How Caroline Chambers Grew Her Substack Newsletter Into a 7-Figure Business

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. If you’ve been frustrated trying to discover actionable insights from different analytics and keyword platforms, Clariti is your solution. Clariti helps you manage your blog content all in one place so you can find actionable insights that improve the quality of your content. Not only does it automatically sync your WordPress post data so you can find insights about broken images, broken links, and more. It can also sync with your Google Analytics and Google Search Console data, so you can see keyword, session, page view, and user data for each and every post.

One of our favorite ways to use it, we can easily filter and see which of our posts have had a decrease in sessions or page views over a set period of time and give a little extra attention to those recipes. This is especially helpful when there are Google updates or changes in search algorithms, so that we can easily tell which of our recipes have been impacted the most. Listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast get 50% off of their first month of Clariti after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you’re listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming Caroline Chambers, who you might know from her super popular substack newsletter, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Caroline’s career in food started out when she opened her very own catering business, and then morphed into freelance recipe development and a surprise cookbook, which she did for many years. With the start of the pandemic, Caroline finally made the switch to creating her own recipe content and started her Substack newsletter, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking. Her newsletter is now the number one food and drink newsletter on Substack, and she has grown her business into a seven figure business, which is totally incredible.

Caroline has an awesome perspective on making her recipes unique and useful for her readers, and chats more about how she has grown her subscribers and how she converts unpaid subscribers into paid subscribers, and way more about her strategy with Substack and growing her business on this episode. Her second cookbook, What To Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking is coming out today, on August 13th. We are big fans of Caroline’s here at Food Blogger Pro, as you might gather from the first few minutes of this episode, and just thrilled to welcome her on the podcast. So without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Caroline, welcome to the podcast.

Caroline Chambers: Thank you. I feel very excited to be here. I told the person who helped us set this up that when I was first starting out in the food world, trying to figure out what the heck I was doing, I used to listen to this podcast all the time. So when I got her email inviting me on, I was like, “Oh my gosh, here we are.”

Bjork Ostrom: Here we are.

Caroline Chambers: I’ve made it.

Bjork Ostrom: She would like to tell you, I was reviewing the show notes, she says, “Our team is a huge fan of her Thai-ish steak and Noodle salad,” so it’s not often that I get little fan notes, and it was italic text in the show notes.

Caroline Chambers: That makes me feel very good. That’s a really good one. That was a recent recipe and I’ve been getting a lot of, “This is your best work yet.” It was Noodley, steaky, cabbage, cashews, all the good flavors, so thank you. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks. Emily says, thanks, and thank you for being a podcast listener at one point. Really appreciate that. And here we are. We’re going to talk about your journey as a creator. It’s one of the things that we’ve been trying to prioritize is conversations with people who are building… Their career arc isn’t the same as some of the career arcs of the conversations that we have on the podcast, which oftentimes is like, “I’m going to go out, I’m going to build a site and I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic, probably from search, maybe a little bit of social media, and that’s going to be the path forward.”

But the reality is there’s hundreds of different ways that you can build a successful career by publishing content online. And you’ve done that. Did you start out thinking about approaching it from the traditional standpoint of like, “I’m going to try and get a bunch of traffic,” or in that stage where you did talk about trying to figure it out, maybe listening to this podcast, other podcasts, what was your mindset then, and did it shift or has it always been in this space of maybe finding a different way?

Caroline Chambers: Oh, yeah. Yeah. If we take it way back to when I first got into the food world… So I started my career, my post-college career in advertising, hated it. And my husband was in the military, so we had to move. When we moved to San Diego, he was like, “Figure out a way to work in food. That’s what you want to do, figure it out.” So I first-

Bjork Ostrom: When was this?

Caroline Chambers: This is 2012. 2012, we moved. I was working in New York in advertising after I graduated from UNC, Chapel Hill. I had a few food clients, Don Julio Tequila was one of my big clients, and I got to do a ton of really cool… It was the early days of Instagram, Twitter. I was being flown across the country to attend Don Julio parties with Lil Jon, and tweet a blurry Blackberry picture of Lil Jon. That was my job. That was my job. Making $22,000 a year, whatever the hell, I was paid.

Bjork Ostrom: $50,000 of living expenses in New York.

Caroline Chambers: Exactly. Exactly. Nothing like it. So I started in advertising, got this introduction to the food media world that way, but again, Instagram still wasn’t really big. I always said, “I’m not a food blogger, I just don’t want to become a food blogger.” Once I moved to San Diego and my husband was like, “Work in food.” I was like, “I just can’t be a food blogger. It’s just not my thing.” Maybe Pinch of Yum was around back then, but this is like Smitten Kitchen was the food website, the food blog that everyone was going to. I was like, “No, that’s not for me.” So I started a catering company in San Diego and I loved that, but through that, had to grow a social presence to get it to succeed. And when I think about those days, I think that that’s when I first started listening. Do you guys… Was it around back then or was I a couple years too early on that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, would have been.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, I think so. If not, it was my next iteration. I’ve been through about 50 food career iterations. As we do. But I definitely started trying to build SEO and brand traffic for my catering business, and was trying to create a lifestyle brand around that, and I just-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a lifestyle brand, meaning a digital brand connected to the catering? Or making the catering business a lifestyle business?

Caroline Chambers: Making the catering business representative of also who I was. So I was always, even in those early days, cognizant of the fact that I wanted me and my personality to be at the center of this brand. So Cucina Coronado was the name of the catering business, and it was very much pictures of me on the website at these events doing these things. I love food, and I love the connection to people that food brings. And I didn’t know back then exactly what I wanted that to look like, but I knew that… I’ve always had the Ina aspirations. I’ve always wanted to be an Ina in some capacity.

Was it just as a cookbook author? Was it with a show? Was it with a small food shop in the Hamptons? Whatever it was, I had aspirations of me being at the center of my brand. So lots of pictures of me doing the food thing. So yeah, started trying to figure out the like SEO and how to bring… I was putting random recipes on my catering website. I just always really struggled with it, and continued that struggle for many years until I kind of landed where I am today. Yes, definitely. Definitely attention to the SEO thing. There’s a lot of steps in between that we’ll get to.

