I just got back home to Seattle from a special conference for founders I went to in beautiful
Bologna, Italy.
I went with my brother Channing, and there were a ton of indie actors there.
I think there was only 30 people at the conference, but at least six people were previous guests
on the podcast.
And we spent just two days breaking out into groups, talking about business challenges,
writing books, work-life balance, managing employees, and all that good stuff.
And also getting drunk and singing karaoke, eating delicious lasagna and pasta and all
sorts of Italian food.
It was great until the end when there was a slight outbreak of COVID and me and another
five or 10 founders got COVID and ended up getting stranded in Italy for way too long.
And so I'm finally back, but in the meantime, I've been publishing throwback episodes,
and today's episode is no exception.
Today's episode is one of my favorites.
This was Sam Eaton, the founder of Crave Cookie, and I guess in honor of me getting COVID,
I picked an episode that I recorded way back at the beginning of the pandemic.
Enjoy.
What's up, everybody?
This is Cortland from IndieHackers.com, and you're listening to the IndieHackers podcast.
On this show, I talked to the founders of profitable internet businesses, and I try
to get a sense of what it's like to be in their shoes.
How did they get to where they are today?
How did they make decisions both to their companies and in their personal lives?
And what exactly makes their businesses tick?
And the goal here, as always, is so that the rest of us can learn from their examples and
go on to build our own profitable internet businesses.
If you've been enjoying the show and you want an easy way to support it, you should leave
us a review on Apple Podcasts.
Probably the easiest way to do that if you're on a Mac is just go to IndieHackers.com slash
review, and that will open up Apple Podcasts for you.
Today I'm talking to Sam Eaton, one of the founders of a cookie company called Crave
Cookie.
I noticed Sam posting just a ton of milestones on IndieHackers about how much money his cookie
business is making.
And it set out to me because not very many IndieHackers are doing food delivery businesses.
Not very many IndieHackers are baking cookies.
So I wanted to talk to Sam to find out how COVID-19 is affecting his food business, how
a software engineer got involved in baking cookies and selling cookies in the first place,
and what lessons we can learn from this type of business that has a foot in the real world
and isn't purely tech.
Enjoy the episode.
Yeah, well, I think the fact that you're doing a cookie business is going to set you apart
from pretty much everybody else who comes on the podcast.
Yeah.
Well, I was always trying to do the sass or B2B side.
That's where my experience always was.
You always try to do what you think you've always done or whatever.
You don't see what's available to you.
Just having been in big tech for six years, and then my sister saying that she was going
to start a cookie thing with my cousin.
Oh, my cousin's going to help me set up a Shopify site and start selling cookies.
And I'm like, no, please let me.
I've been an IndieHacker.
I was already doing IndieHacker stuff for a couple of years before that, like, please
let me help you set up your site or set up your company.
So yeah, that ended up being me and my sister.
It's really worked out.
I mean, I just talked to Scott Keyes from Scott's Cheap Flights, and his business has
been pretty threatened by COVID because he's in the travel industry helping people save
money on flights.
Yeah.
And you're in the food industry.
I think most food businesses are also suffering.
Most restaurants have been closed down.
But you, on the other hand, are thriving.
You've been blowing up.
You've been posting these milestones on IndieHackers about how you're making $100,000 in revenue
every month and how COVID has been like almost the best thing that could have happened to
crave cookie because you're in the delivery business.
Is that just pure luck?
Or is that like, you know, you change your business model because of COVID?
No, it was a...
We were already up and to the right, as far as growth every month, every quarter.
But that just gave us probably what...
It was probably a 15% bump in what our normal trajectory was.
We were already hitting like the 100k a month or whatever before that.
And then yeah, after that, we just like, what was that like in April or May?
Yeah, I think your last one was 110k a month in April.
No, but we hit.
We hit over 200k.
I think it was in May.
How many cookies is that?
We do probably 15,000 cookies a week.
And that's all just to your local area.
Yeah, it's one kitchen with drivers going around and delivering these cookies.
Yeah.
That's nuts.
See, the thing is, though, if part of that is, I'd say 80 to 90% of it is just from our
online orders, but we have also partnered with like a local coffee shop that has like
five locations.
But that's still part of a normal business model.
We bake the cookies and we deliver them to the coffee shop.
And then people come and pick up the warm cookies that they know to do it at a certain
time.
And so there's a line of cars lined up at this coffee drive through to pick up these
cookies.
But yeah, it doesn't add any complexity to us.
It's the same business model just delivering cookies that are stripped from the oven.
What are your margins like selling hundreds of thousands of cookies?
Yeah.
So our margins are much higher than the typical restaurant industry.
So like, normally margins for a restaurant is under 15%.
Ours are 35% to 40%.
Nice.
It's been really, really good on that side.
I think most technologists, like you're a software engineer, right?
Yeah.
And you also do design because your website's beautiful.
Yeah, thanks.
So you're like this sort of full stack engineer unicorn.
We've started indie hacker businesses before.
I think most people in that position would never really dream of doing something in the
real world because the margins are low and because you can't really move atoms as fast
as you can move bits.
And there's all sorts of pains to deal with and things in the real world that just seem,
you know, antiquated and unattractive if you're a developer.
Why did you decide to do this?
You know, why did you get excited when your sister said she was going to make a cookie
business and not say, you know what, that's for the birds.
I'm going to stick with this digital stuff.
I don't know if it's something because I grew up in sports or whatever, but like I just
get super enthusiastic about stuff really easily.
No matter what company I'm at or whatever, if someone's coming to me with an idea and
they're pumped about it, I turn to a mirror.
I'm like, yeah, this could be sick.
We're going to do this.
We're going to add this thing at the database and we're going to start doing all this stuff.
And so when she's talking about like her selling cookies, like I don't even think about the
normal model of people doing Shopify sites, or I don't even think about that stuff.
I'm just thinking about from a software engineering point of view, like how efficient can like,
when I was a growth engineer too, it wasn't just like a, I do all the full stack, but
like for like most of my software engineering career so far, I've been a growth engineer.
So that was a few tech companies doing that.
And so I love the marketing and growth and that side of things.
And so actually building up her cookie forms and trying to optimize how people are like
putting in their information, you know, the way that you make it so people are choosing
the flavors right away before they even have to put in any information.
And then finally they put in their address and it does all that stuff.
So like trying to optimize that and just even adding things like how Amazon has my orders,
you know, you can go back and see your order history, adding that it's built into the product
and like seeing how many people, how many thousands of emails we collect after people.
We launched that three weeks and we have like over 10,000 emails locally.
This is in a local little place that we have that many emails.
It's like crazy.
Yeah, so it's extremely focused on how good those emails we have are, you know, so it's
yeah.
