(Ep 1) CLEVELAND COOKIE DOUGH CO -> Building a cookie dough empire from scratch 🍪
Vicki Kotris | Co-Founder & CEO
Hello founder faithful!
Welcome to the first edition of The Founder Newsletter. My goal is to give you a quick synopsis of what got me thinking from this week’s episode of The Founder Podcast in 5 minutes or less.
(But what’s The Founder Podcast?)
The Founder Podcast is a weekly show where I sit down founders and have real-talk chats about the highs and lows of their entrepreneurial journeys. We cover things from where the spark for their idea/company came from and making prototypes to marketing tactics, tips from investors and their morning routine. Basically, it’s me going head to head with Guy Raz in the podcast octagon (just kidding Guy, you’re awesome and welcome for the backlink).
I’ve found the conversations really helpful for motivation, inspiration and just generally fascinating to learn more about my favorite brands - I think you might too.
Here’s our website (mission control), here’s our Instagram (where I spend way too much time making quotes and audiogram content), here are all the discount codes we’ve gotten from the companies we’ve had on the show.
(And who are you?)
I’m Kallaway - a future founder trying to get some answers before I jump in the ball pit myself. Let’s get it.
This Week’s Episode (Ep 1) 🍪
Vicki Kotris, Co-Founder and CEO of Cleveland Cookie Dough Company
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Google
Summary 🔍
What’s the business?
Cleveland Cookie Dough Company makes and sells edible cookie dough. Trust me, it’s as good as it sounds. They have a bright pink food truck that goes to festivals, fairgrounds and catered events all over Ohio as well as seasonal pop-up shops. Additionally, Vicki recently launched a second business to kickstart her Midwest dessert domination called Remixx. Remixx is an ice cream and cereal bar that allows customers to create their own ice cream candy creations. It’s like a hybrid of a Fro-yo shop with a McFlurry machine for customers to use.
Who’s Vicki?
Vicki was born and raised in Northeast, Ohio. After spending the majority of her career in B2B Sales at places like Yelp and Hyland Software, she wasn't satisfied with the monotony of corporate America and turned to entrepreneurship to satisfy her creative endeavors. On a trip to New York City with her husband Steve in 2018, Vicki discovered edible cookie dough and instantly knew it would be a hit in her hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. That’s where she got started and hasn’t looked back.
Vicki’s Startup Manifesto 🗣️
What’s a Startup Manifesto?
At the end of every episode, I ask my founder guests the same question:
If you had to write a Startup Manifesto with 5 of the most important key lessons or pitfalls to avoid when starting out, what would they be?
Here’s what Vicki had to say:
Startup Manifesto 📜
Find your superpower and exploit it. Know what you’re good at, know what you’re not good at and know that you don’t have to be good at everything. Partner up, hire out, do what you gotta do. Whatever you’re good at, just be really really good at it.
Hire your finance person immediately. Have a CPA or a partner that has a business background. Only once you have that, will you be able to get people to really buy into your idea.
Don’t quit your daydream, but don’t quit your day job. You need to have something in place that allows you to take on additional risks that make you feel comfortable enough that you can explore different avenues and ideas.
Collaborate with other local businesses. It helps you level up and it helps you expand your target market. It’s also really fun!
Just keep going. Put one foot in front of the other. You can cry in the corner for only so long, but you’ve just gotta get up and keep pushing forward.
What Got Me Thinking From the Episode 🤔
After reflecting on my conversation with Vicki, there were a couple of things that really got my wheels spinning:
1. Trend Adoption Timing - Coasts -> Midwest 🗺️
Growing up in the Midwest, it always felt like we were late to the party. Trends, music, culture, etc. always seemed to flow from both coasts inward. It almost felt like by the time the trendy things started being adopted in my hometown, the “cool places” were already over it and on to the next.
A couple things struck me as Vicki was telling her story related to this concept. The first, was that she used this trend delay to her advantage. She knew that there was a delay in adoption in the Midwest so she went to the coasts, in this case NYC, saw something that blew her away and then took it to where there was whitespace.
The contrasting idea to this concept that also struck me was that because of the mass digitization and internet adoption we’re seeing across the country, I imagine those trend delay times will continue to get shorter and shorter. We’re already seeing it - boutique fitness studio brands are starting on the coasts but are building in Midwest rollouts into their expansion strategies from day 1.
The question I’d pose to you is this - do you think the coasts (e.g., NYC, Miami, SF, LA, etc.) will always be the ones “setting the culture” or will the seemingly instant exposure of new things via digital media enable Midwest culture to set trends for the rest of the country? Can you imagine a world where a Cleveland or a St. Louis or a Pittsburgh are launching products/services/ideas/concepts/revolutions that are then adopted broadly across the rest of the country and world?
2. Millennials Questioning Their Purpose 🙋
Towards the end of the conversation, Vicki and I had a bit of a dialogue around millennials questioning their purpose. I’m a Millennial and experience these challenges daily, so I feel safe in talking through it here.
I posed the question, “What would you say to Millennials who are questioning their purpose and that what they’re doing day to day isn’t inspiring, etc.?”
As someone in that position, my honest self-assessment is this - I’m willing to work hard…really, really hard, but I find that it’s best when a couple things are true:
I have genuine interest in what I’m working on (either topic or skill development)
There is some tangible upside or reward that should come (it doesn’t always due to market conditions or macro factors, but it should)
When either one of those things aren’t true (and I’m guessing this is the same for many other high performing Millennials out there), I find myself starting to get agitated, frustrated, uninspired and anxious that I’m not doing what I’m supposed to be doing and need a change.
It’s an interesting debate because the majority of our parents are telling us, “back when I walked uphill both ways to school, we got a boss that was willing to have us and worked until they told us to stop with a smile on our face, etc.” I just don’t think we live in an era where that is the right strategy anymore. The “data” shows that a high performer switching jobs every 2-3 years often has the fastest path to rise through the ranks and faster pay acceleration than staying in the same place for 12-15 years.
Those case studies and this dialogue I had with Vicki got me thinking that maybe “we” (the big Millennial WE), should just shift our baseline to a reality where we want to work really hard until we feel that inevitable sense of agitation or frustration, and then happily make the switch to something else, fully expecting that to be the right move all along.
Wrapping it Up 📕
I hope you found this semi-interesting and inspiring/helpful in any way. If so and you want to help support The Founder, here’s a couple things that would be valuable to me and the show:
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Listen to the full podcast episode with Vicki on Apple or Spotify
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Till next time ✌️
Kallaway