Bjork Ostrom: In between. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. But yeah, the SEO and traditional blog with Ads thing never quite clicked for me.

Bjork Ostrom: And let me know if this resonates, but one of the things we talk about is sometimes you can see a thing, and that thing that you see is somebody doing something that is representative of echoes of what you want to do. And it might be like, “Hey, I’m building a brand, and it’s a personality based brand and this person is doing it in this way.” And you kind of look and say like, “Okay, the way they did that is they figure out search traffic and they figured out…” So what does it look like to try and do that? It sounds like in you doing that, what you discovered is that’s not the path, and so then were you iterating and saying, “Let me try a different path to see if that feels better for how I am going to hike to this destination?”

Caroline Chambers: Let me take you through my path. So I had the catering business for several years in San Diego. Through that, I started getting asked by local magazines, bigger brands, to do recipe development. So recipe development is basically when a brand is hiring you to develop a recipe, but if you don’t have a name of your own, a brand of your own, they’re just taking that recipe, they’re white labeling it, so to speak, and they’re just putting it on Woodbridge by Robert Mondavi was and is still one of my recipe development clients.

And so they would take the recipe, I would have nothing to do with it. They weren’t paying me for my brand to be a part of it. Nowhere did it say Caroline Chambers and it would just be slapped up on their website in a magazine in what are those things called? Point of sale. When you buy a chunk of cheese and it has a little fold out tag that has a recipe on it. I created a lot of those. And so I started building a brand around recipe development, because what I found was catering was such a slog. I was literally 22 years old with back pain and getting gray hairs.

Bjork Ostrom: Icing your knees at the end of the day.

Caroline Chambers: Icing my knees and laying flat on my ground, just being like, “What have I done?” To make $1000 at the end of the day. I realized how much easier the recipe development side was than the physical, being in a restaurant or being in a catering business just from a literal physical perspective. I could sit in my kitchen and spend a day tweaking one recipe and make… I don’t know what I made for recipe development back then, let’s say $150 for a recipe, and that was so much easier than the labor that went into catering a party and making 300 bucks or whatever. So I started building a brand around-

Bjork Ostrom: Almost like B2B. You were known as somebody who other businesses could come to and do recipe development. But that probably left out the piece that you knew that you wanted, which is consumer connection to-

Caroline Chambers: It left out that narcissistic… yes.

Bjork Ostrom: No, and I would say I would push back against that. It’s connection, community, the ability to speak and interact with people, and it’s the same thing if you’re a musician, you can be a recording artist and you can go into the studio and create, and some people love that, but inevitably there are musicians who, if they were studio musicians and they never got to step in front of a crowd of people, that’s just a different dynamic.

Caroline Chambers: And to take that metaphor one level deeper, there are also musicians who are creating diddies for brands that have their name nowhere attached to it. So I was creating the diddy for a tied commercial, basically, and I was like nowhere attached to it. I would share it on this Instagram @CarolChambers. I’ve had that forever, and I would share it on my Instagram and be like, “You can go to the Woodbridge site and find this recipe.” But I was always missing that personal, you to me, you follow me on Instagram to get recipes directly from me. I was really missing that for many years, but I had built this job and this network of people who were coming to me consistently for recipes and I didn’t have the time to… Can you hear my dog in the background?

Bjork Ostrom: No. But it’s great. It’s like birds chirping in the park dogs barking in the house.

Caroline Chambers: That’s Cooper. I don’t live in New York City, but I do have a dog chirping in the background. I had built this steady income of recipe development clients, and so I always felt this piece was missing. I didn’t have time to post a recipe just on my Instagram for fun for my community that I had built there. But I had, I had such steady work, and so that piece was always missing.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s hard because you know that you could take an hour or two hours to craft a piece of content that you share with your audience, but it’s hard when you translate that into, and then I’m not going to get paid $250 in order to do the recipe development. And so then, I was talking to a friend actually this weekend whose brother is a family therapist and he’s just like, he’s working all the time because he’s attached this dollar amount to his work. And you know that if you’re not going to work in an afternoon that equates to $500 or if you are going to work on something, but it’s something that’s not directly tied to revenue, there’s also an inherent cost to that. So how did you-

Caroline Chambers: 100%.

Bjork Ostrom: What did it look like to navigate that?

Caroline Chambers: That’s so funny you say that. That’s exactly because not a lot of people ever bring that up. That’s exactly the cycle that I got into, and I think a lot of small business and entrepreneurs can get into that cycle of, well, I can’t take the time to build this business, because I’ve got this thing set up where I know that my hourly, in one hour I can make $200. And so what happened to me as a mom is that I also, I would get a babysitter for that two hours to develop a recipe in which I would make $300. So I’m going to spend $30, I’m going to make 300, my profit is 270. What happens when you’re trying to build a brand where you’re not making money at the beginning is that-

Bjork Ostrom: You just start losing money, because hiring a babysitter.

Caroline Chambers: You’re just, yeah. And so any amount, at this point when I made this shift, we skipped a point where I, in my mind… So basically in 2012 I started building this catering business, which then shifts to recipe development. I went and worked for a restaurant consulting brand in San Francisco for a piece, but I was still always side hustling doing this recipe development on the side, continuing to build that brand on the side, always left that company to go full force with the freelance recipe development because it was just so much more enjoyable, my own time, all the things. In that time period, I did a stint where I was food styling for the New York Times. My husband was in business school, we spent the summer in New York City and I got a freelance gig styling for the New York Times for the summer for Melissa Clark’s column with a really great food photographer named Andrew Scrivani, who was just such a great mentor and really showed me the ropes.

And through that I reconnected with an old UNC friend who is a cookbook agent, and she was like, “Okay, you’re in the food world. You’re doing all these cool things. Would you ever want to write a cookbook?” And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t even have, I have 1000 Instagram followers leftover from my old catering business. I never even post there. I would never want to write a cookbook until I had a very clear POV on something cool.” I don’t want just another girl gets a community and writes a cookbook, not just like Caroline Chambers here are my favorite recipes. No, I would never. And at this point I had no community anyway. And she’s like, “Okay, yeah, well, you’re going to continue to grow your brand. I can tell you’re going to work on it. Let me know.”

