Predicting The Turn W/ Dave Knox

Tim Heitmann started Double Good as a 500-square-foot popcorn shop on Navy Pier in 1998 and grew it into a wholesale business that sold to Costco, QVC, and FTD. Then a handwritten letter from a fifth grader who had raised $300 for his band trip made Tim question everything. He walked away from wholesale and poured the company into a fundraising side business that was barely 5% of revenue.In this episode of Predicting The Turn, Tim shares the full arc: how he spent five years quietly building a fundraising tech platform with just three people in a WeWork office, why he focused obsessively on competitive cheerleading as his beachhead market, and how COVID did not create the pivot but revealed a platform that had been five years in the making. When growth exploded in 2021 (400% in Q1 alone), Tim explains the brutal reality of scaling manufacturing, watching SLAs blow from 10 to 47 days, and building a blackout feature to throttle demand before it killed the brand.Tim also explains why Double Good has never taken