So anyway, yeah, it's just a, I get super enthusiastic about this kind of stuff and
I don't really care what the product is.
I just love doing this new things, but yeah, I do still want to do the B2B side, even doing
the cookie thing.
Like I still have a bunch of friends who are in sales and all that stuff.
And it's just, I'm always talking about ideas.
There's just something about how big the tech side can be.
You have faster growth or faster potential or bigger potential, but you do have a lot
slower growth on the consumer side, I feel like, especially with a physical product,
like we're limited by how much we can do in a store.
So I've been super efficient with one store, but we have to add more, more hubs.
Yeah.
So, but once we start doing that, it's just, it'll just snowball.
I mean, the numbers are still pretty crazy.
If you think about the typical internet business, you have access to, theoretically, everybody
on earth.
Everybody who's connected to the web.
And you see companies spending months, years trying to grow their email list and find customers
and they don't get to 10,000.
And you have a business where you're pretty much limited to your local area and you've
managed to get 10,000 people on an email list.
They were limited to a 10 mile radius, that's their delivery radius.
And that's it.
Yeah.
So maybe, you know, is there something about that focus that helps you build a better product
or deliver more happiness or convert more, more signups?
Why is it even able to get to such high numbers, even though you have such, you know, a relatively
small pool that you can play in?
Yeah, that's, that's, I think that's the focus.
So the thing is, I always loved building my own stuff.
And so like, with the effort it takes to build things, you're actually kind of constrained
in how much, how many features you can add in an amount of time and all that stuff.
So like, really, we added the, the online form and then it just goes into this back
system thing.
And then we kind of just keep focusing on the efficiency.
And so as we just get a high volume of cookies, they're still always straight from the oven.
And like, that's the kind of stuff where a lot of customers complain about certain things
like, Oh, I can't mix and match the flavors in a box.
I have to buy two boxes if I want two flavors, but that's part of our focus.
It's, we see in our system how many cookies we have to make for a 30 minute time slot.
We have to get this many chocolate chip and this many churro cookies or this many sugar
cookies.
And we know that that's each box is whatever.
So we just kind of make all the boxes and then we start grouping those for the drivers.
So it's like, yeah, we, we're extremely focused and limited.
And so that means that you can just guarantee quality at that point.
And so people are just constantly ordering these cookies are recurring customers.
It's really high.
You know, it's 60% of people buy again.
They're just always quality cookies and people are so surprised when they're like straight
up warm when they're pulling them out of the box.
So like we just made them.
I've never ordered a cookie delivery, but I think I would also be surprised if I order
and the cookies come and they're super warm because that means you've got your shit together.
You're really thinking about the customer experience.
Yeah, it's definitely one of those things where if you were to make cookies at home
and you have them straight from the oven and they're still kind of falling apart, you can't
pick them up yet.
We're almost at that, that level, but there's still, they're really, they're really fresh
and you could totally tell that we just made them.
Yeah.
There's other cookie companies like this in different parts of the country.
We were the first ones to do it in California.
Yeah.
Like in the mountain West, there's a lot in like Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and that kind
of area.
But as they were growing, they're doing a lot of with franchising and, and all that.
And we're finding that a lot of their quality is going down really fast.
And as they're kind of really branching out and not really, uh, so yeah, they're, they're
growing too fast, a lot of these places.
So yeah, we're just extremely focused on the, uh, the quality and we only have one location
right now.
So it's, it's a lot easier to do that.
But that's part of the challenge and it's, that's the fun part, stealing that.
So the goal, I think for most indie hackers that I talk to is usually some form of freedom,
right?
They don't like working in a normal job because you get a monetary ceiling with how much you
can make with your salary.
Uh, you have to work on this sort of fixed nine to five schedule.
You can't control the time that you work or all sorts of other things.
You know, when you have your own business, you can control all of that.
You can work from wherever you want.
You can work with whoever you want, your sister, your friends, uh, you can be as creative as
you want.
Does any of this stuff align with why you are building and growing crave cookie?
What are your goals?
Yeah, I think I started doing all the indie hacker stuff because I had all those same
goals, but I think what, what it was is I was just kind of uninterested in the companies
or the, just the dynamic of the way that I was assigned to work at some of these companies.
It's yeah, it is, it is a freedom, but like, this is one of the things I really like about
like the Netflix culture doc and it's part of their big culture thing is to have a, they
call it, they get their freedom and responsibility as a big part of their, their culture.
And I really like just the enthusiasm and freedom of doing something cause I don't care
from working for someone.
If I get the, that freedom and that recognition of what were you doing is actually having
an impact.
Yep.
And I have more opportunities in a big company to do a lot of things cause you don't have
to focus on every single little thing you do as a founder, but yeah, the, uh, I do like
the freedom because I love the enthusiasm and enthusiasm is contagious.
I do feel a little lonely when you're a founder and you're not like just talking to your colleagues
and you're not a founder, you're just, you're just, you're just bouncing ideas off people
and there's no politics involved with that being a founder is an essentially kind of
lonely job because even if you have employees, there are concerns, like you said, are much
more focused.
They're not worried about the entire business, not wearing every hat.
And there isn't really anyone, I guess, besides other founders or perhaps your co-founder
or investors who can really empathize with exactly what you're going through at any point
in time.
Who are really like, you know, your true colleagues who's running crazy besides just you, is your
sister helping?
Yeah.
So it's me, my sister, who's running all the cookie R and D and like the kitchen efficiency
and then my brother-in-law, he's kind of, he's running the operation side.
What a phrase.
Cookie R and D.
Yeah.
There's something about being on a team with other engineers and other designers who have
your same skill set and being able to talk to them.
When I talked to my sister about engineering, she has no idea what I'm talking about.
I could talk about the business, but you can't talk about like the user experience that people
have like the different features I want to add.
She's like, that sounds cool.
I'm like, okay, I'll add that.
I've seen you posting on Indie Hackers about kind of the tech side of Crave Cookie talking
about how you've kept things simple, your server costs, etc.
And like that seems almost like it's your escape where you can talk to some other developers
who actually care and know what you're talking about and are just going to be like, okay,
cool.
Yeah.
So I like, that's one thing I like about like Indie Hackers and Hacker News or whatever.
It's like, you know, you'll see people with comments and then I say, actually, I use this
technology.
Like there was just a post on Hacker News recently about like Crystal, which is a new
programming language.
And I'm actually all in on Crystal on Crave, like that's our server language.
And it's not even at 1.0 yet.
So it's kind of a bad choice from a business perspective.
But like, I don't care.
Well, this is the freedom you get as a founder.
You could do whatever you want.
No one's going to say don't do that.
It's a bad choice.
If it's fun for you, you just do it.
Yeah.
I feel like I'm actually on to something when I'm doing everything is extremely simple,
but not going all in on the no code side.