Two weeks later she calls me and is like, “Okay, so I know you said you didn’t want to write a book, but I have a book with a very clear POV Chronicle books wanted to write a book called Just Married, and they needed a person who was just married to write it, who was a great recipe developer or whatever they were. She was like, they don’t need somebody famous. They don’t want the book to be about the person so much as the book.” I was like, “Perfect. I’ll write my first cookbook.” So I got my first cookbook deal in this very back channel only way that doesn’t really happen anymore. It’s pretty hard to get a cookbook deal these days, and I got one having no community, no following anything. So I wrote that book. It’s really successful. It’s still on the shelves at Crate and Barrel because it has its own life and now that I do have built a community, it has even more success. But basically… It published in 2017, so this whole time I’m still doing my thing freelance recipe development.

In conjunction with what you were just saying about your hourly time being so equated to a dollar amount. I also, when you’re freelance recipe developing or you’re a writer or something like that, your time can only go so far. I could only develop so many recipes in a week. I could only do so much with my time. It wasn’t a scalable business at all, and I kept, that was always in the back of my mind, just kind of needling me that it was so unscalable. I’m writing a recipe and I can only sell it one time to one person and then the recipe is over, I can’t… So that was always in my mind, it’s something that I wanted to solve.

Bjork Ostrom: And you probably also know inherently the value of the thing that you’re creating. It’s like your years and years of experience going into this and it’s like a single kind of transaction as opposed to what they end up using it for, which is putting it in the magazine or on a packaging that is distributed to 200,000 people. And so you know there’s value beyond the recipe itself, but maybe didn’t have access to that audience directly.

Caroline Chambers: Totally. It’s funny you say that because, so I still retain a lot of those original recipe development clients. I’m pushing them off more and more, because I just don’t have time with what I have going on now, but I have recipe development clients that I got in 2012 when I had to absolutely know online community, no name for myself that I still write recipes for, and my rate is about a hundred times what it was when I first started. I mean truly, I think I was charging $150 and now I charge, I don’t know, $5,000 a recipe in some of these cases and they still don’t put my name on those recipes. It’s just that I now know what those recipes are worth-

Bjork Ostrom: Are worth. Yeah.

Caroline Chambers: That time is worth, where it’s being used, where it’s being licensed out, the fact that they have full ownership of it versus only ownership for one year, they’re like these different things you can then negotiate. And so I’ve jacked my rate way up and every single time they’ve been great, in the contract. They never question it and I’m like, “Oh, dang it, I could have been making-”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. Everybody ever who has done any freelance work looks back and is like, oh, you realize. And part of it too is like half of those people say no, but then half still say yes, and the rate is twice as much. You’re getting paid the same amount and doing half the work, but you don’t know until you try and have that conversation. The other thing that I think is true is, I think of when we were first starting out and you get a branded deal and it’s like we’re in a season where a week ago we bought a scratch and then refrigerator for $175 using Lindsey’s babysitting money, and it’s like just your perspective on money is also different where a smaller amount is worth more when you haven’t gone through the experience of even seeing like, oh, a company that is reaching out to you probably has a $500,000 budget for this campaign. And so the difference between you asking a thousand or 2000 feels really significant to you, but to that brand, it’s like-

Caroline Chambers: That is a drop in the bucket.

Bjork Ostrom: But you don’t know that until you know it.

Caroline Chambers: You don’t know that. Yeah. Another funny thing that I think I’ve realized with time is, these brands, you’re thinking like, oh, Tillamook is approving this. No, a 22-year old just graduated from journalism school’s working at an agency or whatever, who’s working at an agency that works for an agency that works for Tillamook is who is looking at this and they’ve been given $500,000 to whatever mess with, and so you asking for an extra 1000 is literally easier for her to just say yes to that than go out and find somebody else to ask for that money. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So we buried the lead here with some of this stuff with your story because one of the really significant periods for you, kind of an unlock I would imagine is the transition into building an audience on Substack and you have the number one food and drink Substack newsletter. My guess is there’s a little bit of that that compounds. I have a friend who wrote a book that’s like a number one book in the business world called The Personal MBA, and he talks about once you’re there, you kind of sit there, but you have to get to a point where you start in order to build it up. So-

Caroline Chambers: Yes, how did we get there?

Bjork Ostrom: How did you get there? What did that look like? And in a relatively short amount of time, when you look at-

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. 2017 is when Just Married, published, and at that point I had sort of started being like, okay, I’m going to be a published cookbook author. I better build up my Instagram a bit. But I still had that issue where I was a freelance recipe developer. That was my main income, and I had so many gigs coming in and I was just so obsessed with just what you were just saying, the equation of my hourly rate or my hour to making a certain amount of money that I wasn’t taking the time to develop those recipes for free to publish on my Instagram or on carolinechambers.com. I just wasn’t seeing the value in that. Basically I was like, “Oh, I wrote a cookbook. That’ll project me into the universe as a food creator.” No, it will not. So Just Married, publishes, it does really well just based on its title alone and where it has placements, whatever.

But it certainly does not all this, I don’t overnight just because I published a book, grow my Instagram audience at all very much realized a book is a great PR-able moment if you are doing the work and you’re a creator who’s hustling hard, but like-

Bjork Ostrom: Like a multiplier.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, it’s a multiplier, but just on its own, you can publish a book and no one will ever know about it if there’s not the right things in place. So between 2017 and 2019, I get pregnant, have my first son. The way that I cook very much changes. And so I have this genius cookbook idea for a book called What to Cook when You Don’t Feel Like Cooking and all of the ingredients would be less than 15 ingredients, nothing that’s difficult to find. Everything you can find in a normal grocery store, all the recipes would take under an hour and it would be a complete meal. So each recipe is a complete meal. It’s your grain, your vegetable, your main, or whatever. It’s a lasagna with a side salad. It’s the whole thing. The idea was you get a cookbook and you have to flip from the side section to the entrees, and then you’re not a confident cook, but you have to figure out does that broccoli go with that main? So this was everything all together.

