371: Becoming Full-Time Entrepreneurs and Growing Multiple Businesses with Bjork & Lindsay on the Simple Pin Podcast

Bjork Ostrom: This podcast is sponsored by Clariti. That is C-L-A-R-I-T-I dot com, and Clarity is really the hub for you if you are a blogger or a publisher, if you have a website. It’s really the hub for you, the place for you that allows you to better organize your portfolio of content, and it’s all in one place. So maybe you’ve been manually keeping track of your blog post in a spreadsheet or a project management tool or maybe you’re not sure if the optimizations you’re making, so you make changes, but you’re not sure if those are actually moving the needle or, potentially, I know this is true for us in our team, you’re spending hours manually organizing what to update or keeping track of it in this massive spreadsheet, and it’s just overwhelming or maybe you’re just too overwhelmed to start.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s why we built Clariti. We wanted to have a tool that brought all of the most important things about publishing and blogging into one place. Right now, that includes WordPress data, Google Analytics data, and Google search console data. What we do is we bring that data in and we centralize it so you can look at a specific piece of content and you can see all of the different components, traffic, you can see information about keywords, and then you can see the information about that post itself.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s really two areas of Clariti. There’s the ability to filter and understand your content. We call that area Explore. So it’s a place for you to look holistically at your content and say, “What does it look like?” You can easily slice and dice and get a better understanding of it, and from there, you can create projects to improve your content.

Bjork Ostrom: Sometimes people say, “What do I do when I get in? What is the first thing that I should focus on?” It’s a really powerful tool, but sometimes it’s helpful to give some simple examples. I have actually five here, and I’ll talk through each one of these, and for anybody who does sign up for Clariti, you can try these out as your first ways to filter and create projects.

Bjork Ostrom: So number one, inbound links, meaning, are you having links to new pieces of content that you’re publishing from other old pieces of content? This is an area for Pinch of Yum that we could improve on. We just published a bunch of really awesome how-to articles, and we need to go through old posts that reference those or that could reference those and include links that point to that new piece of content because right now, we’re not linking to that new piece of content anywhere, and Clariti surfaces, really quickly surfaces any pieces of content that don’t have inbound links from other places.

Bjork Ostrom: Number two, broken links. So sometimes we publish a piece of content and five years pass, and there’s a link within that piece of content that’s now broken. It could be an internal link on your own site pointing somewhere that maybe you’ve changed the URL or removed a post or it could be somewhere else. It could be an external link. You can easily look through broken links within Clariti and create projects to fix those up.

Bjork Ostrom: Number three, labeling your content. Now, within WordPress, you can create a category, and categories are usually going to be public places within your site that somebody can go and look through the different pieces of content in that category, but sometimes it’s helpful internally to label content. An example for Pinch of Yum is we’re labeling every piece of content that has a step-by-step tutorials in it. You could also label sponsor content versus editorial content. So you could quickly go back and see, “Great. In this last year, how many pieces of sponsored content did I do or how many sponsored content articles do I have in general?”

Bjork Ostrom: Number four, find a post that has missing meta description. So the meta description is an important piece to include because it’s a suggestion to Google for what they should show or what it should show when somebody searches for a keyword and it shows a result. Now, Google doesn’t always show that meta description, but it’s best practice to fill that out, and sometimes we forget to do that. So you can look through all of your content and see any pieces of content that are missing, a meta description.

Bjork Ostrom: Number five, find any content that has more than one H1. H1 is a header, and best practice for H1s is you generally just want one of those, but sometimes we forget about that. We’re editing a project or editing a post, and we add an H1 and, technically, it should be an H2 or an H3. So with Clariti, you can quickly filter to see and say, “Hey, show me anything that has more than one like two plus H1s,” and you can create a project to say, “Go into these pieces of content and change those H1s to H2s or H3s.”

