How I Built This with Guy Raz - Pipcorn: Jennifer and Jeff Martin

Episode Date: April 26, 2021

While working at a farmers market in Chicago, Jennifer Martin had a Jack-in-the-Beanstalk moment—a chance encounter with some tiny kernels, which wound up growing into a small giant of a business: Pipcorn, snacks made of heirloom corn. Along with her brother Jeff and sister-in-law Teresa, Jennifer launched the brand in 2012, hand-popping mounds of popcorn and hand-stamping the packaging. Within a few months, the team was featured on Oprah, and within a few years, they were on Shark Tank, but each time the publicity nearly derailed them, forcing them to scramble to meet demand. Today, Pipcorn has expanded to include crackers, dippers, and cheese balls, and is sold in more than 10,000 stores across the country.How I Built This Summit - information and tickets at:http://summit.npr.orgSee 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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It had tall windows, beautiful old details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com host. Hey, it's Guy here with an important reminder that our first ever how I built this virtual summit is right around the corner. From May 24th to the 27th, we're bringing you inspiring.

conversations with some incredible entrepreneurs. You can learn how to build and lead a team with Brne Brown, how to get the word out about your business with Gary Vee, channel your creativity with Adam Grant, and find power in community with Rashad Robinson. Also, each night I'll be hosting conversations about innovation and marketing and how to make an impact with some of your favorite guests from the show like St. Marshall, Sal Khan, Sadie Lincoln, Tristan Walker, and many, many more. If you're ready to build a better future and make connections with other people who want to do the same, then this summit is for you. You can learn more about it and get tickets at summit.npr.org. Thank you to GoDaddy, the presenting sponsor of this year's summit, and to our supporting sponsors, Dell Technologies and Bulldog Online Yoga. And I cannot wait to see all of you there. So it was a ton of work, zero efficiencies.

It was like what's the most amount of work we can do and that's what we did. And that first time we like made all the bags and we seal them, we bring them to the market. Yeah, we were so excited. We had all of these. Our mom and dad were in lawn chairs behind us. We've arrived and we open them up and like they're stale. Soft. Yeah.

It was really disappointing. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, ideal. and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Jennifer Martin turned a tiny kernel of corn into a big idea and joined up with family to build pipcorn, a brand of snacks made of heirloon corn, and sold in thousands of stores across the country.

So you've probably heard the term unfair advantage. This is a term startup founders will use when pitching their idea to investors. They'll say, Something like our unfair advantage is we hold the patent on this idea and no one else can legally copy it. Or our unfair advantage is that we only hang out with A-list celebrities who will promote our skin cream on Instagram. You get the point here. But another advantage a startup can have is location, especially when you need to break out of the pack in a crowded marketplace.

And when it comes to location, New York City can be a pretty good place. to launch. But wait, you say, New York is expensive and New York is full of a million brands and companies. All true, yes, but New York, especially New York media, happens to also be obsessed with New York and everything that happens there. And that outsized attention can help turn a smaller brand into a much, much bigger brand fast, which is how a snack food company called Pipcorn got its start. Pipcorn was originally conceived in Chicago, but weeks after they started,

the founders, brother and sister Jennifer and Jeff Martin, got an opportunity to sell their heirloom popcorn at the hipster outdoor New York food market, Smorgasburg, in the hipster capital of America, Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It's a market visited by some of the most influential journalists, TV executives, and food bloggers. And one day, one particularly influential visitor to the market would stop by the popcorn stand. A visit that would also prove transformational.

But we'll get there. Because the thing is, even with the early and outsized attention and even with an eventual slot on Shark Tank, the rise and rise of pipcorn was anything but smooth. In fact, at several points along the journey, the viability of the business was in doubt. Especially because the snack food industry is jam-packed with options. When it comes to popcorn alone, there are at least 100 different national brands. Aside from Angie's and Smart Food and Orville Redenbockers, you can find popcorn popped in a solar-powered factory, Svirracha popcorn, even a popcorn brand called Gary Poppins.

But Jennifer and Jeff Martin and their other co-founder, Teresa Zoe, were trying to differentiate their brand. by using a different ingredient, a strain of heirloom corn that they believed tasted much better than conventional corn used in popcorn. And with that corn, they would eventually go on to produce a line of corn-based snacks, Frito like corn chips, Cheetos like crunchies, and cheeseballs, comfort snacks, but a little fancier than the kind you might find at 7-Eleven. Jennifer and Jeff grew up in Madison, New Jersey, in a family of four. kids. And from a very early age, their parents made it pretty clear that family was at the center of everything. Like we used to walk through the grocery store chanting, like, we are the

martins, the mighty mighty martins. They had this whole thing that we would do. And it was just fun. You know, we were kids. But, you know, it was really important to them. And it definitely is important to us. And what did your parents do when you guys were growing up? So they actually met working at IBM, both in the sales department, and they bonded over being kind of able to lean on each other and kind of not other people. Why? They were at the time, you know, our dad was one of the only black men in the group, and our mom was one of the only women. And so they really leaned on each other for a ton of support, and they were really successful doing it because they really had each other. They had this really strong connection in bond. But after having four kids all within a year,

it was kind of a crazy house. Our mom retired and our dad had moved at that point to Dunham Bradstreet where he worked in sales and was actually traveling a ton. So growing up, it was really like our mom, she was home with the four crazy kids. So it was four kids. Did you guys go to church? Was that part of growing up or not really? Yeah.

So our dad is Baptist and our mom is Jewish, actually. So they took us to Temple on Fridays and church on Sundays. And it was really more about. community. And when somebody didn't want to go, they didn't have to go. There was not that push. Really, what they were trying to instill is like, you're part of a bigger community outside of this family also. And it's your responsibility to be part of something bigger than yourself. And so I think that's really what they instilled. And I looked forward to it every week. And I think it was really cool that it was never about somebody being right or wrong. It was just like different perspectives.

Do you remember? I'm just, I'm curious as, as kids, like, sort of, sometimes going to church or sometimes going to the synagogue and having, you know, parents from different backgrounds and cultures and being biracial. As kids, did you ever feel left out or shut out, or did you always generally feel welcomed in the different environments and communities that you would go in and out of? I mean, there was definitely an adjustment, I would say. You know, there were moments in time where an off-color comment would be made about our dad at temple. And it wasn't like something that was incredibly obvious. But if you're in that, if you're living in this scenario, you pick up on it. And potentially the same thing at church on Sunday. So just with those two as an example,

and even outside of religion, you know, there was just, you just pick up on these things. But it also teaches you patience. It teaches you how to communicate with people at a very, very young age and how to carry yourself in a way that's different than other people would have to. You know, like, I've been in many situations. I know Jen has as well. There people don't know what our background is. And they don't know based on how we look, you know, definitely not that we're biracial, but they kind of assume one thing or another.

And that is a really interesting place to be. Yeah, I think that for me, I think I did feel othered in certain situations. And I think what I felt in a lot of situations as it can. and still was just like holding my breath waiting for somebody to say something, just like sitting in temple and just waiting for somebody to say something that was going to be hurtful. And I think that is why for me I always wanted to be so close to my family is because we didn't grow up in a very diverse town.

And so I didn't feel part of the community necessarily that we grew up in. And so I think being with my family, I felt like, It was like we were like a team, and so we were always looking out for each other. So I definitely think that I felt that way. Sounds like your parents were super supportive. I mean, I imagine, you know, this probably wasn't a quote, unquote, issue when you were a kid. But you are gay. You are gay woman.

Were your parents pretty supportive? Did you feel comfortable talking about it with them when you were younger? Yeah. I remember like I, you know, I just remember telling my dad, and him just like making like jokes because my dad's very funny and then was like, you know, I don't care at all and I love you no matter what. And yeah, they're really supportive. And I think it's interesting because of their generation, a lot of people aren't supportive. And even if they are like in an interracial relationship, like, you know, being gay is not the same thing, right?

Like that's like a complete, and they are super supportive. And even though I was nervous to come out, I feel like it was really easy. And then I called Jeff. That's why I talked to them. He was the, he was the third call. Wait, who was number two? I called mom and dad separately. I called mom, then I called dad, and then I called you. You have, you are black, Jewish, and gay. Yes. That's like...

A lot of people don't like me. It sounds like there was a lot of love in your house growing up. Yeah, 100%. And I think it was like a lot of love and a lot of hard work. Like, that's really what they... what my parents are all about. Jeff, you went on to study business in college. I know after college you went to go work at a bank at UBS, I think, in 2007.

Yeah. And I think around that time, Jennifer, you left to go to college in Connecticut, but from what I read, you were only there for a year. It wasn't the right fit for you, and you essentially kind of dropped out from that school. Yeah, it just wasn't the fit. So you, I guess, ended up going to college in Chicago, right, to Loyal University. And you were studying, like... I was, it was like social work. So it was like human services and social work.

And my plan was, I knew I wanted to help people. I didn't know how. And so that was definitely my plan to, like, continue going into that field. And my job, when I was there, there was a health food store down the street of the campus. It was called True Nature of Foods. there was like a teeny juice bar which kind of got built out as soon as I started working there. And so it was great to go there and be able to work there and get a discount because it was all the food that I could eat because I also had to heal myself, right, of like all the food stuff that was going on for me. What were your food issues if you don't want?

Well, I have, I'm celiac and then I have like, I'm allergic to milk. I have like a bunch of like random just allergies. And then I have ulcerative colitis. Wow. So when you were a kid growing up, were you. completely gluten-free? Basically, yes, I had food allergies, but we didn't figure out it was gluten until I was about 12, and we eliminated gluten from my diet completely, and I started to feel better for the first

time in my life. And the thing is, though, at that time, you know, 1990-something, the gluten-free options were awful. Like, they were so bad, but we had this little cabinet in our house where all my food was that I could eat. Jen had the only snack having it in the world. When you hear that, it's like, oh, I'm going to go get. Like, she had the only one that, like, no one wanted. So her snacks were always safe.