So I pitched this book and all these publishers were like, “This is amazing, great concept, but oh, Caroline only has 2000 Instagram followers. Like, Nope, pass.”

Bjork Ostrom: Because you’re not going to be able to sell it. Is what they’re-

Caroline Chambers: You’re not going to be able to sell it. So the publishing landscape had changed that much from 2015 when I got the book deal for Just Married to 2019 when I was trying to sell this book that I was like, “No, but the name is so good, it’ll sell itself.” And they were like, “No, it won’t. You don’t know that.” No publishing now is at least cookbook publishing in my experience is you have to be able to sell the book yourself. So whether you are a rapper who has a huge audience and so they get a cookbook deal or you have a food blog, and so you get a cookbook deal, whatever, you have to be able to sell it. They don’t want to be in charge of selling it. The publisher, they want you to be in charge of selling it and have your own built-in audience to sell it.

So everyone rejects it. I am so defeated, and at this point I’m genuinely now looking back, I realize I wasn’t putting in the effort, I wasn’t putting in the effort to building my own brand and doing these things. And it was because of that I didn’t feel like I had enough time in the day to… I couldn’t hire a babysitter for $15 an hour to then do work for free to publish a recipe on my website. No way. That wasn’t good business. And then I am one of the many people whose career trajectory totally changed in March, 2020, all of a sudden my husband and I were both stuck at home with, I was pregnant with our second. Our first was one, a little over one, and I was literally working on a huge Cinco Mayo campaign for I Kid You Not Corona Beer. On March 16th, I was down in Monterey at a food photography studio shooting this huge campaign for Corona beer, and we were like, so Corona beer coronavirus.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s funny. Yeah, totally.

Caroline Chambers: So funny. Wonder what’ll happen. And then the next day, the whole world is shut down.

Bjork Ostrom: Shuts down. And everybody picks a collective golf.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, yes. So I get check from Constellation who owns Corona. I get my check from them, literally never hear from them again. I don’t even know if I ever sent final recipes. They were just like, “Ah, yeah, I think Cinco de Mayo’s kind of canceled for this year. We’re good.” So those recipes went nowhere and in consequence or in quick succession, all of my other freelance recipe development gigs were like, “Pause on that, pause on that. We don’t know what we’re doing right now.” Take yourself back, the grocery store shelves were empty. Getting food was impossible. It was an issue. And so no one knew how to market food, and the only people who paid me were people who market food. So I was like, okay.

I remember March 20th looking at my husband and being like, I think this is my moment to, I’m not making money anyway, so I’m just going to go absolutely ham on the internet. I don’t know if for listeners, have you ever had a friend who you’re like, oh, I think they’re trying to become an influencer because all of a sudden they start hosting a ton of stuff and talking in selfie mode to their camera.

Bjork Ostrom: Kind of trying out new versions of themselves.

Caroline Chambers: Trying out new versions of themselves, posting their meals that they’ve never posted before, sharing a link to their son’s swimsuit. You’re like, what the heck is going on? Well, that was me. That was in 2020 totally. And so my advice would be, I’ve had a lot of people since I started trying to be an internet creator or whatever the heck we call ourselves, I’ve had a lot of people, friends, friends of friends reach out to me and be like, “How did you do it? Were you not embarrassed? All of a sudden it’s like you just have to be so vulnerable. And also, who cares? If anyone sees you out there posting a link to your son’s swimsuit and talking to your camera about the great hike you just went on and they think you’re a dork, well then they can unfollow you. I think literally every single person in the world, I don’t care if you’re completely introverted, you hate talking to other humans. I think every single person in the world can be an internet creator because none of us are as unique as we think we are.

There is a community of people who wants to follow somebody, every single person on the planet. You just have to do it. So if you are like, “Oh, I could…” So many people who would be like, I could never, I’m way too shy. I could never, I’m way too self-conscious,” then just get on there and be self-conscious, do it. So I got on there and I’m super extroverted. I love chit-chatting, so it was honestly the easiest thing for me. I just got in there, started talking about my day. We live on an acre with chickens. I would take the camera on Instagram stories down to see the chicken coop, whatever. But my thing that really helped me grow is that I would do, it was quarantine kitchen, like quarantine kitchen with a Q, very chic naming. And I would be like post, because I had nothing else going on.

Remember nothing else going on except for keeping going in your old life. I would be like, tell me the ingredients that are in your pantry and I’ll create a meal for you. So people would write in and be like, I’ve got eggs, lentils, curry, paste, whatever. And I’d be like, “Okay, we’re going to make an egg lentil curry.” Do this, do this, do this. And people just, even if nobody made them, they just got such a kick out of the pantry mashups that I was coming up with that I started, and this is before Reels, which Reels are a really great way to quickly go viral and gain a lot of followers. So this was all just word of mouth, people being like, “Oh, you got to follow this girl.” She’s like, “You can type in what you have and she’ll tell you what to cook with it.”

So I started growing really quickly with that, and I started publishing recipes to carolinechambers.com just because people needed a place for them to live.

Bjork Ostrom: Where do I get it?

Caroline Chambers: And never, I don’t even know my WordPress login. I hate trying to deal with websites. And so I knew, okay, this isn’t how I’m going to make money, like driving SEO. This is never going to be how I’m going to make money. So I just kept building and trying to get more followers. I saw, I swear, I listened on a podcast or maybe it was on here, the importance of having your own newsletter, basically, Instagram can change its algorithm. TikTok could get banned, your website could crash or get hacked, and you could never see it again. Having your own newsletter list of people who you can capture them their attention instantly, and you don’t have to hope that the algorithm shows them your story, they’re going to get your email.

I saw somewhere the importance of that, and it really spoke to me. And so I started building a newsletter list and I would just send fun quarantine kitchen things like, here’s our idea. And it was a great newsletter, but it was just hacked together on whatever WordPress platform I was doing. So I did that for a long time, kept growing my audience. By December, 2020, I’ve had my second son, he’s a couple of months old, my cooking is getting even more… I feel like cooking even less. And this idea of that proposal I wrote, it just was in my mind and I couldn’t let it go.