Bjork Ostrom: So those are just five examples of ways that you can quickly use Clariti and see value from it. If you’re interested in signing up and becoming a user, Clariti is offering podcast listeners 50% off their first month by going to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I dot com slash food to receive 50% off your first month of Clarity. Thank you to the Clariti team for sponsoring this podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Hey there. It’s Bjork. You’re listening to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast, and also today listening to the Simple Pin Media Podcast because we’re going to be sharing an interview that we did with Kate Ahl from Simple Pin Media. She has a podcast called the Simple Pin Podcast, all about Pinterest, and she talks to us about what it’s like to do what we do and a little bit of our story and background.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ll occasionally do other podcast interviews, but we won’t always share them here on our feed, but we felt like this was one that might be worth sharing because there might be some takeaways. Lindsay’s on the interview as well, and she shares some of her perspective as a creator, and we talk about the story of Pinch of Yum and Food Blogger Pro and TinyBit, which is the parent company over some of the other companies that we have, and just a little bit of background on that.

Bjork Ostrom: For you as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as somebody who’s looking to build things, my hope is that there’s maybe some little tidbits, some information that you would consider, a takeaway or something that would be applicable to the decisions that you’re making in your life as it relates to building a business and creating and working on the things that you want to work on.

Bjork Ostrom: So hope you enjoy the interview. It was nice to be on the other side of the mic, so to speak, where we’re answering questions instead of asking them. It was also really fun to have Lindsay as a part of the conversation as well. So let’s go ahead and jump into this interview. I will pass it over to Kate, and Lindsay will be joining us as well. Let’s jump in.

Kate Ahl: Bjork and Lindsay, thanks for coming on the Simple Pin Podcast.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Super excited to be here.

Lindsay Ostrom: Thanks for having us.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. I’m so excited to hear stories. So as we dive in, Lindsay, I’m going to have you start with what you do and what your business is centered upon, and then, Bjork, you tell me about all the businesses that you run as well. So Lindsay, you go first.

Lindsay Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. So what I do on the internet is I have a website called Pinch of Yum. Obviously, both Bjork and I do it together, but that’s where I’m stationed at this point in time in looking at all of our businesses. I’m pretty exclusively Pinch of Yum. So Pinch of Yum is a recipe website, started as a, I guess you could call it a food blog. I feel like we’ve moved away from that within the industry of the idea of blogging and more to a website, a database of recipes, a place people can go to find recipe inspiration. My role at this point is primarily the content director, I guess you could call it, but I’m creating the content. I’m approving the content. I’m setting the direction for all of the content, which is mostly recipes that ends up on Pinch of Yum.

Kate Ahl: I love that. I heard a recent name for it, contentpreneur, so a third contentpreneur.

Lindsay Ostrom: Oh, yeah. I love that. Yeah, I’ve never heard that before.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. I just heard it recently too and I was like, “That’s such a better name than blogger or food blogger.

Lindsay Ostrom: Yes. Totally.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Totally.

Lindsay Ostrom: I was like, “Contentpreneur really sums up this person who’s really driven by content creation.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Lindsay Ostrom: Yeah. So love it. Bjork, tell me about what you work on.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. So Pinch of Yum is a company within a parent company that we call TinyBit, and there’s six small companies that are part of TinyBit, each one of those has a GM, general manager, who runs those. So my role is making sure that all the GMs have what they need, that we have an idea of, generally speaking, where the businesses are going, and a lot of the boring behind-the-scenes stuff that’s happening. So making sure that all of the back office needs are tight and running, the ships are running in time and whatnot. So I oversee TinyBit, and then TinyBit has these other companies that other people are seeing the day-to-day of those companies. So that’s my role and that’s changed over the last few years.

Kate Ahl: Wow. Okay. I’m excited to unpack that, but first, let’s go back to the very beginning at when did the idea sprout for a Pinch of Yum to be born?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Lindsay, you want to talk about that?

