Formulating Success: The Sweet Journey of NoBaked Cookie Dough w/ Co-Founder Jimmy Feeman

0:28This is the story of the one. In our factory in Chattanooga, we produce anywhere from like 20 to 40 ,000 pounds a month. Which is pretty insane. Yeah, pretty insane. 20 to 40 ,000 a month? Yeah. Oh, wow. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about what's now.

1:11We're talking about business. We're talking about marketing. We're talking about life. And look, sometimes there's stories behind the company. And, you know, there's a certain product that kind of rang my bell when I was, you know, talking with him on LinkedIn. I was like, who's this Jimmy guy? Who's this Jimmy guy? What? Cookie dough? Hell yeah. I'm going to talk to him. We got Jimmy Freeman. He is the co-founder of No Bake. What's up, man? What's up, man? How are you doing? I'm great. I get to talk business stories in cookie dough. Are you fucking kidding me? This is what I do it for. Hey, I mean, if you get to eat some good stuff while you're doing the show, That's just a plus.

1:53It makes it a lot better. I know. I know. Exactly. I don't have – my wife might argue with this, but I don't have too many vices. But cookie dough, you probably, since your company wouldn't call it a vice, I just call it maybe a vice to my waistline in summer when I'm trying to show that one pack, that dad pack. But, hey, look, everything in moderation, Jimmy. I love some cookie dough, man. Why is it so damn good? I don't know, man. Like it, there's, there's a few things that they're like from your childhood. There's stuff that you just do. Uh, and one of those things for me and my wife, Megan was just eating cookie dough.

2:36Um, I don't know what it is. My grandma always bakes cookies. I usually eat the dough before they became cookies. That's how you end up where I am today. But yeah, everything in moderation, right? Like it just gives me more fuel to go like work out or do whatever it I guess. But yeah. I mean, you started young though, man. You guys, you and Megan, I mean, how old were y 'all? Like when this started formulating? 23. Pun intended. I did not have a lot of time out of college to figure out, or didn't take a lot of time, I guess, to figure out that I was not supposed to work for someone else. And it took Megan even less time to figure out she wasn't supposed to work for someone else.

3:16So yeah, it's just, it's one of those things I tell people now. and I've seen people post about this recently. People will talk about it. But if you're going to go for it, the best time to go for it is when you're like sub 25. Like what do you have to lose? You don't have a car. You don't have a house. You've nothing. So just go for it. Worst thing that can happen, you file bankruptcy, you're back in like five years. It's fine. My wife would agree with that. I started when I was almost 40, late 30s, and had all of those things, but still did it. Yeah. I don't know if it makes me dumber or – I waited.

3:58But, you know, it's – everything you said is true, though. It probably added stress to the whole thing because it's not easy. But when you're young, you do have time to – I mean, you've got time. Look, we all have time to fail. Like, it's not that you don't have time to fail, But it's usually less maybe responsibilities or other people relying on you, you know, especially you and your wife being together or a couple or, you know, we'll get to that story. But it does allow you a little bit more, I don't know, focus. Like I can't just pull all nighters for five nights, you know, knowing, well, I've got to coach my son's basketball.

4:37I've got to do this or that. you know it's like the combined part of the pressure and the the amount of time you have to put into it right yeah i mean that that's everything dude like you your time slowly compresses until one day you wake up you're 40 you got three four kids you have a mortgage you have a bunch of responsibilities gotta coach the kids basketball team and then you're like dude i got a lot of stuff on my plate if you start you start the entrepreneurial journey then And by the way, I have more respect for you because you're crazy. And I like that. Oh, I'm definitely crazy. That's another story for another day.

5:19I want to talk cookie dough. And I will say when you're telling that little bit there, go listen to David tell sometime. He has a really funny but nasty version of that. Like what happens when you wake up, you're at this, you wake up, you're at that. I like your life story. Anyway, funny. and a little raunchy. But nonetheless, Jimmy, I got to know, like, obviously the nostalgia, I think you've already probably gave it a little precursor. But what in the hell made you go down the cookie day road? It's a wild – I guess it's not really a wild story. Like, the beginning of the company is really us just, like, really hating our jobs.