So I just kept being like, “What could I do with that?” I still only had 10,000 Instagram followers. I was like, all right, what to cook? You don’t feel like cooking. Do I turn that into its own Instagram? Do I turn that into its own website? And Substack was just starting to gain momentum. People were food creators were really turning to Patreon, and I just didn’t dig that for some reason. And I guess I had good reason because has it flopped? Is it over? Is Patreon over?

Bjork Ostrom: Patreon, I don’t think so. But I know any type of contribution model is hard if you’re not… And Patreon, I know you can set it up with tiers where it’s like you get certain access to things, but it maybe leans a little bit into a tip jar. It’s not that, but if it feels like that, that’s different than product or subscription, and maybe there’s a little nuanced difference there.

Caroline Chambers: Maybe. I was seeing Patreons and thinking, okay, so people are going to have to leave Instagram, go to the Patreon app to access this. I was like, “I don’t think that’s,” my people are busy either young professionals, young parents. I was like, I don’t want to make them try harder to get content. And so then I was like, wait, I already have this newsletter. And I kind of heard about Substack and I was like, okay, if I could just continue to create value in my newsletter, I probably first got this idea in October. I already had this newsletter going for many months. People really loved it, but it was just a regular old newsletter sharing recipes from my website, sharing what we did, tips, whatever. I don’t know, it was just a very basic but well-thought-out newsletter at that point. And so I shifted it.

I shifted it to being a unique recipe every week, and I always, because it was COVID times, I always provided a substitution for every single ingredient. So literally I took the ingredient list, I copied and pasted it, and I wrote, because that’s the number one thing back then was like, “I don’t have baking powder. You have, right? There’s no baking powder in my town.” I was like, “Okay, if you don’t have baking powder, do this, this, this. If you don’t have flour, do this, this, this. You don’t have chicken. Okay, you can use shrimp, cook it for two minutes. You can cook beef, cook it for seven minutes.” It was a crazy index of substitutions. And that was when I really started to get a kind of cult following of people being like, whoa, you write these recipes in a way that I could actually follow.

And I also write, most recipe lists are like, add the flour, salt, and butter to the bowl. I write the full amount. So I’m like, “Add two cups flour, one stick butter, and two teaspoons of salt to the bowl.” And I put it in bold so people who aren’t super confident in the kitchen are falling recipes, just really clicking with these recipes. And so I started just, I knew, okay, maybe I’ll turn on this paid subscription model with a newsletter. So I switched over to Substack for my hosting in October of 2020, and I didn’t change anything. Nobody knew. I never talked about Substack. It just looked a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t look any different to somebody.

Caroline Chambers: It doesn’t look any different. All they did was receive an email. All it was no sweat off their back. But I changed the format. So I would still provide these once a week kind of chatty, here’s a soup recipe, it’s cold outside, whatever those newsletters. But I also was sending in the newsletter every single Sunday morning with a full list of substitutions, a unique recipe that I would just talk the heck out of on Instagram and be showing them behind the scenes of cooking it. The pictures, you can only get this if you’re on my newsletter. It’s just the best place for me to send it. I’m doing a newsletter thing. I’ve never been good to websites. It’s coming in your newsletter. So I just would rapidly get tons of new subscribers by being like, you can only access this recipe that looks so good if you subscribe.

And so I did that for several months, and then I, December, 2020, I think December 13th, 2020, I transitioned to a paid model. So I was like, if you don’t want to pay, it’s fine. You’ll still get one recipe a month. And that’s how my model still is to this day. First recipe of every month is free for everyone, but if you want to pay, it’s basically… I told the whole story about how I tried to pitch this concept as a cookbook. Everybody said no, but that I was going to self-publish it and bring it directly to the people one recipe at a time instead. And so I launched it at the price of a cookbook, $35. And I was like, this is my non cookbook cookbook. Kind of like F the publishers, they wouldn’t give me a deal.

So I’m giving myself a deal with my whole thing around it. And again, I probably had, I don’t know, 8,000 total subscribers at this point, and I converted a lot overnight, like 500 overnight or something. And I was like, whoa. All of a sudden, my, let’s say I was making $30,000 all of a sudden annual. I kind of fulfilled on that hope of being able to scale these recipes beyond just being able to sell them once. So instead of selling a recipe…

Bjork Ostrom: That was a singular moment where it was the clouds kind of part a little bit, and the sun comes through and you’re like, this is a moment where after a decade of pondering it, feeling it, the tension, knowing that you’re doing really good work, sticking with it, having a moment where it’s like, oh, this is it. Did it feel like that the moment, or did it feel like that looking back?

Caroline Chambers: It felt exactly like that in the moment. For weeks leading up to the paid launch, I was like, “Oh God, is anybody going to do this? Nobody’s going to pay for, there are a million recipes on pinchofyum.com, what’sgabycooking.com, New York Times cooking those Smitten Kitchen, why would anybody pay me in my own website, carolinechambers.com, there’s a million free recipes, why would people pay?” And so that’s what I put my effort towards was what sets this apart? What makes this worth subscribing and actually paying for it? And so that’s when I really leaned in hard to the way that I write recipes with those bold inline ingredient amounts and providing this huge, it’s really a massive list of notes and substitutions. Often it takes me longer to write the notes and substitutions than to write the recipe itself, really leaning into that. Because it very much is this, “Teach man to fish,” versus just hand them a fish.

Anybody can follow a recipe for shrimp and orzo. But once you have read these notes and substitutions and you realize, “Oh, I can swap in rice and chicken and add some cheese, and all of a sudden I have cheesy cheddar rice and chicken using the same recipe, but just slight tweaks, that’s where people feel really empowered by what to cook, we don’t feel like cooking.” But yes, to answer your question, it was this full sun through the clouds moment where I was sitting on Substack on my dashboard watching one more subscriber come in, I’d be like, refresh, refresh. And you’d be like, 35 more dollars, 70 more dollars. I’m going up in $35 increments. And people are really supporting me because for almost a year during the pandemic, I’ve been pouring myself out for free to give them as much help and assistance in the kitchen as I possibly could.