Lindsay Ostrom: Yeah. I’m trying to remember a specific moment. We always tell the story about for the origins of Pinch of Yum being that I used to just … After Bjork and I got married, I used to just post any recipes I was trying on Facebook, which was the only main social media thing at the time because that was how many years ago? 12, 13? We just said this the other day. We were like, “Oh, my gosh! How long have we been married?

Kate Ahl: Yeah. What year was it?

Lindsay Ostrom: 15, 14 years? That was 2011. Can you help me, Bjork? 2011?

Bjork Ostrom: It was April 2010 when Pinch of Yum first started. Yeah.

Lindsay Ostrom: 2010, eh, 12 years, okay. Yeah. So anyways, at the time, would’ve been even before that, and I was just loving to make recipes, loving making recipes, loving talking to people about the recipes. At the time, I would just go on Facebook and post about it, and Bjork and I got to talking one night and he was like … I think you said something, Bjork, like, “Well, you should start a blog,” and I was just totally, just totally rejected the idea like, “This is such a bad idea. I don’t know anything.” In my head like, “In order to start a website or just start a blog, you needed to be someone. You needed to have a special expertise. I would need to be a professionally trained chef or something,” but come to find out, actually, anybody can have a website and you don’t have to be of any special. You don’t have to have some special certification in order to share what you’re making on a website.

Lindsay Ostrom: So that’s the origins of it, how it started. I feel like it just started with me posting to my friends and family the recipes I was making on social media and then feeling like, “You know what? I’m going to drive everyone away if I keep talking about this on my personal Facebook page, so maybe we need a dedicated place for this.”

Kate Ahl: So after you rejected that idea of that’s not going to be the plan, what actually made you think, “Okay. Yeah, I am going to maybe drive my friends and family away. Now, I can do it”? What was that, I guess, moment where you’re like, “Okay. Maybe that is a good idea”?

Lindsay Ostrom: I think Bjork, and you can help me if you have a more clear memory of any of this, but I think for me with having Bjork’s interest in the internet and online business and all that stuff and just websites in general, once it got in front of my fingertips at a keyboard and I actually started to play around with what that felt like, I think for me I realized, “Oh, this is what that means, and I actually really enjoy a lot of the aspects of this.” I enjoy the writing. I enjoy, eventually once I learned it, the photography and all of the pieces started to, I don’t know, started to gain momentum and feel like, actually, it wasn’t this far away thing that just other people did, but I actually started to get a taste of what it felt like to produce content on a blog, and it was fun, and I really enjoyed it.

Lindsay Ostrom: I feel like I liked playing the game of it, of yesterday I had 10 visitors to the site, and then I did a shrimp recipe, my super popular shrimp recipe, that had 20 people to the site, when the numbers are so small in the beginning, but it’s so fun, and all of that just was really a motivator for me, I think, once we actually got the site, the bones of the site. It actually started on Tumblr, which is funny now, and maybe in hindsight maybe should not have done that, but it was a fun place to start and play. I feel like it was a good, maybe playground is the right term, a good little playground for me to just get my feet wet with online content creation. Anything you would add to that, Bjork?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think one of the things that’s when we rewind the tape and look at our story, and I think this could be applied, broadly speaking, to anybody who’s listening to this and trying to understand their story within the context of other people’s stories. I think a lot of times when we as creators or entrepreneurs look back at our story, I can see myself framing it up almost as advice like, “Here’s how we went about doing it, and this led to this, led to this.”

Bjork Ostrom: I think what’s important to point out, and Lindsay alluded to this, is a lot of times you end up where you are because of a lot of hard work, a lot of hustle. All of that was a component of it, but in regards to Lindsay and I working together and building a thing, a lot of it worked out because it was Lindsay’s interests and my interests, content writing, photography, recipe development, my interest in business, business mechanics, so revenue, ad optimization, affiliate, SEO, some of those things, and just naturally we had these areas that complimented each other, and it wasn’t strategic, and it wasn’t like we set out with this master plan to build a site with a big following. It just ended up that we were lucky enough to have these complementary areas of interest.