6:01So Megan came home one day. We were living together at the time. she was my girlfriend she was like dude i just can't do this anymore uh can't go to the office can't do the thing i'm gonna sell my cookie dough at the farmer's market and like sell it online i think i could probably make enough money to replace my income i was like great do it who cares like at this point in time we were both just like real sick of what we were doing and i'd watched her job hop three times and we graduated like 14 months before that so we're talking like 14 month period, you job hop three times, you probably need a different job.

6:38I have a hard time reflecting on myself. So I didn't notice that I also had job hops three times. And I also hated my job. But we had built by the middle of the summer after I like spent all my time helping Megan basically make cookie dough at night. I go to my job during the day. Eventually, I was like, this job is stupid i'm just gonna sell cookie dough and i quit my job in july um july 2017 and it was great everyone thought i was insane insane and also stupid uh my dad called me he's like what are you doing man and i was like honestly i would rather sit on the side of the road sell cookie dough to people from like a back of a truck or like a cooler then go back to that office ever again so i mean it was obvious for us and like i alluded to it was easy if i look back on all the decisions i've had to make across the last eight years the easiest one was just being like screw it i don't want to work for anyone else and that like that took us down that path the other thing is megan already had that recipe she'd been making nightable cookie dough since she was like 14 same recipe she tweaked it a little bit and then we were off to the races and it's one of things where man looking back on it things happened real fast we executed real fast we did nothing right but the execution is really what matters like if you get up wake up do the thing even if you have no clue what you're doing because we did everything wrong like everything we put it in the wrong packaging didn't know what a health permit was like didn't know shit about running a restaurant but like all you have to do is be willing to learn and be willing to actually wake up and execute so i mean that's kind of what made us go down that road is like megan had a good product we were both real sick of what we were doing i guess that's how you build a cookie dough company i gotta ask so i know we'll get to it but do you get tired like i don't feel like i'd ever i might not eat it every day but are you do you still eat the cookie dough or does it eventually do all good things come to an end?

8:49I still eat it. I don't. I'm not the guy that sits down and eats it. I'm the guy that snacks on it. It's in the fridge. Oh, God, that's me. I'd be snacking on that shit all day. I'd put my glove on and get my whatever you got to do to make it clean. it's fine but we'll get a snack on it yeah i uh i eat i eat it throughout the day and also my kids love it so like it just kind of stays in the house but i try to limit it because i'm like guys we can't eat cookie dough every day my daughter woke up the other morning and she was like dad where's the cookie dough and i was like it's not we don't have any right now and she gave me this look how does the how does no bake i'd be looking at dad like how does no bank not have cookie dough in the refrigerator come on and she was like what do you mean we don't have cookie dough and i was Like there's just none in there.

9:43You ate all of it. I don't know what you want from me. Oh, me. So the base, the base, the first recipe, is it chocolate chip cookie dough? Is that the original? Yeah, chocolate chip's the original. After that, Megan made confetti and brownie, and then we just took those three and like ran with it. We have a bunch of other flavors today. We've done a bunch of crazy stuff, but like those three are still like top sellers. That's where all the stuff comes from. People like chocolate chip. like that's like 70 of our sales 70 of our effort it's which is funny because it's like you take all this time to do all this other stuff when really there's this one thing this one recipe you made it a long time ago when you were a kid and that's the thing that keeps going it keeps like on paying that's funny um but such is the way of life man i mean that's the recipe what was it like with you know those first years and how long have we been at it?