I was doing Zoom cooking classes. I’ve really connected with this community. And they were like, “Yes, Caroline, we are psyched to finally be able to support your work.” And I’m watching that this desire to create a product that is scalable. I’m watching it scale, refresh, refresh, refresh. I’m watching it scale in front of my eyes and thinking, “Okay, so I could have written that recipe for shrimp and orzo for 150 bucks, sold at once, never been able to use it again.” But now I’m writing a recipe for the sky’s the limit. I am writing one single recipe, and there’s absolutely no cap on how much that one single recipe can make me if I just keep hustling and adding more subscribers. So yeah, that was December, 2020, and it’s been an exponential growth since then.

Bjork Ostrom: Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

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Can you talk about what that’s been like to have that change? Because it’s a pretty drastic before and after. And it’s like in some ways it’s slow because it’s a decade of pursuing an entrepreneurial spirit, trying to figure out what it is, but it’s slow until it’s not, and then it’s not. And then today looks very different than four years ago or four years and two months. What has that been like to navigate that? Everything from suddenly, maybe there’s more pressure, maybe not. But also financially it looks different than it did before, and what does that look like to experience that change?

Caroline Chambers: Oh my gosh, so many things. The pressure thing is what spoke to me first. And so all of a sudden I am like, okay, I am pressing launch on this paid feature. And so overnight, I think it was overnight, I got like 500 paid subscribers. And I remember so vividly those first couple of months before I hired an editor, because again, we’re obsessed with how much money we can make to how much we had to spend on this at the beginning as entrepreneurs. So I didn’t hire an editor for months, even though I desperately needed one. I so vividly remember. So it used to go out on Sunday mornings. I recently switched to Saturday based on a lot of the feedback from readers.

So distinctly remember, every single Saturday night was a full anxiety attack. I would reread, read, reread, proofread, have my husband read, have my mom read 500 times, every single recipe went out, because I was so terrified of what if an ingredient’s missing? Because that happens all the time, when you just post something on Instagram, you forget the salt. Somebody says, where’s the salt? You add it because guess what, that was a free recipe, I don’t-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and you can edit the description.

Caroline Chambers: Yes, and you can edit it. And so I was just so terrified of these people putting their trust in me, paying me for something and then, I mean, there’s nothing worse being a food creator. You are inserting yourselves into such an important part of people’s lives, like dinner time especially. I mean, I just say especially I am a community member of the young family of the community. Especially though to me as a young mom, if dinner gets screwed up, because of something I messed up, and then all of a sudden this young mom or dad is standing there and their kids are starving and they’re starving, and the dinner was way too salty, or it wasn’t salty at all or whatever. Somehow I screwed up the dinner, that was so much pressure on me. And so Saturday nights became just fully anxiety riddled. I was panicked that I was going to make some mistake.

I finally ponied up and hired an editor, and that has made such a world of difference. So I think it’s just how I had to finally hire a babysitter for my son to do free work to grow the brand that is now a seven figure business. You had to invest a little, even though you weren’t making any money at the beginning to get to where I am today. It’s the same thing with hiring people to help with What To Cook brand and with the Caroline Chambers brand. Yuck for even calling myself a brand. But you know what I mean?

At first, I was so hesitant and I was like, oh my gosh, I’m making $30,000 now. It’s $40,000, whatever. I just kept seeing it tick up, and my husband went to Standford Business school, so he’s like, “Oh my God, you’ve cracked the code. You’ve created a business with absolutely zero overhead.” And I was like, yeah, there’s no overhead. I make all of this. And so to hire my first editor, I was like, “Oh, damn it. Okay, okay. I’m losing some profit, losing some profit.” But because I now have an editor, it’s now such a more beautiful, perfect publication and recipe than I ever would. And thus, more people tell their friends about it and it gets shared more. And thus, my subscriber numbers have raised so much. And same thing went for hiring my first graphic designer to fully do a branding suite for it.

I was like, oh God, whatever I spent $15,000. Is that really worth it? Yes, of course it is, because then your stuff looks so much more legit and beautiful, and people are so much more excited to get it in their inbox. My branding is really bright and poppy and colorful, and I want it to just be this pop of joy in their inboxes. So they’re like, yeah, they get that, and they’re like, whoa, it’s Saturday morning. It’s Sunday morning Caroline time. It’s what to cook time. And that branding really tells that message. So yeah, it’s been a lot of lessons of when is it important to spend the money? And also as an entrepreneur, and I’ve now grown from the one to two to three small boys in this house. I have a five-year-old, a three-year-old and a one-year-old.

And so valuing my time as the creator of all of this and knowing when it’s okay to outsource has also been a huge lesson over the past four years, or I guess it’s been three and a half years of What to Cook, but like you said, yeah, four in a couple of months since the beginning of COVID. But knowing when it’s the most important thing for me to actually handle myself as the creator of What to Cook versus, for instance, we write a monthly meal plan that’s hugely popular. A it’s popular with my subscribers. So it’s basically I take all the what to cook recipes. So it could be a recipe from 2020 with a recipe from last week, and I create a week long meal plan that sends out on the first of every month.

And this is a part of our evolution of, okay, now this is a seven figure business. We really need to start providing how can I provide more? I’m like, I’m making so much more money for doing nothing more. How can I provide more? So that was one of those things. They take us a lot of effort. It’s a five-day meal plan, and we basically turn, we’ll overlap ingredients. So if there’s chicken on Monday’s recipe and Thursday’s Cook all the chicken on Monday and then just reuse it in Thursday. So it really gets to this message of what to cook when you don’t feel like cooking. We know cooking is really hard for people. We want to make that easier. And we write a full grocery list.

So I used to write all those myself, and I used to write the grocery lists myself, because I was so afraid of somebody missing an ingredient. And now I’m like, “You know what? My editor has been with me for three years. She knows these recipes just as well as I do.” So she fully writes those, and I was so nervous when I first switched from me writing them to Molly writing them, and guess what? Nobody knows the difference. And now it’s fully Molly’s name, and people are like, “Sweet, thanks, Molly.” People love it.