They were so bad. They were so bad. Yeah, they were, like, so upsetting. Yeah, which is amazing because today gluten-free snacks are great. Yeah. And did you also give up grains? I didn't give up all grains, but I did give up corn, actually. That was a big one.

And a lot of the reason I couldn't eat corn was because at that time, the gluten-free products were all made with really. really bad corn, you know, like not corn that you're supposed to be eating. Like, it's like feed corn that basically were eating. And so I think that was a lot of the reason for the corn, what I thought was a corn allergy. All right. So you are in Chicago at Loyale University. Meantime, Jeff, you had, this is 2009, you've been laid off from your job at UBS, the investment bank during the recession, right? Yeah. So we were obviously started. in 2007, which was an interesting time to start in the industry. And I worked in the consumer

products and retail group, and specifically on the retail side of things. So once the recession hit, you know, retail was impacted very quickly. And I vividly remember the couple rounds of layoffs, a round of layoffs goes by and I was in the clear. And then, you know, round two goes by and I'm in the clear. Okay, yeah, we're done with layoffs. You know, we're fine. Round three comes and, you know, okay, geez, that was crazy, but, you know, I'm still in the clear. And, you know, you see friends packing up their desks, and it was hard. And I remember it was a fourth or whatever round of layoffs. And I'm sitting at my desk eating lunch and my phone rings.

And it says, ninth floor, HR. I mean, I knew instantly, right? I knew instantly. So I pick up the phone. It's the head of HR, calls me down to the ninth floor. I go to the ninth floor and, you know, talked about, yeah, hey, Jeff, like, we appreciate everything you've done and all this good stuff here's this you know severance package but we're going to have to let you go we're we have to cut cut costs and this is this is how we're handling it and

it you know no one likes to do that and um that wasn't lost on me so i went back up and i was so in it and i was so focused on work that i went back up and i was literally yeah i went to go finished what i was doing like i went to go finish the presentation so i wouldn't let brad down when he had to go to the meeting so he comes over to my desk and kind of snobes snaps me out of it. And it's like, hey, Jeff, really appreciate it, but it's okay. Like, we, we got this. It's okay. And then it was real. Like, oh, I have to go now. Like, I have to leave the building, like immediately. So I did. I went downstairs, called my mom and told her what happened, and I was shocked. You know, I'd worked four years, and I had a plan and a path. And then one day,

it's just like, rug is ripped out from under you. So I called my mom and I told her and I was like, you know, in shock. And she just didn't skip a beat. And just said, Jeff, this is the best thing that's ever happened to you. Now, go spread your wings. So you are kind of figuring out your next move. And Jennifer, you are in Chicago studying to get your bachelor's degree and working part-time jobs, including a job at a health food store while you're a student. And I guess you met like there was a regular customer who you got to know who had lost a lot of, like a lot of weight by going on a juice diet. What's the story? So he, his name was Jay Michael, and he was incredible, but he would come in once a day.

And we just really hit it off. Like, it was just such a great friendship. And one day, I really needed more money. And I was doing some other, like, catering and working at a gym too. And I was just like, Jay, if you buy me a juicer, I'll privately juice for you. Like, I got it. Wait, that you would, if he bought you a juicer that you put in your apartment, you would just, like, fill. old mason jars with juice? Yeah. I mean, it's like only a, it's only a thing like a college kid

who doesn't understand anything would offer because when you say it like that, I'm like, that is a very weird thing to ask somebody. But I think I just, I always knew it could be bigger than that. And I sent him the juicer I needed. He bought it for me and he was like, just come juice at my house. And so basically what would happen was like, I go to his house. I would place a pea pod order. It would come to his house and I would just juice. for him and I would make tons of juices and I would try all these different like recipes and he had lots of friends and so then I started juicing for them and then I started like just making all these deliveries and he had a car and so he would let me use his car and drive all around

Chicago it just was like such a funny time because I was like working nonstop it was like 7 am to like 1 a.m. at his house juicing and I was just like we should start a business and he agreed Maybe it was like his idea. I don't remember at this point who said it. We were just like, this is working. This is great. And so then we started it and kind of less like launched it. And then we did it for a while.

Obviously he was the capital and I was doing all the work. And the plan was to like grow it into what we know of juice companies now. Having storefronts and being able to pick up a bottle when you want it or having a cleanse where they can send it to you. So you're doing the juicing business and working at the health food store. And you were a student. Yeah. And you come across a farmer who tells you about like some kind of heirloom corn that or popcorn that you, yeah, what's the story? Yeah.

So I was working at the health food store and on the weekends we had a farmer's market. And this guy would come up and it was like a raw milk. It was like a raw milk co-op outside of the store during the farmer's market. But he also brought with him these. mini popcorn kernels. And the store owner knew a lot of my like dietary restrictions and that I can't have corn. And so he was like, try these. You'll be able to eat them. It's half the size of ordinary popcorn. And the popcorn itself is so tender. Like the whole, he was like, you won't have issues because I think the thing that, you know, we don't really think about is like those big hard

pieces from normal size popcorn, they get stuck in your teeth and they're aggravating. But the same thing happens when you're trying to digest them, you know, like they're still that big and hard. And so that's really what was happening to me a lot of the time. And the quality of the heirloom corn was just so much better than any corn I've ever had. And what was this, I mean, it's like, sort of there's like heirloom weeds and obviously heirloom, other heirloom grains. Like, where, what's the store? Because most corn that we eat in the United States around the world is genetically modified corn. It's grown to withstand pests and and to not require that much. water and to be sweet and crispy and to be able to stand up to long distance transportation.

This was like ancient corn, like it came from non-modified corn. Yeah. Sorry, I've gotten really deep into the agricultural side of things. But yeah, I mean, when you'd create a product, you're doing it to accomplish one or more of the goals you just mentioned. And generally, it's like size and uniformity and aesthetics. So when you do that, you generally breed out or you modify out something. And one of the first things to go is nutrient density and flavor. They're like out the window first.

So the beauty of heirloom and what, you know, heirloom farming, you know, agricultural practices, what's so important is that we're like really preserving this bit of history that doesn't have a place in, you know, the commercial farming world. There's no, you know, before Jen found these kernels, There were like little, it was all farmers market stuff. It was always like, hey, here's a five pound bag of kernels. I'll see you next year when you need another five pounds. There was no commercial use for it.

But the beauty of heirloom is it's open pollinated. All the work is done by insects, birds, which essentially, like what we say is like it's the oldest version. It's like what Earth intended this product to be that's just evolved over time with almost no human interaction. All right. So, Jennifer, you are introduced to this. like these heirloom popcorn kernels, and what did you do? Did you go home and like pop them?

Yeah, that's exactly it. I went home, put some oil in the pot, a little bit of like rosemary, I think, and salt and popped them. And, you know, it's the first time I'd ever seen popcorn that wasn't massive. Like it was just these mini kernels. It was also the first time that I like stove popped popcorn. You know, we grew up and we would have the microwave popcorn. And so I took it home really excited and I popped it and it was like half the size and really tender and it didn't hurt my stomach. That was the craziest part. Like I could eat it and as I said, like I hadn't had popcorn or corn in so long because as a kid it made me so sick. And it was delicious and it was like I think for the next month that's all I ate for dinner every single night. And Jeff, you were you were living in New York at the time.

But I guess you were around this time when Jennifer had. gotten these, it sounds like Jack and the Beanstalk, like these magic popcorn kernels. You were, like you happened to be visiting her at the time, right? Yeah, I just happened to be visiting and helping her move apartments. She found a different place where it was moving, but, you know, she was busy and I had some time. So I said, you know, I'll come out, spend the weekend, help you pack up, and it'll be fun. We can hang out for a little bit. So we literally, that's what we did.

And we were left with nothing but pots, pans, you know, and some stuff from the kitchen. So Jen pulled out this bag of kernels and had some olive oil on the counter, some salt, and threw it in a pot and popped it up and sat on the floor. There was no furniture with the pot of popcorn and just ate the entire thing. Like didn't stop, didn't talk, didn't like communicate in any way. We just ate the entire thing. And then stood up and popped another pot and did the same thing. And the first thing I said in the second pot was, we got to sell this stuff. Like this is so special.

We have to sell this. What did it taste like? I mean, how was it different when you tried it? It was just, so first of all, the initial like, oh, okay, I'm eating popcorn. I know what popcorn is, whatever. You put this popcorn in your mouth and you chew on it, and they're like crispy, we say. It's not like this crunch you can hear from across the room, but you get the satisfying crispiness.

And then what you're left with is this really flavorful corn that tastes kind of like corn. Like, it's incredible. So you said once you tried the popcorn, you said, we have to sell this, but were you kind of half joking? Was, like, really serious? Like, we need to stop what we're doing and sell this. 100% serious. Wow. And Jen, what did you think?

Were you like, yeah, we got to sell this? Yeah, I was definitely, I was like so happy to be able to do something with my brother that I was like 100%. And also one of the big things we kept saying was like, it's so good. but also if like I can eat it, then a lot of other people who can eat popcorn can eat it. Yeah. All right. So this is like 2011, 2011. Did you call up that farmer and say, all right, hey, we got to buy more of your popcorn kernels?