Bjork Ostrom: When you look back on it it’s like, “Well, that makes sense.” Lindsay was really good at this stuff. I was really interested in this stuff, and then we focused both of those interests on a singular point, which was Pinch of Yum, and the result of that was with 12 years of showing up every day and working on it that you get to a certain point.

Bjork Ostrom: The reason I say that is I think it’s important for people who are listening to keep in mind, be aware of what is that for you, what is the thing that feels like gameplay that allows you to show up to work. It doesn’t mean that it doesn’t feel like work. It’s still hard and you still have to grind to a certain level in work maybe when you don’t want to, but I think it’s important to point out just, I guess, a point of consideration when you hear other people telling their story and then you understand your story within the context of that.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. I can appreciate that too because when we hear a story condensed into 35 minutes or 40 minutes or even, it’s like watching a cooking show, right? You’re watching people do Chopped or whatever, and you’re like, “I can totally make this amazing meal in 35 minutes.” It’s like, “Well, there’s a little bit more to it.”

Kate Ahl: Also your point of working together with complementary strengths is huge because a lot of people, I couldn’t work with my spouse. I think we have a lot of complimentary things that go together, but working on a particular business wouldn’t be something we would lean into. I don’t know if that would strengthen our marriage, but it sounds like it did for you both. One of the things I’m curious about is as you’re starting this, how are you making money? What is the daytime work that you’re doing during this time to fuel, I guess, this passion in the beginning?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I was working at a nonprofit, and Lindsay was a teacher, and I think one of the things that was really nice about that season of our life is we didn’t have, and we didn’t have kids at that time and so … I was just talking the other day with a friend who just bought a house, and this housing market is crazy, and I was reflecting back on the house that Lindsay and I had bought. It was a condo for I think it was $78,000, and our mortgage payment was less than $500. It was just a season of our life where we just didn’t have a lot in regards to expenses. We were coming out of college, and so you still had this college mindset.

Bjork Ostrom: So we had these jobs that we loved. We weren’t consultants or working at these jobs where you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars. So we didn’t really have lifestyle inflation to the point where we had a huge amount of expenses that we had to cover. So that was one of the things that was nice. So as Lindsay was a teacher, as I was at this nonprofit, we were working weekends, nights, over lunch if we had the time, and starting to see income trickling here and there.

Bjork Ostrom: Then as that happened, we were really slow in making the switch to working on the businesses full-time. So it started as we were working full-time and then doing an extra 50% of our time working on the business, Pinch of Yum at that point. Then it switched where maybe we went to three-quarters time for each of us. So there’s one day a week where we had just dedicated to the businesses. We scaled back over these different seasons or blocks of time to make the transition a little bit easier, not possible for everybody right? Not everybody has the ability to have that flexibility, but we were really conservative in making that change, making sure that we had enough history of the business building to a point where we felt like we were comfortable with it sustaining us. Yeah, it was Lindsay as a fourth-grade teacher and me working at a nonprofit that partnered with schools to do retreats and programming for them, and that’s how we got started. That’s what we were doing before all of this.

Kate Ahl: So when was that point? You mentioned you’re a conservative and waiting into the waters with really going full-time. When was the point that you went full-time with it, and was there a little bit of apprehension that went along with it, like this worry of, “Okay. We’ve seen these things. Is it going to work?” and what year was that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Was it 2014, Lind? So the summer of 2014 that we went-

Kate Ahl: Yeah, that sounds right. Yeah, 2014.

Bjork Ostrom: So I think at that point, the combination of us having there wasn’t a ton of risk because of where we were at from a spending perspective. We didn’t have a bunch of expenses that we had to cover. We had expenses, for sure, but it would be much different today if we were making that change out of a full-time job into an entrepreneurial career just because things look different. We have two kids, and we have a house that’s bigger and just more expenses. So I wouldn’t say it was super unnerving at the time.