10:41What year are we in? 2025. For 8 years. How long? 8 years? 8 years next month. I mean you and Megan must have a strong relationship to have made it through all of it. I mean a lot of people listening probably have started business with their significant other and not made it or it been like hell. And yeah, I'm not saying it was Rosie. We're going to get to some of that, I'm sure. But it says something about the relationship. It does. I also think it says something. You don't necessarily have to go start a business with your spouse to make this happen, but you could try it to make sure. But like if you start a business or something or with someone and you've probably seen this, Ryan, you'll go out, you find a partner.

11:32that person's your partner sometimes you know that person better than you know your spouse sometimes you know you spend more time with that person than you spend their kids so when it was me megan we started business together what it did and what it forced us to do is be super transparent like you got to be up in each other's head all the time like you can't lie about stuff you can't hide things from each other you can't just be like i'll leave that at work everything follows you everywhere and so you have to be super aligned and super transparent that does cause you to argue and fight more but i would say that that stuff is healthy as long as you're not letting it like you know blow up your relationship make you hate each other you can argue about stuff like we'll argue about like how to allocate like a hundred grand like oh should we spend it on these ads should we do it on this thing but like we're not arguing about stupid stuff that I see my other friends argue about with their wives, which is like, I bought like skis and I didn't tell you about it.

12:32I'm sorry. Like, what are you talking? Why are you, why do you not tell her first of all? Or like people wouldn't go like fool. Like I've got separate bank accounts. We do our separate thing. We do our own thing. And I'm like, dude, that doesn't make any sense. Why are you even married? Cause like at a certain point you have to be like all in transparent, like here we are. Cause that's how I run it with like a business partner and so like that's how you run it with like your spouse i guess if they are your business partner but i mean i trust megan like fully my life so like you have situations where it's like i'll sign on something we'll use my credit my credit gets jacked up i know that like megan's not gonna like leave me and leave me like screwed instead it's like next time we're gonna use yours we're gonna like rotate it back and forth we're gonna use this to our advantage because honestly you're more powerful as a team than you are as an individual, but people don't see it that way usually.

13:26And I think it took like the pressure cooker and then like the shared experience of our twenties, like doing this to like make all that happen. Like that doesn't happen overnight. It doesn't happen like normally. Or also to your point could like completely destroy your relationship.

13:44But Hey, I mean, it just works really well for us. I don't think it works for everybody, But it's been fun and bad and everything in between. It's good, though, because if it works, having where you're mutually, it mutually benefits both of you pretty equally. If not, it should be, let's call it equally. And so when you have that built in trust because it's and so when you have a partner, when they're not your partner in life and your partner in business, Because even when you love them and you trust them, they're mutually separate paths of gain a lot of times. And so that's where you sort of get that trouble out of the way as long as the relationship is tight, which is what you had.

14:32So that's a good thing. I just want to get to the story of the bus down by the river.

14:42i heard a school bus was somewhere involved in in the story of no bake and we're talking with jimmy no bake freeman that's i give everybody a pet nickname that's yours now jimmy i love that jimmy no bakes i love it um jimmy no bake yeah i uh yes the the bus like how we came into the picture because of the way we ran the business so the first three years we ran no bake we built a dessert shop chain basically so we built a franchise system opened a bunch of shops so from october 2017 when the first shop opened till october 2019 we opened nine stores and then october 2019 you know leads right into march of 2020 which is the first time we had to like switch up what the business did and prior to that you know like i had actually gotten really burnt out.

15:34I hated going to those shops. I hated managing all the managers. I had a manager call me from jail that was managing our Cincinnati store and be like, yeah, man. Uh, wife called the cops on me. I have to spend the next two days in jail. And I'm just like, what am I supposed to do? He might not have been no baked. He might've been too baked.

16:00So these situations, right? that makes that that fucks up your life you're like i don't want to do this anymore i don't want to do this thing so then march comes along retail's hard yeah ironically i started to like the fact that we had to pivot to dvc and then it was like all the shops are closed yeah we're under a lot of pressure but like this is working scaled up the dvc business and then we went to raise money in uh the beginning of 2021 and right before that during 2020 my pet project during the pandemic because I bought a school bus and I was going to turn it into an RV because you know everyone's sitting on like TikTok in like March of 2020, April 2020.