Yeah, we did. And it's, we called them up. And we were so young and didn't know things that at one point we had to ask him, are we doing something wrong by like buying his corn dust from him and then popping it and selling it. Like, we literally asked him and he was like, what? Like, this is exactly what I want to happen. But it was just looking back, it's like we're super appreciative that he saw the vision and understood because he, you know, he was so familiar with this popcorn, but he was so supportive of us going out and doing this. So what was the next step? I mean, if you were really serious

about starting a business, did you first start by doing more research? Did you first start by, like, trying to build a business plan? Did you first start by forming an LLC? Or did that come later? It kind of came later. We did a lot of testing in our parents' kitchen. We did a lot of like sharing with friends and family to just kind of get feedback. But, you know, we definitely didn't go the path of like business plan and, you know, the whole thing. It was like we know we have something pretty special. So we kind of pivoted more to trying to find a place where we could sell this without going the path of raising a ton of money from day one.

We kind of wanted to just prove it out and bootstrap it. I feel like there was a lot of conversations. There was emails. There was like both of us, you know, still testing popcorn and eating it. And then we went on a road trip. We actually like drove across the country. Who you and Jeff? Jeff and I did.

And Teresa met us in Chicago. Teresa is your wife, Jeff. Yeah. Right. And you kind of roped her into this. Yeah. Yeah. She kind of didn't have a chance.

I mean, I guess she didn't really have a choice. She was in. Yeah, so Jeff got the car in L.A. I met him in Vegas. And I remember being on that road trip and we spent the entire time trying to figure out a name, trying to talk about like what it would look like. Thinking of like the worst names for mini popcorn. Like every version of like what mini popcorn could potentially be called we came up with.

And I feel like that was like a really pivotal moment where it was like 100% like this is going to happen and going to happen soon. but we could not think of a name. We could not think of a name that did the product justice. And we, like Jen said, we tinkered with every version of mini, and it was just like, this is corny. I guess no pun intended. So I actually had a friend from college whose friend growing up started a company called the naming group,

and they would literally name products and different things for kind of like large companies. They did a lot of like work with cars. So they would name like a new car that was being launched by X brand. So she hooked us up with a guy that worked for her name Jake. And he learned everything we wanted to do. We sent him some samples and probably a Ziploc bag or something. A week later, he's like, I have a PDF.

I have a presentation for you guys. And he had like 15 names in there. And right in the middle of that deck was Pipcorn. And as soon as we saw Pipcorn, it was like, that's it. We settled on it, like on the call. Like that was the name. It's like we're not popcorn. We're Pipcorn.

It's something that we could see. and people could, it would resonate without doing a ton of explaining. So when you told your parents like, hey, we're going to start this popcorn business, were they, were they really supportive or were they like, I don't know. I mean, because, Jeff, you had a job on Wall Street as a banker. I mean, were they thinking maybe you should go and get like a job job? Or were they like, yeah, go for it? They definitely said go for it.

And we support you 100%. But I'm sure in the back of their minds, they're like, what are these kids talking about? Like, this is a lot. Yeah. My mom recently told me that she was like, because one of the things we did when we weren't together was we hired a student to help us with the logo and the packaging. And my mom said that she and my dad every day would be like, they just worked on a font for like hours.

They just, all they did was worked on a font. And like, I think there was like moments of that. I think they were super supportive, like, go do. this, but I think the amount of like attention to detail we put into every decision we made was like beyond what they were like, they were like, just go do it. And I imagine like the startup costs were not that high because it's like corn kernels and bags to put it in. Like it probably probably didn't have to, I mean, I'm assuming which you may have had some savings from your job or you had some money to finance it. Yeah. And I think this is why it didn't fizzle.

So many of these, you know, startups fizzle for one reason or another. And one of those reasons it didn't fizzle, or a couple of them were, you know, there were like these little signs that we started noticing, like the old chip aisle that always said chips, pretzels, snacks, started saying popcorn chips, pretzels, snacks. So it's like, okay, popcorn's growing. There's something happening here. And then incredibly low barriers to entry where we could start with $3,000 in a bank account

and get the equipment we needed and at least start. I mean, it didn't get us that far, but we could start and we could prove it out in a pretty small targeted way. Yeah. Jennifer, you graduated, I guess, in 2012. Is that right? Yeah, I graduated in 2012. And that spring, because I guess back in New York, your brother is kind of popping a lot of popcorn. And you are, you're kind of going back and forth, I guess, between Chicago, New York.

And that spring, you guys managed to get. a booth at Smorgasborg. Describe Smorgasborg. What is it for people who haven't heard of it? Smorgasburg is, it's like an outdoor food market with a bunch of small batch foodies who are like making one product, whether it's, you know, snacks. Like we were doing chocolate, lobster rolls, burgers. It's just stands of people who are really passionate about food and are doing it in like

smaller ways and either like somewhere between launching and like a few years old. And how'd you get in? So I actually had to go to their offices. They had an office in Brooklyn and pitch them. They had a lot of people who were actually cooking on site, like making food on site. And they didn't have a lot of packaged goods to round out the whole setting. So we kind of told the story, like we can start to be one of these packaged food vendors that can be like a take home. So, you know, people who are going to, you can only eat so many things at one time.

But you can buy a bag of popcorn and take it home with you. And take it home. Yeah. And it sounds like they thought this was. different and interesting because it was also a weird thing like heirloom popcorn like who's what's that oh it was like perfect like they they had already run a flea market very Brooklyn yeah super Brooklyn it was perfect for what they were trying to build tiny popcorn and like really hipster like coffee bags was like right up their alley so it worked out that that's what you were selling it in it was it was like coffee paper coffee

bags yeah and we we couldn't afford a print job so we this was all happening like all at the same time was like refining the packaging and the idea and where we're going to sell it and we're going to it and it happened very quickly, but we couldn't afford a print job. So it was like, let's buy these coffee bags that are readily available. And Teresa had the idea, like, why don't we just hand stamp them? And what did your logo look like? It was great. It was just, there were three words. It said pipcorn, and then there was a little grain symbol above the pipcorn, and it said natural on the left and hullis on the right. And natural and what? Hullis. So like the popcorn, yeah, like was like virtually Hullis. So it was like, whole less without a hull. Yeah. Like,

like a boat without a hull. Hull less. Wow, that is a bold choice of words. Because people are like, hullless, what does that mean? Yeah. And by the way, where were you popping the popcorn? So we were popping out of a really small food incubator up in East Harlem called Hot Bread Kitchen. It was like a nonprofit where they would work with immigrant women and provide them an opportunity in a facility to bake items from their culture, essentially, and sell them. them. And then the other side of it was this, they would rent kitchen space by the hour. So we, we asked them to just rent the space for like six hours. And, uh, like, we really needed to start making product or else we thought Smorgasberg was going to say like, all right, we got to give

your spot up to somebody else. So we convinced him on April 26th, 2012 was the first day in the kitchen. We popped for our six hours. And we made like a hundred bags, like nothing. And, and how were you doing this? Were you like using cast iron Dutch ovens and just shaking it over over burners? We were using these really big. So we had finally graduated from our mom's old spaghetti pot. And we just bought a bigger version of that. So we bought like a $50 pot, which was so expensive for us at the time with a lid that didn't fit on properly. And then we bought fry baskets. So part of the problem with popping popcorn ready to eat in a bag, ready to go, is the kernels. You got to sift out those unpopped kernels so people don't break their teeth. So we bought a fry basket, which is like the basket that you literally put into a friar to fry French fries and just made the holes a little bit larger.

We poked holes through them to make those holes a little bit larger so we could pop the popcorn, take the pot when it was piping hot, pour it into the friar basket, and then shake it like crazy to get all the kernels to the bottom and then fall out. And then we would put those into little bags and seal them up. Jeff had like burns on his arms because he would just he would just be standing at the stove. I was the sifter. He was the pauper for a lot. And he would just be shaking it the whole time. So it was a ton of work. Zero efficiencies. It was like what's the most amount of work we can do? And that's what we did. And that first time on the April 26th, we like made all the bags and we seal them. We bring them to the market. And all the bags were stale when we got to the market because we just hadn't thought about that. We had. They hadn't been like... Wait, they were stale because if you just directly put it in the coffee bags, the popcorn

go stale? Yeah, so for the ones we were using then, eventually we graduated to having ones that were lined so that we could just do it in. Yeah. I got you. But the first batch, we put them in, sealed it up, so excited, go to Smorgasburg. We're like, we've arrived and we open them up and, like, they're stale. And everyone was such a good sport.

They're not crispy. They're just like soft. Yeah. Soft. Yeah. It was really disappointing. It was no fun. No.

Crispy popcorn. But you only make that mistake once. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And by the way, how much were you selling the bag for? Like $8. Eight bucks. So that's like, yeah.

We had to ask people like, hey, you know, we didn't know anything. So it's like if this costs us four bucks to make, how much should we sell it for? And, you know, somebody gave us the advice of like you should just be doubling it. Yeah. So whatever it costs you to make it, sell it for double. And it's heirloom popcorn. So people are like, well, maybe, you know, $8, it's expensive. But it must be pretty special if it's that expensive.

Yeah. And for us, it was like, if we can't sell it for $8, we don't have a viable business because we can't lose money doing this. All right. So you debut at Smorgasborg in Brooklyn in April of 2012. And how did you do? What was the reception to your popcorn on your debut? It was amazing. We had a lot of friends and family come support.

So we were just jacked up. We were so excited. We had all of these. Our mom and dad were in lawn chairs behind us. It was amazing. People were just really excited to see what we were doing. And then someone put us on their Instagram, Jen. I can't remember who it was.

Kate Spade. Kate Spade. Put us on her Instagram. Wait, the Kate Spade. The Kate Spade. And it said, it was a picture of our bag. And it said, at Pipsnacks, welcome to the flea. Wow.

First day. I'm assuming at this point, like once you debut at this opener market, Jennifer, you're leaving Chicago. You're not going to, I'm assuming you're thinking, all right, this is going to happen in New York. Yeah, 100%. So I guess in that summer, in July of that summer, it was a hot day. You guys were selling your popcorn. And there was somebody there, like you saw a woman with a clipboard who was like just kind of standing around. you invited her to stand under your tent for shade?