Bjork Ostrom: The other part was we had had enough history to see, “Okay. We’ve been doing this, the blog, working really hard on it for four years,” and at that point we had launched the membership site for food creators called Food Blogger Pro that had started to … There was increased interest in members who were signing up for that. So we had enough history at that point, but I think there was not as much an angst around it. I think we also felt confident that if we needed to, we could go back, Lindsay could teach, and I could go back to the nonprofit I was at or another job. We had skills, I think, that were transferable. So we’ve got this really through as well.

Kate Ahl: Had a little bit of a safety net, for sure, to go back.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, for sure.

Kate Ahl: So Lindsay, as you are growing the food blog and really leaning into Pinch of Yum, what would you say that, going from a teacher into this new profession, what were some of the things that you were learning during that time about the industry or about what you loved or didn’t love? Is there any takeaways about I guess things that you would say to somebody else who’s just learning, how to be a food contentpreneur that you would take away from that time when you were learning?

Lindsay Ostrom: I mean, I think one of the things that’s really stuck with me just as a lesson, I guess, a life lesson or a lesson that I’ve learned about myself as it relates to content creation is there was this in-between time what Bjork described as the time when we were starting to scale back our day jobs, but at that point, the blog and the other businesses that we had were also pretty well-established and up and running. So then at that point it’s almost like you have two full-time jobs.

Lindsay Ostrom: I think in that transition period specifically, I specifically think about my last year of teaching. I was in a 0.7 I want to say, a 0.7 position as a reading specialist. So I was going to work every day, but then I also was doing a ton of content for the blog. I think the lesson that I’ve taken with me from that time is that sometimes we, I think, take more time than what is needed to do a task. Even now, I’m doing this full-time and I’m not producing as much content as I was during that time.

Lindsay Ostrom: Now that being said, our content is a little more carefully done now, and we have a different process for it, and we have other people involved. So it’s different. It’s not apples to apples from what it was then, but I would get up in the morning, I would intentionally limit myself. I wouldn’t write any of my posts ahead of time. This is not necessarily advisable. The big picture lesson is on just time squeeze in general and being efficient where you can.

Lindsay Ostrom: For me, one of the ways that I did that was I would save all my writing for the morning, the morning that that post would publish so that there was a little bit of pressure, just creating that pressure for myself like, “I don’t have to be into school until 9:00. So I’m going to get up at 6:00 and then write my post from 6:00 to 7:00,” because, really, all I needed to write it was an hour. So then I would write it from 6:00 to 7:00, hit publish, and then go to school for the day, and then do whatever else I needed to do in the evening.

Lindsay Ostrom: I think it’s just something that I reflect on a lot now, now that I’m not working a different job, I’m only working this job and trying to think about I think there’s a craftiness, a forced cleverness about your schedule and about your pacing that comes when you are walking with one foot in both sides. So I think for anybody that’s feeling that and feeling that it’s stressful, for sure, and that was the right decision for me to just go one direction eventually, but I think there’s a lesson there to be taken and there are ways that we operate that can also still serve us well even once we leave our jobs and go into content creation full-time.

Lindsay Ostrom: Especially as people who consider themselves creatives in some form, I feel like there’s a big risk to just if you don’t have that pressure to just take your time a little bit more, to take it easy and so-

Kate Ahl: Yeah, procrastinate.

Lindsay Ostrom: Exactly, yes, and like, “I’m just thinking about ideas right now,” but when you have that, when you have that tension, when you’re backed up against a wall a little bit, it’s incredible how much you can, if you really have your heart set on something, how much you can produce and create. I think that’s just something I reflect a lot. I feel like I learned that in that season, and it’s something that I still think about a lot now.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. I took that Kolbe test, Kolbe A Index Text a long time ago, and it talked about people who are quick starts needing that pressure at the end. I’m not a quick start. That pressure actually kills all creativity for me, but I think that’s so important with what you said is you knew, “Okay. I’m going to wait till the day of I have this hour here, squeeze it in, and then I can work on other stuff and then come back to it,” but that produced that creativity for you. I think that’s so important for contentpreneurs to really lean into that because I’m the person who wants to write it two weeks ahead of time, and then I can go back to it and look at it. Some people are like, “I want to write it, get everything I can.” It’s like sprinting, “I want to do the 100-yard dash instead of the marathon.”

