Dirty Dough

The Challenge

Bennett Maxwell's entrepreneurial journey didn't start with cookies. He'd been selling since elementary school — candy bars, solar panels, real estate. When he saw Crumbl's booming cookie empire, he wanted in as a franchisee. But Utah was already sold out.

Then a high school friend, Tyler Peery, announced an investment call for a small cookie brand called Dirty Dough. Bennett jumped in as the first franchisee, opened a location in Tempe, Arizona, and quickly saw the potential. When Peery was ready to move on, Bennett purchased the entire business in 2019.

Now he had a brand with promise but no scalable system. He needed to validate the franchise model, understand unit economics, and build a repeatable playbook — fast.

The Bootcamp Experience

Through the Startup Ignition Bootcamp, Bennett applied lean startup principles to a business that most people wouldn't think of as a "startup." But that's exactly what made the methodology so valuable — it forced him to treat every assumption about customer demand, market positioning, and franchise economics as a hypothesis to test.

The validation framework helped him think systematically about what made Dirty Dough different (cookies engineered from the inside out, with layers, mix-ins, and filling within the dough) and whether that differentiation would hold up at scale across different markets.

The Results

The answer was a resounding yes. Dirty Dough became one of the fastest-growing restaurant franchise concepts in America.

When Crumbl filed a lawsuit against Dirty Dough in 2022, Bennett didn't panic — he turned it into a growth engine. The #UtahCookieWars went viral, witty billboard ads generated massive press coverage, and franchise inquiries exploded. At the time, Dirty Dough had only about three locations open. The lean startup mentality of turning constraints into opportunities was exactly the mindset he needed.

Today, Dirty Dough has 70+ locations with hundreds more in development across the country. The brand secured $2M in additional funding and moved toward acquisition by Craveworthy Brands in 2024.

"When the Crumbl lawsuit hit, we had three stores. Most founders would have folded. But you learn in bootcamp that obstacles are data — and this one was telling us we had something worth fighting for."

Key Takeaways

• Lean startup applies to franchise models too. Bennett treated franchise expansion as a series of hypotheses to validate, not assumptions to bet on.
• Turning a lawsuit into a growth engine. The #UtahCookieWars showed how a validation-first mindset turns obstacles into opportunities.
• From first franchisee to 70+ locations. Systematic thinking about unit economics and market demand drove national scale.