Yeah, so we saw a woman and it was a super hot day and she was just kind of like standing there. And so we said to her like, do you want to stand in the back of our tent so you can get some shade and finish working on what you're working on? She was not looking at your popcorn or anything. No, she wasn't looking at anything. She was just, you know, we just looked out in the crowd because that's like what you're doing the whole time. And we just saw her and we're like, she needs a place to like just hang for a second because she was just like trying to do work. It was clear. And so we were like, do you want to hang in the back of our tent?

And she was like, that would be great. Thanks. So she goes to the back and we're in the front and we don't even talk to her. Like we're not trying to really engage. We probably offered her a bag of popcorn and then just sort of like hung out up front, joked around, tried to sell. And she walked out of the back of our tent and came to the front. And she was like, I'm actually a scout from Oprah's favorite things.

Wow. Yeah. And, you know, you guys are on my list or like, do you have any samples? and what are your holiday flavors? And so at that point, you know, this is July. We launched in April. We don't have holiday flavors. But, you know, it's Oprah's favorite thing.

So we're like, you know, and we just named the like classic holiday flames. So we're like gingerbread and peppermint and all these just like random things. And she was like, okay, great. What does your packaging look like for the holiday? And so we had at the time, if you had come to Smorgasburg, all of our display, we set the bags in old milk grates. So we were like, it's going to be a crate. And she was like, awesome. I need a sample.

This is Saturday. I need a sample in my office by Monday. And we were like, not a problem. Wait. So the idea was for your Christmas offering. And this wasn't even something you had thought about until she asked you. What's your Christmas offering? You're like, we're going to sell like a four pack and a crate that that you just kind of had to come up with that instantly.

Yes. Yeah. And so we were like so excited. And it was just, I can like still feel that moment of like, you know, We had no idea who was standing in the back of our tent. We were just like trying to give her a second. And then being like, could this actually happen? Like what, you know, and we had so many things that were working, like right time, right place that we were like, no way.

Like what's going on? And so we like pack up and Jeff is very good at like building things and fixing things. And he like goes home and like build a crate. Like he like stains the wood, figures out all the measurements, dissolves. And the idea was the bags would be in the milk crate. That's how you would sell it. Yeah, for the holiday thing, we were like, let's do four bags in one crate. You know, that'll be the, that'll be the holiday offering. Because, you know, traditionally popcorn was in a tub, like a tin. Yeah. And, you know, it's like the holiday tin. Like, you know, everyone knows that. And we were just like, we don't want to do a holiday tin. Like, that's not who we are. We want to be different. And so this was our workaround. And yeah, so went home. Luckily, like, we were really able to just like test recipes, you know, very easily. We tested a few, made the gingerbread, the peppermint.

How do you make it taste like gingerbread? Just put like cinnamon and nutmeg and allspice on popcorn? That's what we figured out, but when we said it, we had no idea. Right. Yeah. I mean, we barely had our own flavors. We were still testing and, you know, kind of like refining a little bit. By the way, what flavors were you selling at that point? At that point, I think our flavors were sea salt, kettle, rosemary, and crabby? Craby.

Craby was like Bay seasoning. Old Bay seasoning, right. And she wanted Christmas flavors. So yeah, we just started to like research how to make, which is easy, right? Like here's what's in a gingerbread seasoning, kind of deconstructing and then rebuilding in a way that would lend itself well to like seasoning a snack food.

But we went down a path of doing like chocolate and mint and we got like way ahead of ourselves. And it was kind of an iterative process. with Oprah's team, really trying to prep us to get a yes from Oprah. So they were kind of helping us like, you know, Oprah likes these flavors and trying to kind of pique her interest. What did they tell you Oprah liked? Truffle.

Truffle. Oh, man. And then specifically truffle with lemon on top. And we tried every possible way. To make a truffle lemon popcorn. Yeah. We had our mom dehydrating lemon peel and grinding it into a dust. And we had, we were using.

lemon juice and lemon essence. We tried everything. And there was only one thing that we could get to work, which was, in the typical pipcorn way, the most difficult thing to do. Which was? Which was zesting fresh lemon on every single batch of milk. Wow. Just taking on like a microplanner. And just, and what did you get the truffle from? So Oprah's team had a relationship with a company that made truffle salt. And they said, you know, give these people a call. They might be able to help you. and it turned into something, you know, that worked really well. Wow. So you threw some truffle salt on the popcorn, some lemon zest, sent it back to Oprah's team.

And they said, you know what? Oprah likes it. She doesn't love it. But she likes it. Pretty good. It's pretty good. She doesn't love it. You kind of want Oprah to love it.

You want it to love it. So they were like, hey, come to the office. She's making her final decisions this week. And was Oprah going to be at the office? No. No. We were just going to go. and set up.

So we were going to go bring a crate. And their advice was, get a big red bow. Like, make it showy. Do whatever you can do to make this look great. But it's all about presentation too. Like, it's got to be the whole thing. And then you might, you know, get a yes from Oprah. Yeah.

And one thing that we hadn't said was they were filming behind the scenes. So we had been filmed at Smorgasburg. They came to Smorgasburg and kind of showed the process of like finding people because they were trying to make an episode of how, does Oprah pick her favorite things. Right. So we had already been filmed. So when we get to the office, they were like, we need to film this part where, like, people

bring all their things. So they miced us up, put us in a room, and they were just like, the scene we're trying to show is this is when you, like, walk into the room, you put it down, you set it up, and then you walk out. That's all you got to do. Right. And so, okay, cool. Oh, my goodness.

Everything's so beautiful. Hello. That's why I kept saying. You have to do beautiful. That's why I said presentation is key as well as taste. Okay, I'll be back in a moment. Just you do your thing. I'll be back a second.

We walk in. All right, what do you think? We put it down on the table. They were like, okay, we'll take the bow off, right? They were kind of instructing us to do, like, a few things. So we, like, take the bow off, and then all of the sudden, the door swings open. It's Oprah. She just walk.

It feels like it's not real. You don't even know that Oprah's real. And then she's there. She's there. She's there. I'm here today. I've already chosen this. You're in.

Yeah, it's a yes. It's a yes. We had also been waiting in the office for a pretty long time, and I just can remember being like, is this actually happening? Like, is this real life? So she immediately starts asking us questions about the product, and we were like, Oprah, so sorry, but like, we need a couple seconds. Like, this is a lot.

We can't think straight. And then I had to ask her if I could give her a hug because I wasn't sure if somebody else would bust through a trap door and tackle me before I got to her. It was like, and she said you can hug her? She did, yes. And I think, I mean, it's so overwhelming. You're like, I want to tell you everything and thank you for everything, you know? I wish we could have like, redo it when I could like be in my body. Yeah. Because I fully left my body. Wow. So we left and then we had to like figure out, you know, this is August and this is going live in November. And we are only a couple months old. We didn't have the

production to support it. We didn't have these crates actually made and we didn't have a vendor to make them. And we didn't have money. They needed money to do this. Yeah. We didn't have the flavors perfect. And we had to go figure all of that out in an incredibly short period of time. When we come back in just a moment, how Jeff and Jennifer scramble to prepare for the Oprah air date and what happens after their website inevitably crashes. Stay with us. I'm guys. Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's late 2012 and Jennifer and Jeff know that as soon as their episode with Oprah goes live,

there's going to be a surge in demand for pipcorn, especially because they're working on all these holiday flavors. And what better Christmas gift than a crate full of peppermint and gingerbread infused snacks? So we really set our sights on some commercial popping equipment, which was a challenge because we wanted to replicate the same process. We wanted to keep going with that whole pot on the stove. But that's not possible, not practical. Yeah, we found this guy, I think he was outside of Seattle, who essentially would make these like Caldron-style farmer's market poppers, where it's this big huge pot. and these burners, it's like a burner that you use for like a walk. So incredibly powerful, big flames.

You put the oil in and you put the corn in. And it's essentially the exact same process as popping it on the stove. It just moves it around. Yeah. So in the beginning, we couldn't afford the part that stirs it automatically. So we had big wooden paddles and we would just agitate the corn stirring and stirring and stirring. Wait, I'm trying to figure this out. How do you do that?

Doesn't it pop into your face? Yeah. Yeah. Every now and again, it would. It was usually fine. Even if it popped out and hit you, it wouldn't be a big deal because it would just bounce off of you. But if you're popping a sweet flavor with some melted sugar, it sticks to you. So it pops out and it's burning hot.

And it happened to me a couple times where it would stick to like my neck and it would burn you. I mean, it was painful. And where did you put? Did you still use it in the commercial kitchen that you were working out of? No. So we tried. And they were like, you're crazy. This is a shared space.

You're in here for four hours a day, but then someone else comes in. You can't just occupy all this space with your giant machine. Right. So we found a kitchen. We moved to New Jersey right off the George Washington Bridge in October, and we were able to put in equipment, lock the door. We kind of had our own little space that was just for Pipcorn. But all of this, like, buying equipment, moving to a new space, how were you paying for it?

I mean, you presumably didn't have much money yet beyond some sales from smorghumort. Yeah. This was the point where Teresa, so I met Teresa working in banking and she kept down that path. She was still working in banking because she had a steady job. You were married and you didn't have a steady income. Yeah, so we actually weren't married at the time. We were. We were just dating and that whole thing. But she really kept her job full time to support me, like being able to do this full time. But she had also saved up enough money to put some capital in so we could in this really, short period of time between August and November build something where we could weather the Oprah storm like we could meet the demand. All right. So you've got this ginormous expensive popcorn machine and you're making lots of popcorn and presumably the Oprah episode goes live. When did it go live? November. November 2012. And what happened? They showed a pan across shot at the market of our

packaging and when they showed the name pipcorn, our website crashed. Before they even showed. The power of Oprah. Yeah. Power of Oprah. That quickly. People just went on to order your popcorn. Yeah.