I was so afraid of losing ownership or something or having people think, “Oh, Caroline didn’t write this, so it’s not valuable.” Well, guess what? They don’t think that I’m not that great. So bringing people into your team and into your fold, bringing people into my team and into my fold, I should say, has been such a huge part of this. Because the more it does become a bit of like, okay, if I hustle harder, I know I can get 1000 more subscribers by the end of the week. And with that hustle comes so much more work. Okay, how are you hustling? You’re creating another meal plan. Because you know people love meal plans, so you’ll get another a hundred subscribers.

You need help so that I can do that. My number one job is being a mom, but I also have a full freaking time job with all of this. So making sure that I can also enjoy my life has been huge and bringing in, I feel like my biggest lesson over the past four years has been assembling the right team to help and knowing that spending more money can make you more money.

Bjork Ostrom: And even if it doesn’t, it’s like a resource exchange. You’re trading it for time or it’s all resources that we have.

Caroline Chambers: Yes. Outsource the things that you don’t enjoy. Because that will mean that you’re able to be really creative and great at other parts that you do enjoy.

Bjork Ostrom: The other piece that I think is important that you pointed out is figuring out the pieces that you can outsource that don’t matter as much if you’re not touching those, or if you’re not a part of those. And you have self-deprecating and like, “Oh, who cares if it’s me or not doing it.” There are some things that people would really care if it’s you doing it or not, and it’s like preserving those. But do people care if you’re the one who figures out how to update their email address if they change emails? No.

Caroline Chambers: Great example.

Bjork Ostrom: And there’s 100 different things like that that we do as entrepreneurs every day that we can figure out slowly over time, as our finance resources increase, how do we get those least impactful things passed off to somebody else?

Caroline Chambers: Off our plate? Yes. The things that are bringing down our joy. And then I’m sitting there at the kitchen table, instead of hanging out chatting with my three boys, I’m like, “Oh, I’m so sorry, you haven’t received your email in three weeks. Let me stress that.” I had so funny you bring that example up, because I had a meeting with my… I now have a great team at Substack who are there to support me and help me grow because the more I grow, the more they grow. And they scrub into my data and help me make decisions. And I was like, “You guys, it’s killing me.” They basically changed their app, and so now more email issues happen. I was like, “Yo, the app issue is killing me. I get emails 10 a week, that’s like Caroline, I haven’t gotten my email in two weeks, and I’m having to respond to those individually.” And they’re like, Caroline, that’s why you’re on Substack. That’s why you’re not hosting on carolinechambers.com. Just forward the support team. The email, I was like, what?

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, awesome.

Caroline Chambers: What? So yeah, I mean, I will say if anybody out there has been considering a Substack, the support within Substack from a technical standpoint has been so incredible, but also from a, “Hey, I’m thinking about changing this or adding a podcast or doing this,” and they can really look into your data and they’ve got a lot of smart people there thinking about it. And then also the community aspect of Substack. When I first joined, this was not the case. You very much had your own newsletter. It was just hosted on Substack.

Bjork Ostrom: Siloed.

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, siloed. Now it’s really like when you sign up for one Substack, they give you a list of 10 others that you might, that you can click and say, okay, I’ll join. And I think my latest growth was like 40% of my new subscribers are coming from within this Substack ecosystem. So every now and then I’ll go, oh God, okay. It sucks that substack is taking 10% what their cut is. They take 10% of all of your earnings or whatever. Oh, that sucks. Maybe I should build my own thing, or do I switch to member full, which is Patreons. I thought the Patreon had crumbled and was only Memberful, but I’m wrong.

Memberful kind of lives on your site. It’s hosted by Patreon, but it just looks, it’s like white listed, kind of branded as your own. Do I switch to that? I think they’d have a lower cut, and then I’m like, “No, look at this subscriber growth just from within this system.Emma Lovewell’s podcast or Elizabeth Gilbert’s podcast or Emily Oster who’s a parenting person. She was on Substack and recommended me, and I got like 30,000 new subscribers through her. So yeah, it’s a cool program.

Bjork Ostrom: Is there a way to, do you have a rough estimate of like, Hey, if I get a thousand subscribers, here’s how many of those We’re talking to David Lebovitz on the podcast, and I think, I don’t remember if he should specifically, but he just talked about that as a platform and how great it is. But it’s one of the great things that’s different than the world of search optimization and getting traffic or even cookbook sales. It’s kind of hard to know. With this, it feels like you might have an idea of, if I can bring in 1000 free subscribers, my guess is 2% of those 5% of those on the landing page, they say one to 2% is a good conversion rate. Do you have something kind of in a rough number that you think about?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah. Well, I can tell you exactly what my numbers are. As of two minutes ago, I have 150,000 overall, and then of that 19,500 are paid. So what’s that percentage? Yes. So here’s one of my issues, and this is actually a role. This is a good therapy. This is a role that I need to fill. I am really bad at digging into my data and with my book tour coming up, my team’s like, “Hey, Caroline, where are your Instagram subscribers based?” And I was like, “How do I find that out?” “Where are your subscribers base?” “How do I find that out?” All of this data does exist. And yeah, basically I take any opportunity I can to get more free subscribers and to provide my free subscribers with really cool valuable content that not only shows them what to cook is, but who I am as a person.

Because I do think that I am a person who on Instagram, who my Instagram is Carol Chambers and I’m not just talking about food all the time. When I first started in 2020 trying to become a food creator, I was only talking about food. And thus my job was really hard and I was constantly like, what can I cook next? What can I share next? How can I create content? And one of I was like, God, Mattis… My then one-year-old, I was like, “Mattis is always in the background. I’ve got to get him down for a nap and then I can do my work.” And one of my friends was like, don’t you think that people wouldn’t mind seeing your one-year-old with you and hearing what he eats for lunch and how you create these meals and how you feed it to him?