Everything is on one server in production and there's a SQLite database, meaning it's
not a separate database, not a separate server.
It's literally a file in that same database.
Yeah.
When I started it, I was just writing to a JSON file, the whole database, that was it.
And I was reading and writing from that file and I started to get too many orders to slow
to read and write.
So I just moved it to SQLite and I've never changed it.
I had to do things like change the way I do my database indexing to speed up my queries
and all that.
But yeah, it's just getting super optimized and it's cheap.
We're paying less than $300 a month for the server stuff and that includes the deployment
and all that.
I have another server for deploying and building all this stuff.
So what kind of stuff are you building?
If I am a customer experiencing Crave Cookie or I'm an employee of Crave Cookie, what are
the digital properties that all this code is running?
Yeah, so most of the code or most of the app is on the admin side.
So that's very similar to how in Shopify, when you log in, it's Shopify.com slash admin.
That's your, as the store, that's your side of the app.
And so from there, when people purchase cookies, it feeds into our orders and we can basically
view all the orders.
There's a lot of filters and things for viewing orders viewed by time slot, by customer, by
whatever.
And in the orders, when we got all these orders by time slot, we have to group those because
we open up maps in the app, it'll open up maps for each time slot, for each 30 minute
time slot.
And you can see the clusters of where all these orders are.
So we have people who are literally clustering these orders on the map in the app, like grouping
them.
And then when a driver is available, we start giving them these groups of clusters like here,
you got these five orders and then the next hour you got these other five orders.
Here's all these, here's 10 orders of cookies, go.
That's one of the benefits of me being a software engineer.
Like this, this cookie business wouldn't have all these little tools, um, this little competitive
advantages of a local delivery business without me kind of customizing all the, like I'm using
Google maps, all their APIs and with the built into our admin dashboard.
There's other things as far as like, uh, you know, flavor management, calendars, all that
stuff for when flavors are available or delivery hours.
How many delivers per slot, you know, if we have a driver causing sick, we have one less
driver for that few times lots.
It sounds pretty complex.
I mean, if I go to order from a website, like a typical website, half the time I'm not even
sure they're going to get my online order.
Like their website looks like it was made in Microsoft paint.
I'm like, is this even going to work?
Meanwhile, you've got like a very modern tech business going with this sort of cookie front
where it's super optimized.
You put a lot of work into actually building out all this stuff.
How much of an advantage does that really give you?
You know, does that help you save a ton of money?
Does that help you make your business much more efficient?
Yeah, there's features that before I added them, like before I added the maps that were
built in, you literally had the address.
That was a link.
You would click on that orders address and it would open Google maps in a separate window
with that icon.
And when we have in one time slot, 60 to 70 orders in 30 minutes, you can't go through
and see where each of these are.
You're trying to guess by looking at the street name, where a driver, like which orders go
to which driver.
And it wasn't grouping them either.
Like you were just assigning them individually to a driver and it was a lot of time when
there's 60 or 70 of them and you have one person assigning orders, you have to do one
a minute.
That's insane.
You literally don't have anything else.
You can't just take a bathroom break.
And so it's more like the technology has enabled us to have a higher ceiling of how many orders
we could actually fulfill based on how efficient the assigning and grouping and making sure
the driver has the maximum amount of orders in his car when he's leaving.
Right.
Otherwise, you're giving him and then you realize that two drivers are in the same area.
Then one has a driver across town after that.
It's just really bad.
And so yeah, there's even more.
Now that we're doing all this with grouping, I could start adding software to just start
clustering these groups automatically.
I don't need someone to assign them.
It's more ideas I have.
And as I keep doing that, the software is more viable, the business is more valuable
because we're actually innovating.
And there are a lot of restaurants that probably want to use this stuff.
Yeah, you can strip this out and basically sell it like white label to any other restaurant
that's doing its own delivery.
Yeah.
There's something so fun about building internal tools because your sister, she's doing cookie
R&D.
Her customers are really the people who are eating the cookies, right?
She needs to make delicious cookies, make sure their process is repeatable.
Your customers as a CTO, technical co-founder are really your employees, making sure, like
you said, your delivery drivers can take a bathroom break, making their job as easy and
efficient and painless as possible.
And when you're developing code and tools for your own employees, it's just wonderful
because you get such good feedback.
These are people you see all the time.
You can talk to them.
They're not people you have to hunt down and try to figure out how you're going to talk
to your customers.
They're right there working for you all the time.
And it just, I think, creates such a positive feedback loop where it's much easier to make
sure you're building the right thing.
That's the reason why I don't always like remote work.
There are some of these feedback loops, especially early in a company, when you're building internal
tools and you need to see the people using them.
So I'd have to visit the warehouse a few times and actually just sit there and watch them
or just talk to them about it.
Because they don't always...
One of these people, they're young, one of our managers, our manager of the warehouse
is a girl in her 20s.
I don't know if she feels intimidated to always give me all these little feedbacks about,
hey, this thing is broken.
There's a bug here.
Yeah.
So actually being more involved with the customer tooling or the employee tooling.
But yeah, it's not just the employee side since I do run the form that when people check
out and their confirmation and their orders page and their billing history and all that
stuff.
So it's like doing both.
One engineer.
It's a lot of work.
Yeah.
So it's just you writing all this code, doing all this design.
Yeah.
Thank goodness there's all these third-party tools that I use, like Stripe and Google Maps
and Twilio.
I'm like, man, this would be impossible with all that stuff.
I think it's easier than ever, or maybe not easier, but it's more empowering than it's
ever been to be kind of a solo developer starting an online business.
Because you can't do all this crazy stuff by yourself.
And it's not easy.
I mean, you still probably have to work a ton, you still have to be good at what you
do.
You probably developed a lot of skills over the years, but it's possible.
You actually can do it.
And that means that you can basically scale up an operation like this with as few costs
as possible.
You don't need a giant team of developers.
You can just do one thing and have a ton of profit.
And also, I think you just get the increased efficiency that comes from having a small
team where you don't have a ton of communication overhead, right?
You don't have a bunch of other developers or managers or people you have to communicate
your product plans to and take six months to develop a feature.
You can just think of something and build it today because you're just a team of one.
Yeah.
But that also means I get excited about a feature.
And it's not really the most important thing, but I don't care.
And I love seeing this thing out.
And actually, I get this hunch to build something and it's not as important as something else.
But people are excited when they see it, especially my sister or whatever.
So that's just being exposed to product development and product managers.
They always have these features they want you to build, but now I actually get to go
off my hunch and build what I feel like is distinguishing.
Just little things like when there's only one or two orders left in a time slot, like
just actually showing that in that time slot in the forum, like that kind of stuff.