You know, we had prepped. We actually, so we aired on a Friday and we went to go hire one person to help with production and she brought a friend to the interview. At the end, we were like, okay, Joanna, you have the job. And she asked about her friend who wasn't a part of their interview. at all. We're like, okay, yeah, you can both please come back on Monday. So the airing comes on. Again, our website just crashes. We were refreshing over and over on the phone with people trying to figure out what had happened. We actually did get it back up during the segment,

but we missed that first wave of traffic. Oh, wow. Did you get a lot of orders for, like, Christmas orders for the Christmas flavors? Yeah, we got a ton. I can't remember actually how many now, Jeff, do you remember? It was like close to, you know, $200,000 in sales in a short, in a really, maybe like $150,000 of sales in a really short period of time. And we were, you know, we had bought this new equipment. We had this space that we could, you know, have our own packaging and popping area. And back to the crates, we hired somebody to make, how many, Jen? 13,000? 13,000, I think. Wooden crates, handmade in Brooklyn, hand-stained, hand-sand-sanded.

Like these beautiful, beautiful crates. So we had a process where we had the crates. It was all, what I think helped us was the crates were very rigid, and the paper coffee bags were also rectangular. So you could like slide them into the crate really easily, put a little cover on it, tape it up, and it was a pretty small compact package. So we were just literally popping around the clock, packaging around the clock, packing boxes, parents, friends coming on the weekends.

It was just non, but it took us a long time. Also, we feature was in November. I don't think we shipped all the crates until probably February. Wait, wasn't this supposed to be for Christmas? It was supposed to be a Christmas gift. Yeah. There was a lot of long phone calls, apologizing. There was a lot of Christmas in February.

Yeah. A lot. Yeah. So it sounds like it was, I mean, obviously super exciting, but kind of a nightmare. That's a perfect way to say. It was incredibly exciting, but one of the most stressful moments as well, because we were doing our own customer service. We were picking up the phones. We were, you know, people, you ruined Christmas, you ruin this, you ruin that. And other people were like, we fully, you know, we wrote an email

saying this is going to take us a lot longer than we thought. If you want to refund, we will get you a refund. But if you want to stick with us, we'll get your order out by this time. And, you know, we had a lot of support too. But it was a bit of a nightmare. I mean, it's hard to work through like a big back order when you can only make so much. Were you, like, was like the UPS truck? pulling up in front of that kitchen space where you were working and just like you were just like loading boxes onto it every day yeah yeah did he come I feel like he might have come twice a day he came twice we would like tip him a little bit here and there to like get him to come back a third time I mean we were all hustling including the FedEx guy like we were all

hustling all right so you get through that and you now I mean you were on you were on Oprah's favorite things and and smorgasborg got quite a bit of press attention. So you had some visibility. And I guess sounds like it's gone amazing. Yeah, I mean, it was. I think we had proved that we have something real. You know, it's not just like a fun hobby. It's not just this has this is going to be really big. But I think it was really hard. You know, I think the Oprah, we sort of like pivoted a little bit too much to focus on like being an online gift. And we had to like swing all the way back to figure out like, okay, well, that's, that's seasonal, right? People love that for the holiday, but then the rest of the year, what are we going to do?

And we had a swing all the way back to figure out wholesale. How do we scale? How do we get our shelf life up? And even though we made a lot of money through the Oprah experience, it cost us so much money to, like, get to do all this that we really didn't have a lot of money to do this. So we were like, yeah. And we didn't really have enough to scale in the way that I think people looked at us like we could at that time. Yeah. But meanwhile, from what I understand, around that time, you did open up another stream of revenue because you were able to get into a Whole Foods, right? Like, I think you got into this cafe in a Whole Foods in New York, in the Bowery, right?

Yeah, and this was through our relationship with Smorgasburg. They opened up what they called a snack bar. They had like a vacant, like a coffee bar or something that they shut down, not near any of the other food, but they were like, let's launch here and we can showcase. some of these vendors from Smorgasburg. So we were like, absolutely. Like it gets us in the door at Whole Foods. Like, we'll do anything. So here's the thing I'm wondering, though,

when you're in Whole Foods with like the coffee bag and the stamps, like the hand-stamped stamps on the bag. Like if you're at a farmer's market, it's different because, or the Smorgasburg, because you can go up to, people can go up to you and you can say, oh, this is heirloom corn and it's, we're using interesting flavors and you can tell the story. But if you're just on a shelf of Whole Foods,

how is somebody going to know that this is unusual or different or worth trying. Well, this was a really interesting time for the brand for a number of reasons, but one of them was just this opportunity with Whole Foods was really unique because we got in through the snack bar and we didn't have to go to the grocery department. They brought us in through specialty. So we were being purchased by the same department that purchased as like beer and cheese and like these high-end crackers.

So we were able to have these big displays in the entryway and buy the cheese department. We had all these amazing opportunities to be visible elsewhere because we weren't in grocery. And what made it even better was that the specialty department in New York never had a product they could stack up. It was always like these cheeses and these specialty items that were small. So this was the first time that they had like boxes of a snack food that they could stack on top. of each other and display in the store and kind of compete with grocery a little bit. And that was a massive opportunity for us to be that snack for them and to sell a story to other stores within the Whole Foods network, even like the store down the road saying,

hey, have you seen what's happening at Bowery? Because you should go check it out. We could do the same thing in your store. So the other specialty buyers wanted us, right? Like they could look at the numbers in the system and be like, whoa, these kids are moving a ton of product. Like, we have to bring it in. But how were you moving so much product? Demoing. We were in the store every single day. We were demoing nonstop. And visibility. I mean, it was definitely the demos. But this is when we started taking this data and all of these data points and going to other stores saying, like, hey, we can do the same thing for you. And then we hit a major roadblock

when we discovered the power of a store like this, and specifically the Columbus Circle location of Whole Foods. This is, I think, their biggest location in New York, the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle. Yeah. And what was the Roadblock? So if you've ever been to the Whole Foods in Columbus Circle, or if you haven't been,

to separate the express checkout from the normal checkout, they usually have like a partition. And when we launched into the store, they said, we're going to use you guys, your cases, to essentially build the partition between the checkout lines. So we're used to selling maybe between 10 and 20 cases to a store. And they were like, we want 300 cases.

We're going to go big with pipcorn. So we popped it for a week, bagged it, rented a U-Haul, delivered it. And the next day, we get an order for another 300 cases. And like, we couldn't do it. We were overnighting, you know, pallets of corn, 2,000 pounds of corn. We were like scrambling. We were producing it as fast as possible. at a loss, delivering it ourselves.

It was like one store was all of our business. We would just kept getting these huge orders. And we never said no. So we were always like, yeah, we'll make it work. So it was like we would get any friend to come and help. The Columbus Circle Whole Foods like legitimately almost put us out of business early on because the volume was so huge. Wait, I mean, this is sort of counterintuitive.

You had so much business, so many sales, so much volume being moved, that almost put you out of business? Yeah, because we just weren't prepared for it. We were used to, you know, pretty good volume from the other Whole Foods, but nothing like they used us for the checkout line. So if you're in line in a busy day, you have to walk past Pipcorn. You know, it was just the volume was so much more than we ever anticipated. So were you guys like freaking out?

Yeah. Yes. Yeah, we didn't know what to do. I mean, we, it's like, you know, people would say, like, oh, that's a great problem to have. Yeah. You know, it's too much demand is great. And we were kind of like, yeah, I mean, it's amazing, but like all of these really, really amazing problems kind of like equate to like a pretty serious issue.

Like we need to figure it out. And so we did. This is when we started to then get new equipment that was equipment that you see in the movie theaters, more commercial, more reliable, higher output. Because you couldn't just stand there moving the stick around all day. No, no, yeah, we had to graduate. And by the way, how were you paying for? I mean, if, because Whole Foods, I'm assuming, pays you, what, 60 to 90 days later, like many companies do. Yeah.

I mean, we would owe our bills in 15 and we'd get paid from them in 30 days. So we had cash flow issues for a really long time because the growth was so extreme that yesterday's checks might not cover next week's bills. Wow. And that was Whole Foods, right? So Whole Foods is, they're Whole Foods. They pay on time and the whole thing. But we were also selling to a lot of other smaller stores that, you know, sometimes we'd have to go chase people down for 100 bucks because we needed it and we sold them products. And by the way, who was doing the business development?

Like, were you going out as a sales rep? Or did you hire somebody or a distributor? It was just us. It was us. How were you making popcorn, packaging it, delivering it to Whole Foods, and also still getting direct-to-consumer orders, and going to shops and trying to get them to sell and stock your popcorn. Guy, I honestly don't know how we did it. Like, thank God.

When you say it, it's like, how did you do that? I remember there was the specialty stores that we got into. And I think that one thing that we'd replicated was we'd like go on to Yelp and just look for cheese shops, specialty shops, gourmet shops in other cities, right? Like Philly in Boston and Chicago and all those things. And I think that was really helpful in like figuring out how to get into those. I remember Ellie Truesdale from Whole Foods. She was like, don't make the mistake so many people make, which is getting into Whole Foods and then being like, I want to get into every store.

And I think that that helped us a little bit because we didn't make the mistake of trying to get into like a massive retailer where if we couldn't fulfill it, then we would have gotten kicked out aside, you know, like obviously aside from Whole Foods. But we didn't have a lot of those going on. It was all these, like, specialty shops. But I'm getting stressed out because no one is popping popcorn while you're doing all this. You got to make popcorn. Who's making the popcorn?