16:40I see the people who are living in the van and I'm like I'm not one to let you live in the van and I don't get to live in the van. It was cool. I want to do it. So you go from there to I guess I'm going to buy one. So we sold our food truck ironically and then I took the cash from that and went and bought this old bus from this church. Spent the whole year remodeling the bus. It was my side project. And I'm not that handy, but I guess now I am because it didn't work out. But, yeah, we moved on to that bus in March of 2021, or March, April 2021. And then we lived on it for about six months. Right around that time, my daughter was one year old, so we only have one kid.

17:26it was it was a challenge but it was also this thing where we had like read the four hour work week like really bought into the D2C thing and we were like we can work from anywhere but then you're like I'm going to be able to show up and my office can be in like Yellowstone National Park I have news for you it can't, it's a terrible idea and it's why we actually stopped but it was a fun six months It was a brand experiment. And like, can you be fully remote? Do you actually have to have any piece of the pie? Ironically today, we like moved all the way back toward like in the third pivot of the company, we moved all the way back toward like owning everything.

18:08Like we do our own 3PL work. We manufacture our own products. We have a lot of like hands on stuff going on. And I'm there for a lot of it. There's a lot now where I'm not because I've kind of learned to train people to do the things that I should be training them to do. but yeah it was like a good solid year of us like really deep believing the v2c dream which is like i can run my 10 million dollar a year business from fiji and i'll be fine um and you're in the like brand space so you know like i mean there are people that can achieve something like that but you really got to be in the business be doing your thing yeah and it's a full time it's more than a full-time job so i mean it was fun it's a fun break if you're being if we're being honest um but yeah i recommend something like that to everyone i also recommend building something that you live in even if it's like a shed in your backyard like to every guy it's like it's a transformational experience you're like i built this thing with my bare hands and now i'm like living in it it's satisfying i don't know why i have no idea why it's satisfying it just feels right i i uh i've actually been fixing up golf carts like in my spare time i find it very in my my i go with a dad it's like a master craftsman plays plays eight instruments he's a master craftsman can build anything and i'm the the idea the writer guy i'm right i'm a digital true that guy.

19:37I'm not Mr. Hammer and Nail. But I have found therapy in fixing up golf carts. I have no idea why, but it's something about working with your hands that is rewarding and learning to be a little handy. So my dad is finally I think he was always proud of me, but there's a different level of proud now that I can turn the screwdriver and know how to wire shit yeah they're like oh that's cool i love that yeah the golf thing's cool you don't understand any of the other shit but digital ads facebook ads what branding what's that yeah uh what's what let's talk about the brand you know like obviously no big the product and what it is describes what it is.

20:29But when you think about your brand, I'm sure you guys have evolved in this. At first, it's like, hey, we're making cookie dough. You can eat that shit. Let's go. Let's go. But now how has that evolved for how you do think about the company and the brand and sort of your, I don't know, customer experience? It's evolved over time and it's been really informed to buy the customer. Because I think when you start out, you don't necessarily know the customer. You sort of do. And Megan would claim that she does. Her thought was always that she is the customer. I will market to myself. I totally get that.