It's not as much of a priority as online shipping, like actually I was shipping cookies in the
mail because we probably make a lot of money from that.
But I want to really optimize our current business model before I start adding all these
other things.
Because the likelihood of me going back and optimizing these things when I have two things
on my plate is a lot lower.
I've got a kind of a recency bias rule for myself and Andy Hackers, where I'll always
get excited about some new thing that I've thought of or someone suggested that I really
want to build.
And usually whatever I've recently thought of just becomes by far the most exciting thing
in my mind.
And anything else kind of gets pushed to the back.
And pretty consistently, it's been the case where if I am excited about building something,
that excitement outweighs my rational decision making process, and I haven't really thought
through it.
So my rule for myself now is basically I have to be still excited about something a month
after I first thought about it for me to actually build it.
I'm not allowed to just build anything that comes to mind.
Otherwise, I'm going to waste a ton of time, but it is super fun to just indulge and do
whatever you want and just use the programming language that you want, build the features
that you're excited about, and realize that it's probably not going to kill your business
and you're having a lot of fun doing what you want to do.
Yeah, everything does go in my backlog and I do order it.
So there's really some accountability there.
But yeah, I do feel like that if you're excited about something, it'll show when you build
it.
Yeah.
If I'm excited, I'm feeling it.
I'm in the zone.
I'm going to put a little extra touch on my form validations, all these different things
about how the form is processing.
If it's just a pain to you, you'll forget to put the little loading icon into the clicks
on a form.
They're like, is it submitting?
I don't know.
That kind of stuff.
You do need to be excited about what you're working on because then what's the point?
If you're a founder, you need to be excited about it.
So let's talk about how you got here because you weren't always running a cookie business
and your previous anti-hacker businesses, your last project was the SaaS business.
It was all online.
Tell me about that.
What were you working on?
How'd you come up with the idea?
Yeah.
My last thing was called Gamify.
And that was a tool that was basically for gamification.
You make these achievement lists that people can embed inside of their app.
And so, for example, when someone signs up for, I had this idea when I was working at
Qualtrics, which is like the big survey, the enterprise survey company.
So like, they're part of SAP now, but like, yeah, so when someone signs up, there's so
many things to do.
Imagine going into like Photoshop for the first time, you never used Photoshop before.
How many things do you can do?
You kind of want a list of things, hey, just draw a square for the first time.
And then once you do it, checking off that item of the list automatically, it's part
of it's built into the thing.
So like, yeah, with that achievement list idea, there was a lot with, as far as like
detecting stuff in the browser, like doing all this DOM diffing and all that stuff.
Like when someone clicks an element, how do I detect that element is what they want it
to be done, or yeah, there's a lot of complexity there.
And I still think that kind of stuff works.
People like, if you don't want like guides and walkthroughs where it kind of forces you
around the app, I don't like that stuff because people usually just click X on that.
But like, if it's a little list that kind of gives you some tasks that you can kind
of check off, I feel like that helps with me.
So I don't know what the market says.
So the idea would be that with, you know, if I were to use this as a customer, let's
say I use this for ND hackers, you know, I would install it on my website and there'd
be a little list in the bottom right or something that says, you know, here are five things
you can do, like fill out your profile, create a product, add an avatar, make a post.
And as they do those things, it's kind of checking off the list and they feel like they're
getting better at using ND hackers.
Yeah.
And it's even in more advance than that because it has had built-in APIs and stuff.
So like, you can say, get five upvotes and you can actually, as ND hackers, kind of figure
out how to detect someone has five upvotes and then talk to my API and tell them if they
have five upvotes and then they'll see that in their list.
And so you can kind of gamify it even more.
It's kind of like what a badge systems you would see like on Reddit or whatever, like,
but kind of letting other companies have it built in and it's a separate platform.
Why did you stop working on this?
Like, what was kind of the arc of the story?
With B2B, it's super important that you have a people person on the other side.
So I did.
I had a guy who's a, he's a VP of sales at another tech company.
I still talk to him all the time where we're still talking about ideas, but like, it's
more like I was completely in on the code and building in the design, but that he was
still in the, let's test, let's see if this is viable, even though I'd already built everything.
So he's kind of just like floating ideas or he's kind of just kind of talk to some people
in the discovery phase.
So I kind of jumped the gun a little bit by a lot.
I spent too much time on this thing.
How much time?
Probably eight months.
Eight months, just coding it.
Yeah.
Wow.
Before you had any sales.
It wasn't a, it wasn't a full-time job, but like eight months of, you know, time.
So like probably if it was a full-time job, probably would have been two or three months.
And so he was kind of floating, he was talking to people on LinkedIn.
He had a good email list, he was just talking to, you know, people with product managers
and all this stuff.
And it's just, it's really hard to just do that grind.
And I don't think he was as invested enough yet because it was still early and he wasn't
as excited about it.
So it's like, well, what more can I really do?
So it was just finding the product market fit and getting a customer base.
Like I do think that it's still something that's super valuable to people, but every
time I show the actual product to people, they're like, well, that's pretty cool.
Did you make any sales?
Did you make any, generate any revenue with this thing?
No, I didn't even have a payment form or anything up.
It was still in the beta stage.
You're still building it.
Yeah.
So what was it like deciding to quit that?
Yeah, that was actually, it was not me deciding to quit it.
It was more like, oh, look at that over there.
So yeah, like I was saying, I just get super excited about other ideas.
If something is not successful, naturally I'll just find something else.
Other shiny things will take its place.
Yeah.
I don't get super bummed about it.
I am a growth engineer.
I am a data analyst.
I just see the logical side of things too.
It's not, I'm just all emotion and excitement.
So I will just be like, yeah, screw that little thing.
I'm just over it.
I assume the shiny thing that distracted you was just saying she wants to launch a cookie
company.
Yes.
That was around the same time.
Yeah.
I started that when I still lived in Seattle.
Yeah.
So that was not long after that.
That was in 2018, late 2018.
Yeah.
And you're thinking, okay, I'm a growth engineer.
My sister wants to do this on Shopify.
I can make this so much better, so much cooler.
Where did you start with Crave Cookie?
What's the first thing that you do?
We did look at all the stuff with Shopify.
We looked at how expensive it is.
Just for an MVP, I don't want to have a commitment of how much I have to pay a month, $60 a month
or whatever it is, plus a bigger cut of your salesman.
So I can easily build a website.
I can easily build a form that feeds into a JSON file and we just handle payments through
Stripe or whatever.
And then when you go to the admin side, you just see all the orders.
That's pretty simple.
Once an order is marked delivered, it filters that one out, you don't see it anymore.
That was the MVP.
And it's extremely easy.
You just loop through all the orders in the file and I just render a table.
How long until you made your first cookie sales?
Because if you're building this from scratch, I imagine it's going to take you.