Lindsay Ostrom: Totally. Yup, and I think everybody, I feel like, I’m glad that you said that about yourself too because I do feel like for everyone it’s different and even for different seasons within your business it’s different. The caliber of content at that time probably wasn’t as good as what it is now when we are scheduling ahead and we are working with the team and I’m not just waking up in the morning and writing a post real quick. So I feel like there’s multiple … Everybody’s going to have their own take on that and the way that that works for them, but that was just something for me during that time that was really meaningful.

Kate Ahl: Talk to me a little bit about hiring your first team member. What was that like and when did you have that moment of, “I need help,” as somebody helping to do another element in this?

Lindsay Ostrom: Bjork, do you remember who was-

Bjork Ostrom: I think ironically it was Angela to do Pinterest.

Lindsay Ostrom: Was it Angela? Oh, that is funny. That’s really funny. Here we are talking about that I didn’t want to do Pinterest.

Kate Ahl: Here we are.

Lindsay Ostrom: So that was my first hire. Seriously, that was when we were like, “Okay. There’s a thing here that’s a big deal for food content creators, and I don’t personally feel that excited to dive into that world.” So yeah, it was my friend Angela, and we just hired her. I don’t even know if we really gave her much direction, but we hired her to set up a Pinch of Yum Pinterest and manage that, very part-time, and yup. My sister, we also hired my sister in the beginning to help with comments and just some community management type stuff.

Lindsay Ostrom: I feel like several of our first hires, “hires”, that were part-time, almost like single task positions that were five hours a week or something like that. That was our very first dip into it. I don’t know, Bjork. Maybe you can talk a little more about what you would consider to be our first official hire.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. I think it depends on how you view hire. There could be a full-time team member or you could look at it as somebody in a contracted role doing something really specific. I think sometimes it can seem intimidating, the idea of hiring somebody, but as maybe a little bit of a pressure release for anybody who hasn’t been through that, I think you can dip your toe in the water by hiring somebody who is a specialist in an area that you really need help with or support with that maybe aren’t as confident in or something you don’t want to focus on.

Bjork Ostrom: An example being, you could hire Simple Pin. That could be a higher. It’s hiring an agency, but it’s still under the umbrella of hiring. In our case, it was hiring for some really specific tasks. I can remember hiring for bookkeeping, Pinterest, hiring for comments. As that starts to happen, it allows you to practice a little bit, “Hey, what is it like to work with somebody or even to ask somebody to do something?” That can be a weird feeling when you first are working with somebody.

Bjork Ostrom: So I think for us that was the step into it, and then eventually, you get to a point where it’d be like, “Man, it would actually be really helpful to have somebody who’s not split across multiple things, but really just dedicated to thinking about how to work on and grow and build this thing,” and that’s where you could start to get into thinking about hiring somebody more in a full-time capacity. I don’t know the exact order. We don’t have employee number three type hires, but I do know-

Lindsay Ostrom: Like Twitter?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Usually, how it would work in the cases of folks that we’ve worked with is we’d hire for a specific role. I think of Jenna, who’s still with us. She’s the GM of Pinch of Yum right now, which means she manages ins and outs day-to-day, originally came in and was in the role of office manager. So we needed somebody to help with all the logistics of the ins and outs of this really cool office space that we had, and also, we were doing events and helping with that, and as we got more comfortable with that, it was a part-time position that grew and grew and it is what it is today, and it’s like, “Wow, that’s awesome for us.”