21:05The way that it's evolved is kind of like moving away from that and then moving into like, what have we learned? And that's hard to do. And I think a lot of brands have to evolve that way. Because you're going to build a product, right? You're going to do your thing. Like you said, you're like, hey, cookie dough, you eat it. let's go like buy it try it and then what happens you sell that to one two three million people and those people help inform you like well what flavors should you make what challenges are there like around like the product itself that type of stuff and then on the brand side they start to inform you of like what should i be marketing to so like originally nobakes was very like uh i wouldn't call it like neutral but we were very like neutral we didn't want to offend anybody like this brand is just like we're making cookie dough it's our thing and then slowly over time we started to realize especially once we got into cpg and the ddc into like having a packaged product then it became obvious that there are a bunch of people out there that are like i'm plant-based i'm vegan i'm a carnivore i only eat meat i only do this i only eat organic food like better for you like worse for you premium food whatever that's when we started to really like craft the brand around like what our mission is today which is to be chef driven not lab driven so like we made the product in a scoop shop right like we made it for customers fresh we had nine of them that was our core business that's what we did we try to stay true to that even today because it helps us stay like really centered like people will come to me and be like you're gonna make a sugar-free cookie dough are you gonna make like this cookie dough that cookie dough like this certification this bs and it's like no i'm not what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna stick to the thing that we do best which is you make a really really tasty treat like we call like a premium indulgence and we're gonna stick to the chef driven thing which is that megan's gonna craft these flavors as if she's serving it to you like in your kitchen that just made sense for us and like when you stick to your guns like that and then you craft the brand around it you start to realize that you're going to piss off some people and that's okay because those people aren't supposed to be eating your stuff anyways like you said you're like dude i love cookie dough that's great those are the people i'm marketing to like someone likes cookie dough great and then there'll be someone that would like walk into the scoop shop or something like that i interacted with one of these people recently we're in a food hall downtown in nashville we have a shop on broadway so it sees a lot of traffic you know there's probably like 15 million people that walk across that corner a year not all of them are coming in my shop and in fact some do come in the shop and they're like hey do you know where i can get some ice cream and i've told our employees straight up i'm like tell them where the ice cream shop is it's right over there yeah they should go to the ice cream shop why would you want to serve them and they don't understand the concept that like you have to turn down people that aren't your customer you have to send them to wherever they're supposed to be and that way you can actually get customers that want to eat your stuff um which that's a whole nother thing and that's something that we to this day have like i think grown slowly and i wouldn't say struggled to do but like it is really really hard to blow up a consumer brand for that reason you do have to like get in front of everyone that's hard but at the same time like you do want to make sure you're getting in front of the right people and you're not trying to market to everyone you can't be everything all the time for everybody it's not possible so that's kind of how was evolved i mean we started with like exactly what you said and then we moved into like we have to take a stance on like what we are or people try to shove random stuff down your throat all the time um every business owner gets that though like who has not had some and you gotta take a stand for what you are you got that you've got to define it like everybody wants to define you but you've got to define it and stick to your guns like you said yeah i mean you know you're like every business owner has always suggested like, Hey, you thought about this?

25:02You thought about that? I have people ask me if I've ever thought about like food truck. So the other day I posted a video of our food truck on LinkedIn. I was like, Hey guys, look, there's a food truck. It was there in 2019. I already did it. Don't want to do it again. Thanks for suggesting. I'll put it in my, like, I'm never going to do that box. Um, people really want to suggest stuff to you or they want to suggest stuff around your brand or your product. It's like your job as I think a founder is to say no most of the time and like stick to your brand, your thing, like and really go deep on whatever that thing is that you're doing.

25:39And you guys probably see that in the brand space all the time. It's like some people are really distracted. Other people go really deep. Go deep. Stay true to yourself. Usually it works out. It's just kind of hard. Talking with Jimmy, NoBank Freeman. So, Jimmy, I mean, I want to talk some numbers. Like, you know, I find fascination. Like, we did a Valentine's thing talking about how many billion of this, how many pounds of that. How much cookie dough are we making? Like, how many pounds of cookie dough are we making a year or a week? Or, like, what's some numbers that would surprise and delight the audience?