Yeah.
It took me one to two weeks to build this thing and we had our first sale.
Very cool.
And it was growing fast in that little small town that my sister was living in.
So she moved and sent to a bigger city.
Yeah, we were in a little small town, Ripon, California, a little tiny town.
And so she's like, okay, we're going to move to a bigger town and put in some roots, get
this thing growing.
So with an online business, the way people find their first customers is creating an
email list or tweeting or posting on something like Product Hunt or Hacker News or cold emailing
people.
How did you make your first sales in just one to two weeks in the real world, selling
cookies to people in your sister's town?
Instagram and Facebook groups.
This was in 2018.
So yeah, she just started contacting people she knew on Instagram and Facebook, just announcing
that there's these warm cookies available.
So like, yeah, I think people kind of like the idea of buying some homemade cookies,
but it definitely looked different than just, oh, this girl I know is selling cookies.
Because once you go to the website, it definitely doesn't feel like some local person selling
cookies.
That was my side.
I'm trying to make it feel like a reputable company instead of a someone selling cookies
from their kitchen in my mom's house.
Because yes, he was there.
Yeah, they were in between houses.
They were moving from Sacramento, lived in my mom for a while until they were moving
down to Fresno Clovis.
And so they had from my mom's kitchen with a cottage food license, we were allowed to
sell up to 40 grand of product a year.
Without much regulation.
Yeah, that she just started selling in there.
So give me like a snapshot of like all the rules and regulations that go into this because
I have no idea how to start a food company.
You've got to get a license, I assume you have to do something to make sure your kitchen
is up to quality up to snuff.
If you're going to start one of these things, and you're an indie hacker wanting to do an
MVP, you just have to get what's called a cottage food license.
It might be different in different states, but in California, you just need a cottage
food license.
And that means, like I was saying, you can sell up to 40 grand a year, and it's much
less regulated, you can be in your home kitchen, you don't have to have all the nutrition facts,
you can just put allergens the way that you package things.
It's different.
There's rules about you can't have any pets in the kitchen, you have to have your gates
up around the kitchen and stuff.
But yeah, so for people wanting to get something started, if you just want to try selling food
locally, yeah, it's just sounds super simple, very simple regulations.
It's like people who go to a, like a bake sale or a bake sale or like when they have
like the farmer produce we couldn't go and buy farmer's market.
Yeah, farmer's market.
People have all these little things they can sell farm farmers markets, they have rice
crispy treats, they made or whatever laws people I, I'm sure don't have any kind of
license unless the farmer's market requires you to have it.
So that they probably do.
It's a very simple license to be able to sell stuff like that.
But with our volume, we quickly needed a real license.
So that that's when it starts to get really expensive, because you have to actually relatively
expensive we're not we don't have a huge storefront with all the seating and like the nice bathrooms
or whatever.
So like, it's different.
So we just have a warehouse you don't see but it's still there's there's still regulation
you have to have with it the way that the kitchen is set up the way the ceiling has
to be over the kitchen, where you store your ingredients, how you store your ingredients,
the dress code for people making these things, you know, the hair nets and all that and there's
a lot to learn.
And none of us had any experience messages and making cookies for a long time, but she's
never done it commercially.
So it was a lot of experience and and, and growth hacking, kind of doing things and then
asking questions later, yeah, setting up the kitchen and then and then getting a license
for the big warehouse after it's already running, you know, doing stuff like that.
And once you start working, it's not so like, oh, the police are going to come and shut
you down.
You're working with the county to get these things set up and they know you're working
with them.
They're going to give you some slack if they know you're, you're trying to be legitimate
and you're running it, you're trying to start a business.
That was good.
And especially since we were working with a coffee shop and they had some experience
doing that.
So you really need friends who have any kind of experience in it.
And you'll find that if you're doing sales and you're working with people.
Was there an inflection point where you went from, you know, this is just an MVP.
It's me and my sister.
We'll see how this goes.
Sell a few cookies online to, oh, shit, we need to hire people.
We need to expand our operations.
This is a real business.
I'm going to put a lot of time and effort into this.
Yeah.
So for me, it's different than for my sister.
I always saw this as passive income.
I was fine working in the tech companies I was working in and even before quarantine
and all the COVID stuff, like I was supposed to be going to Google and go work at Google
and stuff while I was doing this on the side, but like that happened and things changed.
And yeah.
So I was always kind of seeing this as passive income and I would just kind of keep optimizing
the engineering side and putting nights and weekends.
But yeah, after the quarantine happened and we got such a huge bump and I could actually
see how much growth we could get.
How this is a seven figure business out of one delivery hub.
Having a food business make seven figures is crazy.
That's like Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger do that.
But not everyone can own a prime location, Chick-fil-A and In-N-Out Burger.
So to get a restaurant that can make seven figures and have almost 40% margins, it's
a rare opportunity.
Now, after the quarantine is going and we actually have some capital to work with, or
yeah, after the quarantine happened and that was like March, we saw all the potential and
we actually had some money in the bank to work with on track for seven figures.
Yeah.
We got to get a second location.
That's when things start to get real.
Now that we're locking down the second location, we have it, we're going to get the second
delivery hub.
There's going to be a lot of things now that have to change with the software as far as
having multi-hub support, especially when you're ordering, which delivery hub are you
in?
Are there differences in how many slots are available?
Because there's different number of drivers per different delivery hub, but these are
the kind of problems that once I solve them, the company can just copy and paste.
I can copy and paste more delivery hubs at that point.
Once you do the first second, once you do the first new hub, the third and fourth and
fifth are going to be so much easier.
And once we have like 10 locations, you know, is this something I can franchise?
Is this something that I can, is a software that I can finally sell to other people because
we're managing 10 locations.
You're kind of like constructing and perfecting the playbook right now.
And then after that, the goal is just to run the playbook as many locations as you possibly
can.
And that philosophy is always keep things as simple as possible, but optimize it.
You want to stand out because there's other cookie companies and there's even ones that
are starting in California, they're moving over now, they're expanding.
And so we can beat them with just better cookies, always warm, and they deliver them fast.
And yeah, that's part of it too.
It's like when people get deliveries, all of our drivers are wearing our crave gear,
and it's just part of the experience.
You know, you're getting a crave driver.
The whole thing is just our brand.
And we've even had things where, because people can write messages on the box, that's part
of when you order.
And so there's people like, they'll write notes and say, tell the driver to spin before
he hands me the box.
Just little weird things.
And then he'll do it.
And they post it on our Instagram.
That's the kind of stuff where we're kind of building a brand that's more holistic.
It's not just a cookie delivery service.
It's very popular in the town that we're in.
And the amount of people posting about it, like them opening the box or them excited
when they open the door and it's our delivery driver.
