Guy Raz

Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Justin Gold used his home food processor to make a better-tasting peanut butter and turned Justin's nut butter into a category-defining brand.

There's a strange thing that happens when you build something successful, and you'll hear this from a lot of founders.

The chase, it never really ends.

You get your first customer, and then you want 100.

You hit a million in sales, then you go for 10 million.

The more you grow, the more complicated it gets, and the bar just keeps kind of moving.

All of this was definitely true for Justin Gold.

Justin started with a simple idea.

He wanted to make a peanut butter that was better than the stuff sitting on the supermarket shelves.

And at first, he just wanted to sell a few jars around Boulder, Colorado, where he lived.

At the time, he was waiting tables and working at the local REI, and he thought, hey, this could bring in a few more bucks.

But every time he sold a jar of peanut butter, every time a customer reacted, it opened the door to a bigger ambition.

So eventually, he pitched his local Whole Foods, and then more Whole Foods, and then grocery chains across the country.

And along the way, Justin kept experimenting.

What started with a food processor in his kitchen became a business built around flavored nut butters, flavors like maple and honey and cinnamon.

But there was a problem.

A typical jar of peanut butter in someone's pantry lasts a long time, especially if you're not making PB&J for kids on a daily basis.

So after some early success, sales of Justin's nut butters started to stagnate.

And that was a problem because, well, what do you do when you hit a wall that seems immovable?