26:19That's actually my favorite number to, like, focus on. I made this original pitch deck a long time ago for this tangent where I was like hey like for investors and like I had one guy tell me it was stupid I was like it's not stupid it's cool I was like we have made like seven elephants worth of cookie dough it was just like what the fuck is it doing to me seven elephants dude 10 ,000 pounds yeah like it's like a 10 ,000 pound elephant let's go no right now today in our factory in Chattanooga we produce anywhere from like 20 to 40 ,000 pounds of cookie dough a month um which is pretty insane yeah pretty insane 20 to 40 ,000 a month yeah holy shit it's wild to see um it's been growing really fast 500 ,000 pounds of cookie dough a year upwards is that what is that somewhere in that neighborhood yeah this year will probably break like one two million pounds which is insane it's just wild to see it also smells really good what's yeah does it smell like i would think that it would smell like yeah smell like because i'm thinking like when you make cookies yeah that's what it is yeah it's that combo of sugar it's actually kind of funny if you go into our bakery i mean we we do our best to keep it clean the one thing that you have a really hard time actually like uh keeping i mean we do it by room by room so it's really just a room where we're mixing but there's flour everywhere the light coating of flour you clean all the surfaces clean everything like you know once a day and then deep clean it once a week but like it gets in the craziest places because every time you turn the mixer on there's flour going in there slopping everywhere basically every time yeah you're like ah we're gonna lose like a tiny bit and it's not a lot so you wouldn't see it or notice it, but it's over time because you're mixing over and over and over and over again.

28:20It's just a light coating of dust. But I love it. Is this a mixing bowl that I could climb into? Like, is it that size? I wonder if you could fit inside of it. That's a good question. You might be able to. I'm 6 '5". You're pretty good, dude. You'd have to crouch down. Yeah. But you can fit in there. Yeah, okay. Yeah. All right. So I can get in there and just start going to town. You know, I ought to fresh my own personal badge. Yeah. I'd like to make a badge of cookie dough. I'd never get out of that. Swim in it. Exactly. That's what I've been thinking about. Like, God. It's like this is like my – you talk about indulgent.

29:00That's the perfect word. Like this is my like dream indulgence. It's like when I really want to treat myself, it's probably some form of cookie dough. Yeah, man. And I think that stuff's going to become a lot. that's going to be a lot more important over the next like 10 years people would i'll pitch investors now and they actually ask me about glp1 agonists like immediately that's like a big question big question for the food industry in general but if you're going to treat yourself and you're not eating a ton of stuff like random stuff all the time don't you want to eat like better food like better tasting food it's like that's that's where i'm at i'm like if i'm gonna like go out to eat i want to go to like a nice restaurant i don't want to go to like random yeah restaurant so like that's that's the thing like you want it to be good like you want it to be that indulgence like you said where it's like i'm gonna eat this when i want to and like this is the thing i want to eat like be that yeah i don't want it in between i don't want it like kind of hell like my wife and i joke you know we're both watch what we eat but not anal about it i mean but we're probably i don't know more fit than maybe the average couples our age but we always will say is it worth the calories that's kind of the thing and we'll always like we take a bite of something we'll kind of look at each other and go if like if she takes about like is it worth it it's not it's not worth it's not worth the calories you know so i just don't mess with that in between stuff it's got to be all the way yeah no it doesn't have to be all the way like that's just the way it is man like it's like that for me with like every food i'm like if i'm going to eat it i want to be good like worth the calories actually matters like if you eating something you actually like you're just eating it because you're bored what's the biggest thing that surprised you jimmy jimmy no bank jimmy with this whole experience and running the company like you know there's always surprises everybody's any entrepreneurs you got their ups and downs The bus story is obviously great.

31:04But, like, what's been, like, the 180 for maybe what you thought or expected? The biggest surprise. There have been two. One of. The first one, the first one's more fun. So, like, surprise in the good direction is we started the thing in March of 2017, right, out of our apartment. which is you're at that point you're just like i'm in an apartment selling cookie dough how good could it possibly get you fast forward all the way to march of 2018 that month we made like 130 grand in profit which was like what is happening whoa and really what happened is actually a lot of money for like a small for like a kid basically for someone that's not all figured it out at all.