There is a definite local brand there.
That's why it's one of the, I guess, the benefits of us having gone completely, do it ourselves,
don't hire any external services.
Yeah, maybe it would have been good to use DoorDash or whatever when we were getting
started for the MVP.
But my brother-in-law was just driving.
We didn't need to pay DoorDash.
And so we kind of just naturally went from my brother-in-law driving to hiring a driver
instead of scaling up the third party service.
Yeah, that strikes me as a pretty crucial part of how your business works.
Because most restaurants that do delivery, I mean, you're always faced with this choice.
Do we do delivery ourselves?
Do we hire our own drivers?
Or do we use one of these services like DoorDash, Postmates, Grubhub, Uber Eats?
And it's not just delivery.
All these services provide discovery too.
A lot of people figure out what they're going to eat because they go onto these platforms
and see a list of restaurants.
But since you're not using them, you're not there.
You have to somehow get people to know about Crave Cookie and want to worry you without
you being a part of all these delivery services.
What's been your strategy for growth?
How have you been able to reach so many tens of thousands of people?
It's been completely organic.
It's people posting about us.
And this is the benefit of us being a hyper-local company.
When people post, it's their friends and neighbors seeing it.
And those are other customers or potential customers.
Once people are raving about a local cookie delivery thing, it just spreads really fast.
And so there were some things that injected the growth, like getting featured on some
prominent local people's feed.
It's not like we paid them or anything.
It was organic.
But then like a news company, like a local Fox station or something wanting us to be
on their morning news for a local cookie delivery for National Chocolate Chip Day or something.
We gave free cookies to policemen and firefighters or I don't know what it was.
So it was that kind of stuff that got us to be more discovered at first.
But then now it's just mostly people posting about it all the time.
And then that gets other people to see it.
And like, oh yeah, I'm going to buy some cookies right now.
And then we just will post things on Instagram or, yeah, we haven't needed to do any email
marketing at all.
No text message marketing at all, even though every order has a phone number and usually
a customer email.
We haven't used those ever to send marketing stuff.
So yeah, we just been having hyper-organic growth.
Yeah, it's completely based off of the social media, I'd say.
One of the best things you can do as an indie hacker when you're trying to get your first
foothold and grow your business is you want to pick a really small niche.
There's so many big companies that are targeting the mainstream and if you can find some small
group of people who share products via word of mouth with each other and who all are pretty
similar and who are underserved by some bigger market, then you can get a foothold.
And I think what you've done that's super cool is your niche has just been in your local
community.
As you said, everybody in your local community, they all know each other.
If somebody orders a box of cookies, it's kind of a naturally viral product.
You don't order a box of cookies and eat it all yourself, unless you're me.
You're probably sharing it with other people and they're going to want to know where you
got them, etc.
And you're going to talk to other people about them if it's a good experience and so it seems
like such a great way to just start growing your business and you kind of escape the competition
that way.
There's not a bunch of other giant cookie companies competing with you and it's kind
of easier to get on the local news than it is to get on some sort of massive news website
online or be the type of product hunt, everything is scaled down and there's just much less
competition and you can just really shine and then grow from there.
So I think it's pretty cool to see the way that you've actually executed on this.
Yeah, and having the big tech experience, I see how cutthroat the big tech world is,
and how optimized a lot of that stuff is for marketing and all that stuff.
And taking that down to the local pond, it's much easier from that side.
There's things that are harder but to go back from the growth thing, we did also have early
on gift messages that we handwrite on every box.
So you can, when you're checking out, put in, it's less than 150 characters or something
but we will write it on the box.
And so we get a lot of gift orders.
So people are gifting them to other people.
It's a very creative gift.
It's a box of cookies from a local cookie delivery company that are huge and warm and
it's a handwritten message from that person.
So it's a lot of gifts and that gets people to discover it.
Super smart.
There's nothing more viral than a product that you can get.
Like a Hallmark card.
You never buy a Hallmark card and just keep it.
You give it to somebody and then now they know about Hallmark cards and they'll want
to give it to somebody else.
And so kind of built into your product to be viral.
If you're selling cookies as gift boxes, that's such a great natural way for the product
to basically be something that others discover.
And it's not something like with online products, a lot of people will put a feature in there
where they'll just say, oh, you know, share this with a friend, here's the share button.
And it's like, well, the product isn't naturally something that you want to give away, so why
would anyone use that?
But with something like cookies, kind of it's a great gift for a birthday or Valentine's
Day or any sort of thing like that.
And so if you just like nudge people to do it, you're not trying to convince them to
engage in some totally foreign behavior that they wouldn't do normally.
You're just sort of going with the flow and sort of a judo move like, hey, people want
to share cookies, let's just make it easier and make that experience better.
Yeah, we literally just broke our single day delivery record on Father's Day, the Saturday
before Father's Day.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, it's all about the gifting.
It's not all gifting.
But yeah, it's even if you're like me, I'm kind of a health nut, where I don't like eating
a lot of cookies or just processed food in general, not that, you know, it's just a when
I say processed, I just mean like not whole natural ingredients.
Like, I like bland almost like, I'll straight up just put cucumbers and carrots in a bowl
with some peanut sauce on it, you know, like that's, I like the simple but like, even me
would gift these to someone because I know it's nice to gifts them even if someone just
has a few bites.
They're still really good.
Yeah, so even though I don't eat our cookies, I definitely enjoy my samples.
So let's talk about the, you know, you're talking about the competitive landscape with
a local business and you know, some things are easier.
There's less competition, your competitors are less sophisticated, you know, they haven't
done marketing at a big tech company, they haven't optimized everything.
And so you can kind of compete easier in the smaller pond.
But there's some things that are that are harder because it's local.
What's harder about a local business?
Yeah, once you start doing local business, there's just more regulation.
Local business is the way that business has always been done before tech disrupted it.
And so there's human history of regulation, or at least American law history of regulation.
There's a lot of hoops to jump through compared to just starting an online business.
It's where it's still kind of the Wild West, you kind of do whatever you want.
So there's the regulation side, there's the, it's not just local.
There's also, there's B2B versus B2C because you can be local and serving local businesses.
But yeah, we're serving local consumers.
And so in any consumer company, you always have to like have that strong focus on your
brand and reputation.
And with local, it's crucial to have a good reputation and set word mouth spreads because
we don't even have a location.
So people aren't finding us on Google maps and reading our reviews.
There's no location to look up.
And so we argue, we are kind of lucky that we, there's not any like bad reviews.
Like my cookies were too soft, they were undercooked, like, oh no, cause like in the early, in the
first slot of the day, sometimes like when the ovens, we haven't warmed them up enough,
you know, that that might happen, you know, so like that, you know, people posting on
Yelp or a Google map review or something like that's, that could hurt you bad if you ever
drops you down a star.