So mentioned Joanna, our first employee. She, we essentially just recruited her entire family to come and pop popcorn for us. So her sister came, her cousin came. They brought friends. And we built this, like, family essentially. Well, really, it was Joanna's family, but we became like an extended family. and they really helped us to grow. So we could finally get out of the kitchen full time

and we could start doing all the other stuff and feel very comfortable that we had an amazing team popping the corn. All right. So you guys are trying to just keep your head above water. Come out of 2013, good year, $200,000 in sales that year. And in 2014, you decided to apply for Shark Tank, right? Yeah.

Which is, I mean, I don't even want to ask why, because obviously why. It's a huge national visibility and huge attention. Yeah. They actually approached us to be to apply for the show in 2013. So while all this crazy stuff is happening. Because they saw you on, they saw you on Oprah or how they know about you? Yeah, they saw us from Oprah. Okay.

So we had all this stress with, you know, popping the corn and growing the whole food's relationship and like all these exciting things. And in the back of our minds, we had this shark tank opportunity that, was just like, what are we going to do? We have so much happening. And Shark Tank could change our lives, but we're just not ready for it yet. If we go on Shark Tank, like, they're going to eat us alive. We've been in business for a year and three months. We just didn't see a way to be successful. So we told the casting agent, who was super understanding. We told her the timing just isn't right for us. Like, we just think we'll be so much, you know, more prepared next year. If we can come back and reach out to you in

2014, like we'd love to do that. And she said, Absolutely, like, let's reconnect next year. Yeah, and it was just such a wild, wild experience. And when we win, our producer, like every contestant has a producer kind of like walking you through things, just helping you get prepped. And he said to us, when you go out there, you aren't allowed to talk to anyone about shark tank. Like, you're going to be picked up and you're going to be on set. And even when you're on set and there's other entrepreneurs there, you can't talk about,

you can't talk to anyone. Like, there's, like, Shark Tank spies who are around, and if they catch you talking, then you're going to get kicked off and all this stuff. And so... They don't want you to talk to the other contestants? No. And that's what they said to us. And so we were like, okay, got it.

Like, we are never going to mess up this opportunity. So, like, we are not going to talk to anyone. So we get off the plane. They're like, no one can know you're there for Shark Tank. They said somebody would be there to pick us up. And we get to the curb. And it's, like, a massive van that says Shark Tank Season 6 all over. And so we were like, what's happening?

Like, is this a test? And we get on the van. Teresa was with us. And there's all the other brands who are going to pitch. And everyone's talking. Like, every single person is talking to each other. And we're like, is this a test? Is this all a test?

Like, what's happening? And so Jeff and I don't say a word. And so we seem like such, we just seem like horrible people. Yeah. And Teresa's responding for us. So like, somebody will ask us a question and we'll like look out. the window because we're like, we don't want to get kicked off. So we like go to the room, we like check in, we go to then the lot where they're film and we see our producer and we like

walk up to him. We're like, Ian, everyone's talking. We feel so weird. We're not talking. He goes, fuck him. And then he was just like, don't say a word. Wow. Don't talk. And we were like, what? And I think like in hindsight, he was really just trying to help us because you watch people psych themselves out. You watch people talking and hearing how much bigger other brands were than their brand or how much they prepped compared to other people. And we were sort of in this bubble of not talking to people. And so we like didn't psych ourselves out. So I really think it was just to help us. But it's it's one of like my favorite shark tank memories. And how were they? I mean, everybody can watch the episode if they want. But how was it? I mean, you go go out there and

you start talking about your popcorn. And how were they? How were you received by the sharks? Yeah, so it was the first day of filming for that new season, so I think they were, like, excited to be back. Yeah. But we were the last people to go, so I think they were probably, like, tired. So, like, having a snack at the end was great. And when we came out there, everybody was just snacking so much that no one was really talking a lot. They were just munching on your popcorn. Yeah, like, I don't think Mark Cuban said anything.

He's just eating your popcorn the whole time. Just eating an entire bag of kettle popcorn the entire time. Wow. And even Mr. Wonderful, who, like, his job is to get. give you a hard time was like, you guys are crazy for that valuation and then being like, but this is delicious. What was the valuation that you put it at? 200,000 for 10%.

So you were saying it's $2 million company. Yeah. He was saying your valuation was way too high. Yeah. Did that rattle you at all when he said that? It really didn't because it seemed more like they had to say the, like they had to, I don't know, play their parts and like he wasn't going to go in. He was never going to invest.

And so he had to, like, criticize us. But we'd also prepped ourselves, like, in a, I would say, a different way than other people that were at least there with us. Like, we knew the business. We had done everything from popping to bagging to delivering to yadda. We'd done it all. So we knew the business inside and out. So instead of going to L.A. And locking ourselves in our hotel room and, you know, studying nonstop, we thought, okay, let's do that for one day.

Let's go to a CVS and buy a ball, like a beach ball. and Teresa would essentially would like throw us the ball and ask us a question and we had to answer it quickly to train ourselves to like recall information quickly. And then the second day we were in L.A., we rented a car and we drove around L.A. We just enjoyed the fresh air. We saw the sites. We didn't stress. And then of course we got home at 10 o'clock at night and we're like, we should have been in our hotel room this entire time. We should not have rented a car and driven around L.A.

But what it did was it allowed us to just clear our heads and be ourselves. And we went on set the next day, just kind of like feeling normal. Like the hard thing about Shark Tank for us was like managing the personalities. Like we made a pact. Like we're not going to go on and act crazy. We're not going to let them get to us. Because like that's part of the thing. They're making a TV show too.

But they're also trying to make deals. So we knew we wanted Barbara. So Robert offered us a deal, but he cut our valuation in half. He said, love you guys, love the product. The valuation is too aggressive. So I'll give you 200,000 for 20%. For 20%. Yeah.

So he cut it in half. And we said, no, that's not going to work for us. And his response was, okay, what will you do? And we just said, 200,000 for 10%. That's what we came here to do. That's what we're here to do. Nice. And we were really just trying to, you know, on TV, it looks really organized.

But in person, like, there was a lot of like, no, no, don't answer their question, answer my question. or, you know, here's a question for it. And it was a lot. It was really intense. So we were trying to manage the people answer the questions as many as we could, but also just like hang around long enough for Barbara to come in. And that's what we did. And then eventually she's kind of, she, she offered us a deal that we asked for. And as soon as she said it, we were like, yes, yes, absolutely. Please get us out of here. We want that deal done. So Barbara Corcoran does agree to make a $200,000 investment for 10,000. a 10% stake in the company, but she also negotiated a slightly better deal for herself,

which was also a 10% draw from your salaries. Yeah, correct. Because it wasn't going to be profitable for a while, and that's how you make your money, right? When you own a share of a company, you get a distribution at the end of the year if it's profitable. Yeah, yeah. And her whole thing was, like, I'm going to work for you, too. Like, I'm going to go do all of these things behind the scenes. So I'm not going to do that for free, let's say, you know.

And she's 100% right. like the amount of work that she puts in. And she has a lot of entrepreneurs to manage at this point. There's a lot of people that she's invested in. So she also wants to be motivated. And this was kind of the way that the deals were structured at the time. So it's not like she was just taking money out of the company. But if we took some cash, then she would want to as well.

It was kind of a fair way to structure it. All right. So she's in for 10%. The show airs, and I have to assume it's another Oprah moment. Just orders are going like through the roof. Yeah. Blood pressure. rising. It was just as bad, yes. It was like a blessing and a curse, but the, well, it wasn't a curse at all.

The good news, though, after this, we had gotten our print job, the first packaging print job, I feel like it came in, what, a few weeks before? So we were no longer hand stamping bags. We were still handpacking all of them, but they were fully printed. So that was eliminated a massive step and allowed us to like fulfill way more, like we would have never been able to get out of the situation if we are still hand stamping. Yeah. And now that you've got Barbara Corkin on your side and the even more visibility, did it make it easier for you to find more distribution?

Like, was it easier to get into stores at this point? Yeah, definitely. So we aired on Shark Tank in November of 2014. And within the following five or six months, we were able to get into three more regions of Whole Foods. And with those relationships opened up some opportunities to sell to other retailers too. So we were really able to leverage the exposure and really kind of growing up in the process too. We had a bigger facility at this point.

We had more employees. We had just a process built around this whole thing. So, I mean, Shark Tank gave us a ton of opportunities. And behind the scenes, we were aggressively pivoting towards a much larger wholesale distribution strategy. I guess by 2017, your popcorn was pretty much every Whole Foods in the U.S. I think I read that by 2017, you guys were doing $5 million in sales. So 2017 was actually closer to $2 million in revenue. We hadn't gotten to five yet, which is like a major tipping point for brands.

That was another crazy milestone. But by 2017, we were distributed nationally in Whole Foods. I think we had three popcorn flavors in Whole Foods. And when you go into this large-scale distribution, we're no longer renting U-Hauls. We're no longer making, you know, direct deliveries. We're going through big distributors. So we essentially sell to the distributor and then they make the deliveries to the stores. And Whole Foods works with one in particular that has access to, you know, tens of thousands of retail stores that are not Whole Foods.

So we were able to start to target those as well without doing any additional work from a, you know, distribution perspective, we could sell to the same distributor and then they could go deliver to another retailer that wasn't Whole Foods because they already have the product in their distribution center. Right. So that was a huge tipping point for us, like very late 2016 when we got into Whole Foods nationally because it opened up this major opportunity to start growing, you know, elsewhere. Between 2012, April 2012 and 2018, you guys were just like on this march forward, like, you know, Kate Spade to Oprah into Whole Foods and then Shark Tank and like every and then all over Whole Foods nationally. Like you were just kind of hitting it out of the park. So I imagine when you started to pitch investors, you were, you had to turn them away like they were competing to invest.