32:00We were doing everything wrong. We just nailed the product and nailed the brand. It was basically the thing that surprised me was like, oh wait, you can make a lot happen when you have no clue what's going on. Which is really great. If you just show up every day and do the thing you know works. Don't complicate it. Keep it really simple. Just do your thing. For us, that was like build scoop shop, do pop-up events, build brand like and at the time it was like gather facebook and instagram followers and then drive them to facebook events is ironically the thing that we were doing that's how we were making so much money it's how we were doing the whole thing and then you would do like press and you would do brand stuff and you would do instagram ads and it would all build and build into this thing where it was like driving people to a facebook event this is all you're doing it was a solid strategy for like 2017, 18, 19 worked really well and I blew my mind that like this is so easy why do not more people do this and then I found out why more people don't do it so like the thing that happens is you're going to get surprised like that and then you're going to get surprised in the complete opposite direction which is that I was surprised it was really easy to make a million dollars i was really really surprised that it's incredibly hard to make 10 million dollars like if you're gonna go from running like a small business which is highly profitable and like you have no overhead like you've just blown this thing up and like it's working and you say to yourself i'm gonna scale because this is the surprise right like i was so locked in on the small thing that i was like we can kick it and like me and megan i mean we went to the moon quickly like with a retail business it's hard but it was like all these different pieces coming together and then we went to scale even though it was through like franchising and then it was ddc and then it was grocery whatever it's become every time we've gone to scale it has blown my mind how hard it is to go from like hey we were like clicking we have like an mvp we have a thing that's working to like let's sell 10 million dollars of that thing and consumer that seems to be the number it seems to be the thing where it's like if you could like vast 10 million sales on like a small item that costs less than 20 like you could break that down to like customers but like it's a lot of customers that shit done if it's 10 dollars it's like you have to sell it to a million people a year that's incredibly hard to do um in our in our pine jar in retails around ten ten dollars on shelf we make like five bucks on it i'd have to sell two million pounds two two million pint jars of our cookie dough a year to break the ten million dollar market it's very hard but you realize that like there are all these things in between like the product and then getting to that point because in there the pieces get complicated everything gets complicated your life gets complicated you over complicate it you get debt that you shouldn't have gotten you raise money from people that suck the whole thing blows up in your face and that has been the most surprising thing because i had this plan that i wrote down on a napkin i shit you not to megan where i was like we're gonna build a brand we're gonna open a store and then we're gonna franchise it and sell like we're gonna exit to p or whatever the whole like between build store and like exit and sell it's like that was my it was step b to c that's step like b to z dude there's a lot of steps in there you left out yeah yeah i left out all the other steps i was like oh once the first store works we're clicking and then we just have to scale and i always find it fascinating that i'm like everyone talks about like i'm gonna scale this scale that no one is scaling jack shit and it seems to me that it's just really hard that's just how it is and i mean i find it fun because it's like a game and i've tried to like equate this to like a game that we're playing why would you try to make it complicated or boring when it should be like interesting so yeah that's surprising it's weird i wish it wasn't Both ends of it.

36:29Surprising to get to one million and surprising how hard it is to get to 10. That's what I condensed that down to. Both ends. And it's true. It is. Scaling is harder than people recognize it, even when you've got it sort of figured out. Where are we headed, Jimmy? What's going on? I think you're in a capital raise, maybe, doing some stuff, looking for some investment. Where are we at? yeah yeah so we're we're in capital raise right now we we have a reg cf round on start engine going which is great that means that anyone out there 250 bucks you can buy shares with no bigs super cool opportunity i'll tell you why so plans for the company actually right now are over the last three years we had to grow slow we had to get profitable we had to build something that actually worked and that meant that we now have a 3pl a manufacturing facility cookie dough line where we make millions of pounds of cookie dough all this stuff that's like been built as an infrastructure for the brand and so we're actually raising money so we can go out and acquire other brands real pumped about this um i think that it's going to allow us to go out there and right now like help a lot of people who have been in my shoes or are in our shoes you know a few years ago currently figure out how to get themselves profitable inside of like the umbrella that we're creating so like the goal is to go out find a brand maybe they're doing really well they have a great product a great brand they know what they're doing but they just cannot make money which seems to be the curse in consumer um and our goal is to fix that same way we fixed it for nobics.

