Crumbl: Jason McGowan
Episode
64 min
Read time
2 min
Topics
Career Growth, Relationships, Startups
AI-Generated Summary
Key Takeaways
- ✓Recipe Development Through Testing: McGowan and cousin Sawyer spent five months A/B testing chocolate chip cookie ingredients with strangers at gas stations and via Twitter surveys, discovering 70% preferred milk chocolate chips over semi-sweet, applying tech methodology to food product development instead of using traditional family recipes.
- ✓Weekly Menu Rotation Strategy: Crumbl drops six new cookie flavors every Sunday night while keeping only chocolate chip constant, creating FOMO and conversation. This prevents inventory frustration, enables simultaneous nationwide experiences, and generates viral content even when flavors fail, as controversy drives engagement and earned media value.
- ✓Early Platform Adoption Advantage: Crumbl joined TikTok in 2018 before most brands, now exceeding Starbucks and Nike's combined follower count. They created platform-specific content rather than cross-posting, championed customer reviewers by displaying their TikTok videos on in-store screens, and maintained authentic engagement including CEO negative reviews.
- ✓Franchise Scaling Through Self-Firing: McGowan implemented a daily practice of eliminating himself from operational roles, asking whether decisions served 10, 100, or 1,000 stores. This led to building custom training apps with video content, hiring 30+ people for social media responses, and systematically replacing manual processes with scalable systems.
- ✓Strategic Real Estate Negotiation: A $300 monthly rent reduction on their first Logan, Utah location proved pivotal to launch. McGowan personally handled real estate for the first 100 locations, visiting each site with franchisees, demonstrating that founder involvement in early expansion prevents quality degradation and establishes replicable standards.
What It Covers
Jason McGowan built Crumbl Cookies from zero to 1,000 locations in eight years using tech startup principles: A/B testing recipes, building delivery technology, leveraging TikTok virality, and implementing a weekly rotating menu strategy.
Key Questions Answered
- •Recipe Development Through Testing: McGowan and cousin Sawyer spent five months A/B testing chocolate chip cookie ingredients with strangers at gas stations and via Twitter surveys, discovering 70% preferred milk chocolate chips over semi-sweet, applying tech methodology to food product development instead of using traditional family recipes.
- •Weekly Menu Rotation Strategy: Crumbl drops six new cookie flavors every Sunday night while keeping only chocolate chip constant, creating FOMO and conversation. This prevents inventory frustration, enables simultaneous nationwide experiences, and generates viral content even when flavors fail, as controversy drives engagement and earned media value.
- •Early Platform Adoption Advantage: Crumbl joined TikTok in 2018 before most brands, now exceeding Starbucks and Nike's combined follower count. They created platform-specific content rather than cross-posting, championed customer reviewers by displaying their TikTok videos on in-store screens, and maintained authentic engagement including CEO negative reviews.
- •Franchise Scaling Through Self-Firing: McGowan implemented a daily practice of eliminating himself from operational roles, asking whether decisions served 10, 100, or 1,000 stores. This led to building custom training apps with video content, hiring 30+ people for social media responses, and systematically replacing manual processes with scalable systems.
- •Strategic Real Estate Negotiation: A $300 monthly rent reduction on their first Logan, Utah location proved pivotal to launch. McGowan personally handled real estate for the first 100 locations, visiting each site with franchisees, demonstrating that founder involvement in early expansion prevents quality degradation and establishes replicable standards.
Notable Moment
When a competitor opened one week before Crumbl's launch in the same small town, McGowan nearly panicked about losing first-mover advantage. He refocused entirely on product quality and customer experience rather than competition, leading to lines out the door from day one.
Episode Transcript
Wondery plus subscribers can listen to How I Built This early and ad free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Listening on Audible helps your imagination soar. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. Audible has an incredible selection with over 1,000,000 audiobooks, podcasts, and Audible originals all in one easy app. Find the genres you love and discover new ones. Explore best sellers, new releases, plus thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and originals that members can listen to all they want with more added all the time. Enjoy audible anytime while doing other things. Household chores, exercising, on the road, commuting, you name it. Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as part of your everyday routine without needing to set aside extra time. There's more to imagine when you listen. Sign up for a free thirty day audible trial and your first audio book is free. Visit audible.com/built. I've stayed in awesome homes on Airbnb in places like Athens and Berlin and Rome. And each time these places have given our family a chance to feel like locals. It's the best way to travel. Picture this. You're spending a cozy evening out of town in a home you booked on Airbnb. The space is thoughtfully designed and you think, I bet I could host my own home on Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at airbnb.com/host. If you run a small business, you know there's nothing small about it. Every day there's a new decision to make and even the smallest decisions feel massive. When all of these decisions feel daunting, it helps to have the right platform with all of the tools that you need to be successful. Shopify. Shopify's point of sale system is a unified command center for your retail business. It brings together in store and online operations across up to 1,000 locations. Get all the big stuff for your small business right with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com/built. Go to shopify.com/built. Shopify.com/built. Hey. Just a quick note before we start the show. In this interview, you're about to hear my voice sounds a little bit off. I was battling a pretty nasty cold that day. But the good news is it's an awesome interview, so you will not want to miss it. Okay. On to the show. Sawyer called me up one day and said, hey, there's a building here, and I think we can get it for really cheap because they're gonna demolish it soon. I'm like, oh. I think he was asking something like $1,200 a month or something for it and I was like, sorry, we need to get it to, you know, 8 or $900 and I often think about how many decisions …
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Books, tools, and gear mentioned in this episode
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Tools
“Crumbl joined TikTok in 2018 before most brands, now exceeding Starbucks and Nike's combined follower count. They created platform-specific content rather than cross-posting, championed customer reviewers by displaying their TikTok videos on in-store screens.”
company
- Crumbl CookiesBy guest
“Jason McGowan built Crumbl Cookies from zero to 1,000 locations in eight years using tech startup principles: A/B testing recipes, building delivery technology, leveraging TikTok virality, and implementing a weekly rotating menu strategy.”
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