Yeah. We got hit with like a freight train in 2018. Like it was we made the decision to raise money. We thought, this is the path. We can grow in a major way. We got received a couple term sheets. Like you mentioned, there was some interest. There was a lot of interest. And we thought there's one group in particular that we really loved. They knew the agricultural side of things.

They were really patient capital. They understood like the struggle of being a founder because they were founders in previous lives. So we go ahead, Jen. Oh, no. The one thing I was just going to add was like we kicked off the fundraising process. And then I feel like in two weeks we had, or two or three weeks, we had like two term sheets. Wow. And two term sheets is amazing. I mean, that's commitment. That's a real commitment to investing in your business. Yeah. So like when you do a deal like this, like the first phase is like you go out and pitch. And once you receive term sheets and you sign one, then it's like, okay, this deal is on a path to getting done. So that's what we did.

And, you know, it was about six months of back and forth. There was a time difference. They were they were based out of South Africa. And you mentioned two term sheets. So was one of them based in the U.S.? Yeah, one was based in the U.S., but the one from South Africa was a stronger term sheet for us. So you went with them? Yeah. So we went down this pretty long process. We had lawyers draft up the entire agreement.

We everybody was on board. We went through the whole negotiation. It was like grueling. With this South African investment group. Exactly, yeah. And how much were they going to invest, by the way? They were going to invest $3 million. $3 million, okay, which was going to be transformational, presumably.

Yeah, definitely. And it was going to allow us to realize some of these dreams. And all along the way, we had been prepping to, like, make these things a reality. So in the 11th hour, we, like, exchanged wire information. We gave them our bank information. We signed the documents, like the legal docs that essentially is like our new operating agreement. And they didn't sign. So we found out that the money wasn't there.

They went radio saline on us for a couple days. And after, like, a day or, or two, we were able to connect with one of the team members, and he told us that they weren't going to be able to invest in us. Wait, they sent you term sheet. That's basically a contract. It is. And then after the term sheet, we negotiated like these long-form deal documents and, you know,

had a $100,000 legal bill. So what happened when you got on the phone with one of the partners? It was like a venture capital firm? Yeah. So when we got on the phone with him, he told us that some of their other portfolio companies hadn't been performing well. So they were, the money that backed them got cold feet and just decided to stop any deals that were in the works, they were going to stop them all and kind of regroup for a minute. So we were like furthest down. There were three other businesses that were impacted.

We were furthest down. And what it did was it put us in July of 2018 with no deal. We ran out of cash because we were banking on this deal and the deal itself went a little bit longer than we thought. The negotiations. The negotiations, yeah. And it left us in the middle of the summer, which is like a really hard time to try to start a new deal. So we had nothing. We were in a really tough spot. When we come back in just a moment, how Jeff and Jennifer figure out how to keep the business afloat and even begin to experiment with other types of snacks.

So, spoiler alert, we will. soon be talking about how to make a cheeseball puff. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. So it's the end of 2018. Pipcorn has just lost a big potential investment. And the whole business is starting to feel pretty fragile. We just didn't have money, like, at all. So what we did was we pivoted really quickly to our friends and family. Our parents, Teresa's parents, Teresa's sisters, and some friends just kind of bailed us out. Wow.

And then because they bailed us out, we were able to buy a little bit of time and restart a process in January of 2019. So what did you do? So after a little bit, kind of a short period of time, we were in. introduced to a couple folks and we wound up signing a term sheet that was very different than the first deal, but we were able to raise $6 million in May of 2019. How? So in the time period from July of 2018 to when we closed our deal in May of 2019, that was when we really went back to the drawing board and said like, okay, we're not just a popcorn company. We have this amazing raw material in this heirloom corn. So we started tinkering.

And what we came up with were two initial products that we loved. One was a chip, like a corn chip essentially that was in a shape that you could dip into dips and eat. It's kind of like a Frito like. Kind of like a Frito, exactly. But it was made with this heirloom corn that was incredibly delicious, high quality. Airloom corn frito. Even better. Yeah.

Yeah. So that was the first one that we really, product that we really love. The second one was what we quickly realized was going to be the future of the company, which was our cheese balls. Cheese balls. Yeah, so good. It's everyone's reaction. So we very strategically thought, like, let's get into some extruded products. Like popcorn shelf space is going a little bit more towards these puffed items.

Let's see what we can do there. And we quickly realize that, like, there's a space here to create something that is so nostalgic and so fun and so different that has never been done in natural with heirloom corn, with organic cheeses, with no artificial anything. And to take it one step further, if you flip over a package of a cheese snack that you might have at home, there's a good chance that that cheese puff has natural flavors in it, which is way better than artificial flavors. But it's still something that is, in our minds, shouldn't be in a cheese seasoning. So what we did was we removed all those natural flavors. So 100% of a cheese flavor you get in our cheese ball comes from real cheese,

which is like a novel idea, but it's kind of like not many people are doing that. Not just cheese flavor, but for actually cheese like shavings or, you know, powder. Yeah, exactly. You guys felt like now we should actually become a snack foods brand and make other snacks based around this heirloom corn. What was the vision in your minds? What did you want to make pipcorn? You wanted to be like the fritole of sort of natural and organic foods? Like what in your mind were you thinking?

Yeah, I mean, to a certain extent, we wanted to take all of these snacks that we loved eating as kids. And taking those snacks and making them okay to eat was something that was really exciting to us. It's like de-junking junk foods, essentially. There's a way to clean up these nostalgic favorite snacks. We have this relationship with Whole Foods. They're a captive audience. They love innovation. So, like, we can sit across the table and talk about what do we want this brand to be?

and then they can actually like help us get there. So we had some ideas that we've been working on for a really long time. And 2018 was like the moment when we thought, you know what? Like, let's do it. How hard is it to make a cheese bowl? I mean, popcorn's easy. You just put it in with some heat and shake it around and you got popcorn. Yeah.

But there's like an extruder and like a long process for a cheese ball, right? Yeah, it's as easy it is to make. a bag of popcorn, it's, it's that difficult to me. Yeah, it's the inverse. So you're essentially taking corn meal, like corn grits, and you're putting it into a tube that has a screw inside of it it does two things. It, it acts as an auger, so it pushes the corn down toward the end of the tube. Yeah. And then when it gets to the end of the tube, it creates so much heat and friction that it essentially liquefies the corn grit and forces it through a plate that has some kind of a shape on it and turns it into a puff. So to get that to happen, it has to be the proper moisture content in the

corn. The extruders have to be at the right speed, the right temperature. It's not easy to do, especially using like a whole grain item like we are because usually when you do these manufacturing things on a high level, you want to control every single variable. everything and that's how you get a consistent product and we're the opposite we're using heirloom corn there's so many variables that people can't control so usually when you get a puff again if you flip over the package of a puff you might see like de-germed yellow corn as a first ingredient and what that means is the germ of the corn or the tip the pointy part that's where like a lot of the nutrient is honestly and it's the enemy like extruders can't work with the germ of the corn it clogs it

doesn't extrude, it makes a mess. We don't take it out of our corn. That's why it's a whole grain snack. We leave it in. So it's hard. I mean, that's all to say. It's a hard process that once you get it, you can replicate it, but it's hard to get it right. So in the factory, is it like one of those Nerf guns that's just like shooting out those like round Nerf pellets?

It's just like shooting out cheese puffs? Yeah, that's exactly. Wow. Like a Nerf gun cheese puff plaster? How awesome would that be? You might need to make that. You basically, you were able to transition from a popcorn company to a snack company. Yeah, and I think what's kind of getting back to your question of how do we get this deal done,

we had these things lined up. So we sold it into Whole Foods. We're not just popcorn anymore. We have chips. We have cheese balls. We have other things we can do. We met with the Cracker buyer and said, you know, we have all of this cornflower that's a byproduct of our cheese balls. Let's upcycle it into a beautiful airily.

Loom Corn-based Cracker. And that's how we went about this innovation with the cheeseballs and the dippers, was like work with the co-packers to develop it, but like do a lot of sampling, a lot of taste testing. Like, whenever we innovate, we always start from like, what would we snack on all day long and then build from there. Did that take some pressure? I mean, on the one hand, I imagine it took some pressure off because you didn't have to make it yourselves and pack it yourselves. On the other hand, a $6 million investment in your business actually is a new kind of pressure, right? Definitely. I mean, not having the manufacturing was a huge weight and that was a long time coming. But raising money, there's a lot of pressure because now, especially for a brand like ours that didn't raise money for, you know, seven years to then have this new relationship and these new partners. I mean, it's just a different, totally different way of doing business. So yeah. And then like, you know, the goals that we set in the beginning of the year is like we got to hit these goals. You know, You know, it's not as fluid as when it's kind of a startup bootstrap lifestyle.

Yeah. You've got this investment. This happened in 2019. You get this investment. And I'm assuming 2019 was probably a great year for you, right? I think that was the year that you hit $5 million in revenue. Is that right? Yeah.

So you go into 2020, presumably like every other business, doing very well, and then the pandemic hits. Yeah. I'm assuming at this point, you know, a lot of your revenue, coming from traffic in stores, people just go into the aisles. Were you preparing yourself for having to take austerity measures and prepare for a huge hit in revenue? Yeah, we, yes. The short answer is yes. We did a ton of work to be visible on the digital shelf.

I'll let Jen talk about all the things that we did on the D to C side, which is the new normal. Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of what we did with the website was for education. right, like so that people in the store would come to our website and they would learn about heirloom or they would, it was way more education focused rather than conversion focused. And so I think in that, you know, in March, we had to make a ton of really fast changes to make sure that like it operated in the way that like was easy to buy, was quick.

