After quitting his job, 31-year-old sold bagels on Instagram—now his shop brings in $200,000 a year

All the stress around buying a car can really make you famished. Jacob Anson has an answer for that: his sandwich shop, Brazen Bagels, located in the Village Ford dealership in Dearborn, Michigan.

Anson, 31, started making hand-rolled, New York-style bagels in his home kitchen after quitting his job — selling used tires for an automotive aftermarket company — in the summer of 2021, he says. He spent four months practicing to perfect his recipe, while working as a DoorDash delivery driver to make ends meet, before deciding to sell the bagels as another income stream.

He started selling through Instagram and Facebook in February 2022, and snagged some morning kitchen space in a local burger restaurant two months later. In June 2023, the Ford dealership — which already placed frequent bagel delivery orders — invited Anson to move into its small café space full-time.

Over the next 12 months, Anson's shop brought in about $130,000 in revenue, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. That number grew to $200,000 between June 2024 and June 2025, and it's projected to reach $250,000 over the ensuing 12 months, says Anson. Brazen Bagels is currently profitable, and Anson and his wife collectively earn roughly $100,000 per year from the business, he says.

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Anson built Brazen Bagels without a plan, significant startup capital or any kind of entrepreneurial mentor, he says. Instead, he maxed out a credit card, sold his car to stay financially afloat, and woke up at 3 a.m. to make, roll and boil dozens of bagels every day — something he still does on weekdays, he says.

His wife Megan quit her increasingly "toxic" job in September 2022 to join him, and the duo now lives off Brazen Bagels' proceeds, he says. The four-employee business has sold some of those bagels wholesale through local bakeries and grocery stores and counts the mayor of Dearborn among its customers.

Here's how Anson went from burned out at a desk job to running a bagel shop with a local cult following.

Anson's desk-job burnout came on suddenly, as he answered the phone at work one day, he says: "I said, 'This is Jake.' And while I was stating the [tire] shop's name, I realized, I'm done. I can't do this anymore."

As he considered his next career move, he found himself watching videos of Action Bronson, a rapper and former cook who hosted an online show called "Action In the Kitchen." One video showed Bronson at a New York bagel shop with a line out the door, and Anson recalls wondering if he too could make bagels that people would queue for.

Between October 2021 and February 2022, Anson experimented with different ratios of ingredients he says. "For months, I didn't sit once. I didn't stop baking," says Anson. "If I was tired or if I was not feeling it, I just threw everything in the mixer like, 'I'm not going to waste this. Let's run it back. What did I learn?'"

After launching Brazen Bagels on social media, collecting payment with Venmo, Anson decided to give away his extras to local businesses. The co-owner of one such business, a burger joint across the street called IceBurg Dearborn, had never eaten a bagel before, Anson says — and loved it enough to invite Anson to sell bagels in his restaurant daily from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m.

"The only credit card I got approved for was $3,000. I cash advanced it that day," he says. "I bought an oven and a $1500 Hobart mixer. I'm still using them today ... Over seven months at IceBurg, we sold about 10,000 bagels."

That translated to $300 per day in profit, enough to show Anson that he had a viable business model and to pay off his credit card debt, he says — but not enough to live on, after splitting the money with IceBurg's owners. He gave himself a financial lifeline by selling his 2010 Ford Fusion for $3,200 in 2022, opting to walk to work daily instead and occasionally drive his wife's Subaru Forester.

When his wife quit her job to join him, the couple "got really scrappy," he says: canceling all their subscriptions, solely eating home-cooked meals and finding any way they could to save some cash.

At Village Ford, the café space — which the dealership built roughly a decade ago — became vacant in 2020, when its previous chef departed following a heart attack, says dealership owner Jim Seavitt.

Over the next two years, the dealership interviewed other potential restaurant or coffee shop owners, hoping to find a "unique" proprietor who represented and cared about the Dearborn community, adds Village Ford sales operations manager Krista Rains.

In 2022, after Anson launched Brazen Bagels' residency from within IceBurg, the dealership became a regular customer. In December of that year, it offered Brazen Bagels a $21,000 loan, with a 4% interest rate over four years, to take over and renovate the café, Anson says.

Village Ford owns the space, but Anson doesn't pay rent. The dealership benefits from a heightened sense of hospitality and convenience by hosting the bagel shop, and wanted to provide the young couple with the opportunity free of charge, Rains says. "It's been a fabulous fit," says Seavitt.

Anson and his wife used the loan money to renovate the café, shutting down their IceBurg outpost and spending six months installing new equipment like a sandwich station, cooler, bagel kettle, work tables and a sink. During those six months, Anson bolstered his income by working at a local deli and using his wife's car to deliver DoorDash again, he says.

After reopening at the dealership, Brazen Bagels established wholesale partnerships with five local bakeries and markets — no contracts, just business owners verbally agreeing to support each other, says Anson. He relied on some of those relationships "pretty heavily to stay afloat before the word got out that we were hidden inside Village Ford," he says.

Today, he has one wholesale partner — a coffee shop called Kekoa Brew Co. — which sells about 28 dozen bagels per week, constituting roughly 12% of Brazen Bagels' revenue. The rest comes from the brick-and-mortar space, where regulars stop by before work, during lunch or late at night during Ramadan in a heavily Middle Eastern town.

"How often do you go to get your car fixed, and you wind up with the best bagel you're ever going to have?" says Abdullah Hammoud, the mayor of Dearborn. "I mean, very seldom."

Despite the local popularity, Anson says he has little interest in opening a second location: Right now, he enjoys having a "small, humble" business. He may potentially launch a small food truck someday, as a more sustainable extension of the brand, he says.

"I don't think a second location would make me happier," says Anson. "And I don't think there's a way it could be as good as the one that me and Megan run. ... The entire reason why we're successful is because everything has to be perfect and intentional and worked on every day."

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