies. I remember. And I can't remember the last time I saw Mrs. Fields.

I'm sure they're around somewhere, but I don't know where. It can't be as big as it once was. I mean, there is always a risk that, you know, the sort of the virality or the excitement or the novelty of it wears off. And so how do you – I mean, I know, for example, you slowed expansion, which, again, doesn't suggest that that's happening, but you've got over a thousand locations and you were growing very rapidly and now you're going to slow down expansion a little bit. But how do you protect the future of the business? Like, how do you make sure that in 20 years this is in Mrs. Fields, if you care at all about that? Well, how I look at it, no, of course we care about that. We care deeply about that.

We want Crumbled to be a brand that's around forever. We're really excited about it. And we're very optimistic, you know, even just now, we took a minority investment. Could we have taken the whole company off the table? You know, that could have been a possibility. But it doesn't matter what business you are, you know, 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. You have cakes, too. You 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 love 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, to 300 units a year, right? That's like, it doesn't matter what brand you are or how big you are, there comes a point where, 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. Jason, when you think about the journey

you took and where you got to now, how much of this do you attribute to the work you put in and the grind and how much do you think has to do with just getting lucky and the right time? 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, the timing, there is luck involved in there. And what would happen if I would have started, you know, BYU.com before Facebook. And I mean, but then I think the other thing, too, is the learnings from my faith and having that be a part of, you know, my focus. And those are the three things that I think about. But if we just had luck and not all the other things, things that 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, that, and it wouldn't have happened. So I think it's a combination of all those things and any successful entrepreneur, you know, they may or may not admit it. They have those things in their life, you know, and I think that's what helps make them successful. That's Jason McGowan, co-founder along with Sawyer

Hemsley of Crumble. By the way, remember how Crumbull's pink packaging was in inspired by that 1959 Cadillac owned by a family friend of Sawyer's. Well, in 2021, Sawyer actually had the chance to buy that very same Cadillac, pale pink with those classic tail fins over the wheels. And it's now become kind of a mascot for Crumble. They call it the Pink Caddy. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. Please make sure to click the follow button on your podcast app so you never miss a new episode of the show. And if you're interested in insights, ideas, and lessons, particularly for small business, sign up for my newsletter at guyrazz.com or on Substack.

This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Ramtin Arablewe. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Carla Estevez. Our engineers were Patrick Murray and Jimmy Keely. Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, Sam Paulson, Kerry Thompson, Catherine Seifer, Nur Gill, Ramele Wood, Andrea Bruce, and Elaine Coates. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This.