Like, you know, like, what did you guys do? I mean, I think there was lots of little things like this sounds really simple, but you couldn't jump to each product while being on one page. So you couldn't be on sea salt popcorn and see the other popcorn. And that sounds small. But when you're shopping and you want somebody to not get bored or not get frustrated that they can't just go to the next product, you need them to be able to jump around. But if your website is built for education and sales, like you want them to kind of like

browse. You want them to like learn about other things and find the thing they're looking for where when you want conversion, you want to show them what you want them to see. And so we did little things like that. I think we've always had a really strong email business, like newsletter following, but we implemented and started using SMS. When people get a text, they then read it and then they order at higher levels, higher rates. Yeah.

And you can just communicate in a more casual way. And we've really built a community around our brand. So it's kind of more in line with how we communicate anyway. How did you guys get, build like a mailing list and stuff? Was it simply people just signing up on the website when they ordered? Yeah, we were fortunate that, like, obviously, when we're on Oprah and Shark Tank, you get a lot of people coming. So I think that's how we have a ton of people on it, but also running ads. So we had never run any ads previous to, like before 2020.

And so I think when we started running ads, whether you buy or not, you come to our site, you probably want a coupon and you join the list. I think you're available in like 10,000 stores across the, you. U.S. And what's percentages like direct to consumer through the website and what percentage? I'm assuming more of your sales are through stores, or is that not right? No, that's correct. Yeah, I think it's like 20%, 25% online, and then the rest is wholesale. I guess your projected revenue for this year is like $12 million, which is a huge jump. And you guys now have still, you're still pretty small, right?

You've got just five total employees. Is that, is it right, by the way? Yeah. Yeah. And so I have to assume that you are close to profitability or maybe even profitable. Yeah, we're close. We're projecting profitability by end of next year. But yeah, I mean, it's the business that we're operating today is definitely different than what we had been operating.

We're, you know, without a doubt marching towards profitability to really set ourselves up for that for the next. chapter. And by the way, I mean, I'm curious, this may or may not have had an impact on your business, but there was a lot of attention paid to black-owned businesses in the middle of last year, obviously because of the protests against racial injustice. And there were earnest and let's say some less earnest attempts to support black businesses. But there was sort of a groundswell. We know this because we, you know, we talked to some founders who experienced that, black-owned businesses. Were you, did you see any of that connected to your business at all in any way? Yeah, and I think it was, I was talking to a friend, and we kind of described it as bittersweet, you know,

because it's like the support came after, obviously, George Floyd getting murdered and, you know, obviously years and years of injustice, that it took this for then people want to want to support us. So I think it's a very bittersweet moment, but what's amazing is we are getting the support. and that people are wanting to support black and brown brands, you know, and minority-owned brands. And I think where it feels good is when it's companies or people who are reaching out to you who have always supported you and they're just amplifying it. I think the part where it gets confusing of how to feel about it is when you can tell it's an opportunity for them to lift their brand. And it isn't actually about lifting us as a black-founded brand. And so I think that that was a really tricky thing.

And I think it's tricky because it's like something so personal that affects us who we are and who our family is. And navigating this at the same time as trying to, I don't know, I think it's just been like a really, really interesting few months of how to be really grateful, but also like kind of really eye opening of what people's, why they're doing the things they're doing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting because there are some brands that, you know, where the fact that their black-owned businesses are more connected to what they make, like the lip art. We had Melissa Butler on, and she created this brand because she felt like cosmetics companies weren't, you know, they weren't making products for black and run women. You know, they weren't making the kinds of cosmetics that she and her friends wanted. And so who she is and her story is so connected to that product. Your product is so connected to the idea of heirloom corn, right? Like, based on our conversation over the last few hours, I would think that sort of the core identity of what you put out into the world is based on this amazing product that you discovered. Has the last year, I don't know, brought your own personal identities

closer to the center of what your brand represents in your minds? I mean, I think it would be hard not to. Yeah. I think it would be hard to not go through this year and be like a little bit more kind of intertwined with what's going on in the business in my personal life. I think that you know, being a minority founder, being a black founder is something that is who we are, right? Like we were asked the question recently. What's it like to be a black founder? We're like, we've, this is just who we are. Like I don't even know how to answer that question. But I feel like having us wrapped up into this business a lot more and Teresa too on like, you know, Teresa's Chinese and a lot of this push recently and really in 2020's.

COVID to like this push to stop Asian hate is like another thing that's just like we can we can speak to so many people as founders. So let's do it. What's changed for me is I think the way that I'm treated or the way that I guess I refuse to be treated anymore. And I think that has given me a lot of power this year. Like I, I, you know, in the past, I've always just laughed off. Somebody says a comment to me that's racist or sexist or homophobic. or whatever it is, I laugh it off because I feel awkward and I don't want them to, you know, I just want to make the situation end, right? Like, that's what we all do. And I think what this year has really given me is like, I don't co-sign those things anymore, right? Like, I don't, I'm not rude.

I just won't laugh. Like, and I think that that has been really shifted a lot for me because I didn't feel, I felt responsible in those moments to make it go away. And I don't feel that anymore. And regardless of how people like people haven't changed how they treat me but I think my reaction has definitely changed and I think that's been just something that I'm very grateful for coming out of this year and realizing I was doing so much of.

When you guys think about all you've been through now and where you're heading I mean at some point and we know this because of all the people who've been on the show and have had I've started of food brands, including Angie's boom chickapop. At some point, there's an acquisition offer, or in some cases they reject the acquisition offer like Cliff Bar. But at some point, it'll come, you know, a big brand, General Mills or Friedelais, whoever, I don't know who it is. And is that something you think you'd be open to down the road? I mean, it could be a

life-changing amount of money and could put you in a position where you could pretty much do whatever you wanted to do for the rest of your life. Does that prospect sound attractive to both of you? Yeah. You know, that was, we have a lot of ideas. I wouldn't say that I ever thought I'd be the popcorn guy, followed by the heirloom snack guy. And, you know, I know Jen feels a similar way and Teresa as well. And yeah, I mean, in terms of an acquisition, I think it's something that we would be, you know, to the right partner too. Like, you can really start to see some amazing things happen. And sometimes the founders stay on and sometimes they move on. But, you know, for the right partner that can really take Pipcorn to the next level

and maybe accomplish some things that we just might not be able to. Like, that's an attractive thing because we're making something that we want to be around forever. And whether or not we're the ones, you know, running it, we want it to have, you know, staying power. And I think there's something really exciting there. Your parents must be so proud of you guys that you're a brother and sister and you're working together already built this from really from nothing. Yeah, they're so proud.

They're the best. They always talk about they're like, we miss the old days because they would always come up to Harlem or wherever it was helping us do things. And they're just happy that, you know, we're still working together. We still get along. We're still growing. We're still learning. And I think that's all they want.

Yeah. Yeah, there were moments like in the early days, like in, let's say, 2013, when we were at that kitchen in New Jersey. Our parents live in New Jersey. and we would be popping, delivering, bagging, stamping, and we were so tired. Like, we were just beat. And they would get in the car, drive an hour, hour and a half to the kitchen. You know, at 11 o'clock at night, just to like tag us out.

They would do the dishes for us, clean all the equipment, mop the floor, wipe down the walls, get it ready for the next day. So we could go home and get like three hours of sleep and then come back. And they would just do it because, you know, they were so excited for us. And, like, they saw how tired we were. So, like, any slack they could pick up, anything they could do, like, they were just in. What do you attribute the success of your brand and the growth, you know, all the things that happened to you. I mean, some people say, oh, it's lucky.

Some people say, I were tired. Some people say it was, you know, other factors. I don't know. Is there anything you think about when you think about why you got to where you got to today? Yeah, I think it's a lot of hard work. It's a lot of luck. There's a, there's a certainly a component of like right place, right time. Like, look at the Oprah thing, you know. But it's also like a level of humility and a level of connection that is really important to. Like, be a good person and try to do the right thing. And, you know, in business, that stuff really matters, especially as a founder of a brand who's like going into the meetings, talking to people. Like, those. connections are really important. And then one thing that we always honestly joke about is like, don't let the highs get you so high and don't let the lows get you so low because being really low is hard and there's a lot to work through as a founder. But those super high highs, like

getting that Oprah, getting that shark tank and stuff, that can also be crippling if you don't deal with it the right way. So like we've learned over the years because of these amazing experiences, Like not getting super low is maybe an obvious one, but not getting super high is kind of hard too, because you got to stay right in the middle so you can continue operating. That's always been like a lesson that we remind ourselves. Yeah, I agree. I think there's pockets of luck that happen through your life. I think like, you know, and they come back. You miss one, another one happens. And working hard, I think that we worked so hard and we just never stopped. There's been so many moments where maybe we should have stopped, but we didn't.

And I think that the mix of not giving up pivoting and knowing when to like really give everything to that moment where like the universe is opening up and you're like super lucky is such a key. And I think that's helped us so much. That's Jennifer and Jeff Martin, co-founders of Pipcorn along with Teresa Zoh. And by the way, a few years ago, the three founders ran an experiment to see if you could make popcorn only by harnessing the heat from the sun. So they went out to the hottest place in the world, Death Valley, California, set up a solar cooker, and it worked. They popped some Death Valley popcorn and even sold some of it. But even before they went to Death Valley, they tested the solar cooker on the sidewalk at the corner of 113th and Park Avenue in New York City. And yes, it actually worked there too.

Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. if you're not a subscriber, please do subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. If you want to write to us, our email address is H-I-B-T at npr.org. If you want to follow us on Twitter or at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, you can follow at How I Built This NPR or my account at guy.org. This episode was produced by J.C. Howard with music composed by Ramtin Arable. Thanks also to Janet Ujong Lee, Liz Metzker, Farah Safari, Daryth Gales, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers.

I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This. This is NPR.