And I was like, “Nobody cares about me being a mom. Nobody cares about that.” And she was like, “I would give it a shot.” This is my friend Alyssa. She was like, “I would give it a shot.” You’re not going to have a babysitter for the next several months. If you want to be able to create content easily, he’s going to need to be in the background sometimes and people need to know you’re a mom. And so I started, now I think my Instagram bio is food and motherhood or something because I talk about motherhood and my favorite romance books and my favorite Amazon sweatshirts just as much as I talk about food. But food will always be kind of at the center of what I do. So I take any opportunity I can to convert people to become unpaid subscribers, whether it’s, “Hey, I’ve got this, I’m interviewing Bjork on the podcast next week he’ll be on mine. Come on. You have to be a subscriber to listen whatever.”

And then once I’ve got them in my system, just finding a way to convert them. It’s funny on salad days, so I do a paywall, unpaid subscribers get every single recipe. There’s just a paywall before the directions start and salad days and pasta days are my highest conversions.

Bjork Ostrom: The winners.

Caroline Chambers: Those are my convertor days.

Bjork Ostrom: You do know some of the data, you do know some of the data.

Caroline Chambers: I do know some of the data, but I definitely, that’s one of the places that I’m like, actually, I could probably have some wins if I understood all this a little bit better.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s super insightful from your friend. I think of in the world of content creation, there’s so many different angles you can take with it, but Gary Vaynerchuk, viral for some people, but he has this phrase that I really appreciate where he talks about, “Document don’t create.” And I think it’s such a great perspective shift on how to approach the creation process, which is you’re documenting, you’re not going into the lab and getting everything perfect, but it’s like how do you best document what’s currently happening? And I think that it’s not the only way, but it’s definitely one way, especially for people who are time constrained to create really compelling content because then you don’t have to create a perfect environment. The environment is the thing that makes for good content and-

Caroline Chambers: I’ve never heard that quote from Ol Gary, but I would say that’s the exact shift that I had when I started to see my numbers really tick up was less sharing a perfect walkthrough of a perfect recipe, more sharing like I’m walking down to the chicken coop to get some eggs. Oh my god, Mattis just wiped out in the pile of chicken poop. And okay, now we’re digging an outside bad. Like the funny parts of everyday life that we all have on our journey to cook meals for our family. We all are living… Whether or not you have kids, all of our lives are just a little bit of a S-H-I-T show. And so actually sharing that as opposed to this perfect pristine, finished, polished thing is when I really started to notice my community becoming a community versus just a bunch of followers. I’ve got people because they’re like…

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s story too. I feel like that’s what you’re doing is your storytelling, which is such a compelling part of why people want to follow. We could talk for hours, Caroline, and my guess is people would be able to figure out where to follow you online, but can you do a quick shout out for where people can follow you? And your cookbook is going to be coming out soon. You can maybe pre-order that you talked about going through the process of this cookbook. So do a shout-out for that. We’ll link to it. And where can people pick that up as well?

Caroline Chambers: Yeah, so the cookbook, yeah, basically after a couple of years of having the Substack, I got a call from a really cool publishing house called Union Square that’s owned by Barnes and Noble. And so they just have, they’re really interesting. They just published Dan Pelosi’s book if anybody’s familiar with him Grossi Pelosi and a lot of really cool people. And so they basically contacted me and we’re like, listen, if you’ve ever written a cookbook proposal, you know it’s a frickin slog. They have to be 50 pages long example chapters, example recipes, blah, blah, blah. This editor, Amanda Englander came to me and was like, your Substack is awesome. It is your proposal. Here’s an amount of money that I’ll offer you for a cookbook deal. And I was like, “Sweet.” And my agent was like, “Do you want to shop it around?” And I was like, “I sure don’t. Don’t want to write a proposal. I’ll take it.” So the cool thing is what started as I wanted to write a cookbook, couldn’t get a deal. So I did just upside

Bjork Ostrom: You’d Substack to like-

Caroline Chambers: Then circled me back at getting a cookbook deal.

Bjork Ostrom: Actually, some publishers, I’ll be okay with some publishers.

Caroline Chambers: Actually. Yeah, yeah. Not F all publishers, only some. It was funny, when I first announced that I was writing a book, I was like, are people going to be like, “Caroline, I thought we were anti-publisher.” And everyone was like, “What? You go girl. Like, no.” If anything, people were like, “This is hysterical that you started this being like, screw all these publishers who wouldn’t give me a cookbook deal you got.” So anyway, What to Cook When You Don’t Feel Like Cooking? The book comes out August. You can pre-order it now anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble independent bookstore, and I’ll be doing a book tour 12, 13 cities. So check out, look out for that. You can find more information on @CaroChambers for Instagram. Whattocook.substack.com is my Substack newsletter. carolinechambers.com is my super crappy website, that may be by the time-

Bjork Ostrom: Which you don’t have a login for.

Caroline Chambers: Don’t even know the login for. So just say a prayer and hope it delivers you some sort of meaningful information. I am finally working on redoing that website. Everybody will be pleased here, but it will not have recipes on it. I’m completely removing recipes. That would be a whole other conversation about the decision to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: And the basic idea is it’ll be representative of you and where people can find you, but not the bulk of the information that you’re publishing, which would be on Instagram and Substack.

Caroline Chambers: Pinch of Yum is so I just keep using you as an example obviously, or Lindsay as an example, is a food blog. You go to her for food blog, but I realized I have this, carolinechambers.com is, it has recipes on it, but it also has, it’s like, what is this? And I’m not a food blogger, so sadly all of those recipes I’ve ever put up there going away. So if you love them, print them out. So yeah, carolinechambers.com and come see me on book tour and buy a book and that’s where I can get to meet you in person.

Bjork Ostrom: And people can follow on social. The book tour is, city’s not announced yet, where there’ll be or?

Caroline Chambers: Cities are not announced yet, but probably by the time this comes out, they will be. I’ll be in New York, Chicago, Boston, all over the south, SF, come see me and you can find it all on my website or on @CaroChambers. Or on the Substack, you can find it everywhere. All the information can be found everywhere.

Bjork Ostrom: Like and follow.

Caroline Chambers: Like and follow. Subscribe for more.

Bjork Ostrom: And you’ll find it. Yeah. Caroline, super fun to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on.

Caroline Chambers: So fun to chat with you. Thank you for having me.

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