We don't, we don't care about that stuff.
We're just on Instagram.
People see us on Instagram.
They see all their friends commenting.
Then we have hundreds of comments on a, on a thread.
And someone's like, Oh, we've got to give me some of those.
And so it's more like reading reviews in a live thread, like if you were to go read reviews
on how could news or read it or something versus read looking at reviews on a static
review site.
That's more of like where our, yeah, it's more of the local, where people are just kind
of talking locally, um, how to, how to get involved with that stuff.
So it's not like any business can do this.
There's a lot of stuff you would sell locally like that, like they're just, I don't know.
It's at what point does like the, the homemade factor really like help you versus hurt you.
Like if you're selling suntan or suntan lotion or sunscreen or something like, can you do
that homemade who wants to buy that?
It's a self problem or something you can just go do that, whatever.
So like, do you want to, but like chapstick might be okay.
I don't know if you want to be someone who's making like, I have my own beehives and I
have this, this, my home, like my beeswax or whatever, like that might be something
you can do.
Or like I, my uncle owns this, not my uncle, I'm just saying as an example, um, owns a
dairy farm or something.
Like maybe I can try to do a, a different kind of local delivery for the milk man, you
know, join and do that again.
So there's certain things that they might have a certain kind of, uh, you know, cache
or certain vibe that you can do kind of this premium homemade kind of product.
Have you thought about that, expanding into something besides just cookies?
Yes.
I want to make smoothies.
I love healthy food.
It's like, I'm not, I'm not a strict vegan.
Like I was vegan for, for years.
Like I don't, I still don't do dairy or anything, but like, so I do like the, uh, the healthier
plant based kind of stuff.
And so I think just having something like these premium smoothies that people can get
and you just deliver them, but like that company is literally only delivering smoothies.
Like we're not, we're not branching into jumbo juice where they're starting to sell these
little pastries or pretzels or whatever.
It's like we'd literally just deliver smoothies and that's the kind of focus that you get.
And you start to, you get a brand, people start to associate you strongly with that
product instead of like, uh, so if they see you as premium cookies, premium smoothies
instead of a cookie company or a smoothie company.
So like another thing is like, um, we've had a lot of change in the last, what is it?
50 years since the rise of fast food.
People don't make food anymore at home or not well.
A lot of the knowledge that people got from their parents, grandparents and stuff has
kind of been lost, family recipes and all that.
And so is there a way to get back to homemade food but still tastes better than everything
else?
So like, you're not losing anything.
You're actually gaining everything.
You're, you're getting better food, tastes better.
It's higher quality.
It's better for you.
And is there a way to have a delivery service that just has, Hey, this is, these are our
meals for the week today or Thursday we have lasagna or pot roast Friday.
We have these two things.
It's like, and then you have to still make it simple because you want to make it so you
can have a super efficient, but then you start sending out these, these foil trays to people.
So like families, moms, whatever can buy actual good dinners, but it's way more convenient
and better than everything else.
Like there's really not anything like that, that I know of, but it's just super focused
and it has a really predictable calendar that you can look at.
And it has a variety.
It's a lot of the things with variety, people think that having a big menu is variety, but
I like, I like change.
People like change.
People like changing seasons.
They like it when it's cold and then it gets hot.
And when it's the middle of summer, you're missing the winter.
When it's middle of winter, you're missing the summer, you like change and people gripe
about it.
Like, Oh, bring back your sugar cookie, but they like it when it comes back and they buy
it.
So variety isn't always just having a lot of features or having a lot of products.
Everyone's just changing your products or having a, just a calendar or a, I don't know,
just a rotating revolving product line.
So like, that's when we added flavor of the week and we had our churro cookie, which was
our second flavor and it was very popular.
People love it.
When we announced we were not going to have that as a staple anymore, we're going to do
flavor of the week.
People were freaking out because it's very popular.
You know, it's like 30, 40% of our sales.
Yeah.
It's like their favorite cookie gone.
Yeah.
And then we said, it's not gone.
We'll bring it back as flavor of the week, probably once or twice a month.
So you'll still get it, but now you'll probably try something else that is your favorite cookie.
And then exactly what happened when we, we offered churro cookie once before we, it was
a staple and we had a guy who kept going on every single time we post on Instagram, bring
back the churro cookie, bring back the churro cookie.
And we did.
We made it a staple.
He loves it.
And then we got rid of it.
We had a flavor of the week.
He tried the sugar cookie and he said it's his favorite cookie he's ever had.
And he's like, bring back the sugar cookies, don't make it a flavor of the week anymore.
People love the rotation, even if they complain, but like in today's society where we have
all this advanced technology and things, you can mostly get everything you want when you
want it.
You can get air conditioning when you want it.
You can get, you can exercise when you want not because you have to, you can, uh, there's
just so many things available to you that you're not told no a lot.
And so to tell people, no, we're not going to give you that flavor or no, we have a limited
amount of deliveries.
We're not going to hire more drivers.
No we're not open past 10 PM or we don't open before certain time.
Like it really does create some kind of scarcity.
Yeah, that people like, even if they say they don't, it that's, that's part of like when
you were a kid, like collecting Pokemon cards, there's the, why did, why were Pokemon cards
so popular?
Cause you were just, there was this scarcity.
There's the randomness.
It's kind of like gambling.
Yeah.
You don't know what you're going to get in that pack.
Yeah.
So that's trying to have that kind of, this was all completely luck starting it.
Like it was a constraint of me building the software from scratch and me not wanting to
add multiple flavor support.
When I had to change, we had chocolate chip.
When I wanted to add another flavor, we literally had to get rid of chocolate chip and the other
flavor be the chocolate chip.
But in the, in the software, I would changing it to say not chocolate chip or whatever it
is.
Or if it's between these days, show this flavor instead in the software, even though it still
says chocolate chip in the database.
So it was completely like me slowly adding multiple flavor support.
Now we can add as many flavors as we want on the form, but we learned not to the scarcity
is smart.
There's a, a bakery that I used to live by called Mr. Holmes bake house.
And they had an Instagram account where they would post, you know, here's our menu for
today.
And every day there'd be different flavors of donuts and different things.
And there was like this one like Apple bourbon donut they made that I thought was the best
thing in the world, but they only had it like once a month.
And if they had it every day, I think I would have just gone there every day for like a
week until I got sick of Apple bourbon donuts and just stopped.
But because they didn't, as long as I lived there, I would check their Instagram account
every day.
And then like once a month, I would see that they had the Apple bourbon donut and I would
go down to the, to the bake shop just because of that scarcity.
And the fact that it just caused me to miss that thing, you know, they don't let me sort
of gorge myself and go over the limit.
