Dippin' Dots

“I sometimes say if we'd had a 100,000 dollars in the bank, we might not have wanted to risk it, but I felt like if it didn't work, I was still young enough that I could probably still get a job somewhere.”

“Was the fact that milk prices had gone up 34% that year. Gas prices started going up a lot between 2006 and 2007. And then our liquid nitrogen cost went up like 10%. And so all of a sudden, on, on almost the same sales, we had went from like a net of two or th…”

“We were suing him for, I think, around sixteen million dollars. Well, he countersued us for ten million dollars, and ours was based on infringement, his was based on antitrust, because he, one of the defenses you have if you're being sued for patent infringeme…”

“And so these hundred gallons a day projections ended up being more like two gallons a day or something like that.”

“But on the day that that three-month extension was due, we got an email that said, you're in default because you have not paid your credit line down. This puts all of your term loans in default as well.”

“Well, it would have been 1991 that we would have started getting some actual income from Opryland. I think that first year we ended up doing 350,000 dollars in sales.”

“So we ended up having to come up with basically four million dollars At the end of this lawsuit, so we had spent six million, we ended up spending four on, on them. Wow. And I had to spend an additional 750,000 dollars to appeal this decision to get my name cl…”

“At the peak that would have been 2006. We did 40, almost forty seven million in sales. I think it was right at forty seven million.”

“I think our total sales for that whole nine month period was like 52,000 dollars. And of course we had more than 52,000 dollars in expense. I can assure you.”

“So we grabbed about a, I think it was a little quart mason jar of the mix, and drove out to the lab, and I pulled out probably about a half a gallon of liquid nitrogen into a cylinder, and I took a pipette, and I took some of the ice cream mix, and I dropped i…”

“Yeah, I mean, we had at one point, I think we had between 30 and 40,000 dollars in credit card debt with, you know, with a business that wasn't making money, so we were We were struggling, you know, well, the first few years, we struggled quite a bit.”

“So this is when we kind of jointly came up with the kiosk concept, which you see in many theme parks today. It's a little standalone ice cream stand where someone stands behind it and sells it.”