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A tech founder, $54 million from Snapchat, and a garage sale that raised $43,000 — that’s the origin story Garrett and Jessica Gee brought back to their old campus.
Garrett Gee returned to Brigham Young University not as a student but as the guy who sold a barcode-scanning app to Snapchat for $54 million — and then, with his wife Jessica, walked away from the money to do something that made almost no financial sense. Standing in front of a room full of Provo undergrads, the couple laid out exactly how a software exit turned into The Bucket List Family, the travel channel that’s followed them and their kids across dozens of countries. It’s a founder story that ends not with a corner office, but with a camera, a diaper bag, and a one-way flight.
- Garrett Gee co-founded the barcode-scanning app Scan while at BYU; Snapchat acquired it in 2014 for $54 million.
- Rather than spend the acquisition money, Garrett and Jessica sold their household belongings in August 2015, raising roughly $43,000 to fund what started as a temporary trip.
- Brand partnerships and influencer marketing made the venture self-sustaining, turning a short excursion with kids Dorothy and Manilla — and later baby Calihan — into a multi-year, full-time journey.
From BYU Dorm Room to Snapchat Deal
Scan started as the kind of side project BYU is known for producing — a mobile app that let users scan barcodes and QR codes instead of typing in URLs or product info. Garrett built it while he was still a student, and it grew fast enough that Snapchat came calling in 2014, buying the company for $54 million. For most 20-somethings, that’s the end of the story: exit, payout, next venture. For Garrett and Jessica, it was the beginning of a very different plan.
The couple made a deliberate call not to draw from the windfall for everyday living. That decision, more than the acquisition itself, is the hinge point of the whole talk — it’s the difference between “we got rich” and “we built something new from scratch anyway.”
The $43,000 Bet
In August 2015, Garrett and Jessica sold off their household belongings and used the proceeds — about $43,000 — to bankroll what they initially treated as a short-term adventure with their two young kids, Dorothy and Manilla. There was no five-year plan and no guaranteed income. It was a self-funded trip, not a startup with a runway calculated by investors.
They didn’t touch the Snapchat money — they funded the whole thing on $43,000 from a garage sale.
That framing matters for the BYU crowd Garrett and Jessica were speaking to: the message wasn’t “sell your app for millions,” it was “you can bootstrap a leap of faith for less than the price of a used car.” Anyone weighing a similar downsizing move — swapping stuff for time — will recognize the logic laid out in pieces like this look at radically simplifying life down to the essentials.
Turning a Family Trip Into a Brand
What started as a documented trip on YouTube and Instagram — the couple began posting under the name The Bucket List Family — didn’t stay a hobby for long. Influencer marketing and brand partnerships started covering costs, then generating real revenue, and the “temporary” excursion stretched into a full-time, multi-year run across dozens of countries. The family grew along the way too, with baby Calihan joining Dorothy and Manilla on the road.
Garrett and Jessica walked the BYU audience through that shift from tech founders to travel journalists — the same instincts that built Scan (spotting a gap, executing fast, monetizing early) got repurposed to build an audience and a content business instead of an app. It’s the kind of pivot that shows up across the family-travel space now, from full-time traveling families documenting their routes to creators building entire followings around a single niche trip.
The Lesson for BYU Students
The core of the speech wasn’t a highlight reel of beaches and passport stamps — it was a pitch for calculated risk. Garrett and Jessica were explicit about prioritizing experiences over possessions and about the discipline it took to build a second business, essentially from zero, right after the first one paid out. For students sitting in that room weighing safe first jobs against something riskier, the takeaway was blunt: the $54 million didn’t buy the trip. The garage sale did.
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