They kind of limit how much I can get of the thing that I want, which makes me crave it
even more.
And it makes me a more loyal customer over time.
So I think that's super smart.
And it's super in line with just what psychologically we know about marketing and selling people
like scarcity.
Yeah.
We sell out daily.
And so we, by the, by the end of the day, like if you're at three or four o'clock, there's
no time slots left and we deliver till like past nine.
And so it's, yeah, there's definitely something to it as far as like limiting what people
can do.
Even if we could hire a couple more drivers and get a few more slots in there, just let
it sell out and makes people have a higher opinion of your company just because they
think it's more premium and everyone's buying from it.
It's like there was a huge social proof marketing that was happening a couple of years ago where
you would see all these popups on a website.
Oh, so and so just bought a shirt.
Yeah.
There's that social proof side and just, just by having things sold out or one slot left
and we're not lying, we're not just trying to get you to buy cookies.
We only have one slot left.
And yeah, there's, there's, there's some social proof there and it gets people to continue
to associate you with a higher quality.
There's a good book on this and it's not a business book at all.
It's just a psychology book.
It's called Influence by Robert Cialdini.
And he talks about kind of six principles of influence and kind of, you know, how people
convince other people to do other things.
And two of the big ones are scarcity and social proof.
We like to do things if we know that there's a time limit.
We know that, you know, there's not a lot of resources to go along, to go around.
We want to make sure we get something before it's too late and social proof, you know,
we kind of take our cues from other people.
We see other people like things and we trust those things more.
We sort of outsource our thinking to others rather than having to figure out everything
from first principles ourselves.
So I recommend anyone who's trying to sell something either, you know, whether it's in
the real world or online to read this book, because human psychology is just so important
and it's works, you know, like in online communities and SaaS businesses as well.
With any hackers, for example, we'll have certain conversations, certain form posts
that occur pretty much irregularly.
For example, we'll have like a big, hey, show off your landing page post on the forum.
And we tried building this into like sort of a permanent feature.
And there was always, you know, a little bit of participation.
People would kind of post their landing pages every now and then.
But then every now and then, if we just do like one big post, like once or twice a month,
that post will get like 300 comments, because everybody's been waiting for the opportunity
to share their thing.
And so I think it's not just cookies, it's not just food or real world businesses.
But even if you have like a SaaS business or a community online, if you sort of limit
your features, and you create some scarcity, I think it'll create more demand.
It's just something I think that's underused.
And it's kind of cool to see how you're doing with Crave.
Yeah, that was always the philosophy with like the founders of Basecamp.
They always had that kind of philosophy where they don't give all the customers all the
features they always wanted.
And they're still relevant today.
So there's still in the news what they're doing.
It works.
Their hey email thing, they're just launching.
So they're, yeah, that's, it's not the only philosophy.
They're the ones that work, but it's, it depends what you're selling.
Yeah.
Well, listen, Sam, I don't want to take up too much of your time.
It's been super cool to hear about Crave cookie.
Your growth is insane.
And it sounds like you've got a ridiculous number of ideas for where you can go in the
future.
What would your advice be to the other indie hackers who are listening in who haven't found
any success yet, who don't know what to work on, and who are maybe, you know, considering
starting something new?
What do you think they should know?
So I can only speak to really like technical people because I'm a technical person.
But I guess it's not completely true, but yeah, the you're probably really good at something
or really interested in something.
And you don't realize how you can pair with someone in a very random way to sell something.
I was a very good software engineer, growth marketer, whatever.
And my sister makes cookies.
And I sell cookies like it's and we're making seven figures of revenue.
So it's like, it's unreal how much more success I had doing something that I thought was I
would have thought was beneath me.
When people love cookies, who cares if it's just like a it's like, oh, it's not a big
tech SaaS company.
Well, I'm not I'm not featured on TechCrunch.
I'm not whatever.
Like, I have more people loving my cookies than a lot of people have actually loving
their stuff, even if it's a something they use all the time, it's just people are actually
passionate about it and seeing all these little kids posting things like you see little kids
enjoying it.
And it's like their thing.
They're gonna grow.
I remember growing up and getting ice cream from a certain place in my little town.
And like, that's still a memory.
People have memories of this thing that I built from their childhood, you know, so it's
like you can do anything random with some people, but find someone who has another skill
in a different area, and don't always go solo and yet try to build something quick.
And don't waste time like building a big old thing.
So yeah, that's, that's what I wish I would have done different.
I think that's great advice.
And I want to just reiterate it because I think it's understated.
It's something people should think more about.
Number one, if you combine your skills with somebody else, just the number of combinations
of things you can do just explodes ex exponentially, if you're just like, I'm a developer, I gotta
write something with code, you know, there's not that many ideas that are gonna come.
But if you're like, hey, I'm gonna pair with a salesperson who's an expert at selling this,
I'm gonna pair with a cookie maker or something that suddenly, like, you know, the combination
of that means you can build something that's super unique that a lot of other people haven't
thought of and aren't doing.
So I think that's great advice.
And then number two, you know, you don't have to have the fanciest, flashiest, coolest,
newest thing.
There's lots of things out there that people already know and love.
People love cookies, like you said, there's a million things that people love, you don't
necessarily need to innovate to find out what people love, you can just look at what people
already love and figure out a better way to bring it to them, or a different way to bring
it to them, and sort of de-risk your business in that way.
So I think that's super smart.
Yeah, you don't have to, like you said, you don't have to innovate, you just have to be
better at something that people already like, or be more convenient, or just what gives
you that competitive advantage and then optimize for that competitive advantage what differentiates
you from other people, and that's it.
Exactly.
And it's frustrating because you see so many people stuck on this, like, I don't know what
to build phase, and it's like the world is full of a million things that work really
well.
Just build one of those, but for, you know, an underserved group of people in a better
way or optimized, and you don't have to worry about what people love, like the answer to
what people love is out there.
You haven't the answers to that test, just go build it.
Sam, thanks so much for coming on the show, it's been really entertaining to talk to you
about your cookie business.
Could you let listeners know where they can go to find more about Crave Cookie and, you
know, maybe where they can buy one if they're interested.
Yeah, so we're at CraveCookie.com.
We don't have online shipping yet, I've built it out, and I tabled it.
So it's just a matter of time, probably in the next month, I'll probably add some online
shipping so you can actually try these, but they're basically I don't, I'm not on a lot
of social media, I read books by candlelight at night, like, I don't like things to be
overly stimulating, I like being in control.
And so yeah, I don't have a lot of social presence online.
Yeah, if you want to connect with me on LinkedIn, I guess, send me a message or whatever.
If you have any questions, my email is Sam at CraveCookie.com.
If you have any questions, that's where you can find me.
All right.
Thanks a ton, Sam.
Yeah, thanks, man.
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