38:14I busted my ass for the last three years, figuring out like, how do we get profitable? And how do we make sure that like, we're doing the right things, spending money in the right places, and then growing? Because that's still incredibly key to being able to actually like survive. We were able to do that. And now I'm like, okay, the first time that we've had the opportunity to raise, like this is the way to go. And so we're raising that money, trying to go out there and make some acquisitions. We have a really exciting one that's coming up that I wish had already happened so I can announce it, but I'll announce it soon.

38:49And, uh, that's going to be the first of many. Um, super, super excited. Are we acquiring other, other cookie dough brands or is it broader than that? It's going to be slightly broader. So the first acquisition is actually another cookie dough brand. Um, okay. That probably not a lot of people have heard of. they're actually much older than us and, uh, get around a long time. It was a really, it's a very synergistic acquisition. Cause we already make cookie dough. They sell cookie dough. Um, but then in the future, the hope is like cookies, brownies, bars, all the things that we have the ability to make in our facility.

39:26We're going to go after those. Um, and like I said, like the thing that I'm telling investors, the thing that I'm telling our team, the thing that we're talking about every day, between me and Megan is like we have to identify good brands good products like I said earlier like on this podcast that's everything and it's going to become so much more important especially flavor taste like do you actually like eating this stuff because there's no reason to like go buy like a$10 plant-based better for you snack if you don't even like eating it and you're on trisepotide and you don't even want to eat anyways like what are you doing go eat whatever the heck it is you want to eat because you're not going to eat a lot anyways like i think i think there's a huge opening for brands like that and a huge opening for people to like aggregate power like we're going to and then be able to build something that's profitable um hopefully help a lot of other brand owners like figure out how to thrive which is our hope i got a new name No breaks, no bake No breaks, no bake Let's go You gotta go fast You gotta keep moving You gotta keep growing No breaks, no bake That might be the title of the episode It's fun, man I love it

40:50Where can everybody find How many places are We're like I'm sure distribution's crazy if you're selling that much cookie dough. But where are we located? Where's everywhere we can buy NoBag? Good question. So you actually can buy it nationwide, just in a few different places. So we ironically have kept their distribution. Our distribution is pretty big, but it's also small compared to other brands. DoorDash, GoPuff are both really great like instant delivery options. You guys order stuff on DoorDash or GoPuff, look up our brand. It's probably in your area. and then um and you'd find that through dash mart on doordash and then the fresh market down in your neck of the woods my neck of the woods really anyone on the east coast you can find us at the fresh market and then we're sold at a bunch of independent and natural grocery stores all over the east coast some on the west coast you can go on the website and look it up we have a really great store finder and it's very up to date um but my favorite stores to buy it in are or honestly my favorite place to buy it in general is the fresh market because i just like that store um they're the first grocery store that ever did chance on us um and i love that place they they have like if you're like the type of person like me that likes to go grocery shopping and find new stuff they do a really good job of that so i'm i'm a real big fan of that store real big fan of sprouts too hopefully they hear this and um you know it works out this year but uh yeah we're We're trying to keep our distribution very – it's similar to our whole strategy.

42:24Very, very deep and very – definitely nationwide, but very deep on channels we know work. So it's like that DoorDash location, that GoPuff location, that's where everyone's ordering. And I love that. And I love that they're having a good experience. So intentionally staying out of big box or big retailers. Yeah. I mean there's one big retailer that we might launch in this year that I like a lot. But we're trying to keep it to places where we think the brand belongs. Yep. Makes sense. Indulge where you indulge.