Bjork Ostrom: I think because we’re a small company, have been able to grow and develop the position and hopefully in a way that also opens up opportunities for whoever it is that we’re working with. So I don’t think it needs to be as scary as some people think it is because you can start slow and try it out and see what that looks like, whether that be with really specific tasks or part-time position that maybe is a catchall to help with the odds and ends that get to be overwhelming.

Kate Ahl: Right, and to wade into those waters. What’s funny is my first hire was actually Pinterest as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Oh, funny.

Lindsay Ostrom: Oh, that’s amazing.

Kate Ahl: It’s so funny to admit, but it was like I was managing for everybody else and I was like, “I need somebody to do my account.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome.

Kate Ahl: So that’s a really easy hire. Okay. So you mentioned after Pinch of Yum starts you wade into the waters of starting this membership. So can you lead me down the path of how you got to the six companies under TinyBit.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Kate Ahl: Maybe even a little bit about why you named it that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So I can speak to that first. One of the things we talk a lot about as a team, and then we have a podcast we talk about on the podcast when we’re writing things like that, is this idea of getting a tiny bit better every day. I think in this world, it can seem really intimidating because there’s so many things that you need to do, there’s an endless list, and it feels like it can just crush you. So we have this idea of 1% infinity, which is getting a tiny bit better every day forever. It’s really about showing up and doing the work and trying to find out ways that you can get better at that work. So that’s the reason for the name TinyBit.

Bjork Ostrom: In terms of the companies, really what it is is keeping an ear to the ground with the community that we have and trying to hear what people need. So from Pinch of Yum, we would talk a lot about the behind-the-scenes of blogging. So once a month for a stretch, I don’t remember if it was four or five, six years, I would come on and say, “Hey, here’s some ways that we’re creating income from the site. Here’s where we’re getting traffic. Here’s what Pinterest traffic look like. Hey, we got a lot of Pinterest traffic this month. Why was that?”

Bjork Ostrom: What happened was we started to get a lot of other contentpreneurs, and a lot of other publishers who were coming and asking questions and curious to see, “Hey, how is somebody else doing it?” or people sharing with us, “Here’s what I learned.” So from that, we started a community called Food Blogger Pro, which is a community of food publishers who are learning how to improve their content, learning how to increase traffic, learning how to monetize, and that really came from hearing questions that people had.

Bjork Ostrom: It gets a little bit boring if I go deep into every other business, but the general idea is continuing to listen and say, “Hey, what are the other things that people are like, ‘Hey, this is a problem that I have,’ or ‘This is something that is a tension point’?” and then seeing, “Is there a way that we can solve for that?”

Bjork Ostrom: I would assume Simple Pin is pretty similar in that you heard enough people saying, “Attention point for me is I know Pinterest is important,” and you even hear it in our story, “I know Pinterest is important, but I don’t have the bandwidth or the interest in spending my time managing and optimizing my account.” Hey, business opportunity, which you’ve taken advantage of and have done such a great job with. So that’s really the story of anytime that we’re looking at starting a business or potentially acquiring a business is looking to say, “Do we feel like there’s a need out here that we could solve in a unique and helpful way?”

Kate Ahl: One of the questions I would have around that that I hear from people, and maybe I even have a little bit of, is that fear of stepping into a new lane. So as I picture what you guys have built, I see these six lanes of traffic, and some people feel overwhelmed by that or they don’t know how to divide their time. You mentioned having a GM oversee each one of those. What would you tell somebody who has this idea, they have the main business, now they have a second idea that has been fueled from the first one, but they’re really scared about diving into a second business? Because there’s all these feelings of, “What if it fails? What if it doesn’t serve people?” How do you both counteract that and say, “We’re just going to …” Well, how do you both, I’m not going to assume, how do you lean into that?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. Yeah. So I think it’s important to know a lot of times something might not work and that’s okay. It’s not uncommon to get an idea to pursue something and for that to not get traction. There’s a concept that is maybe overused, and it’s a little bit older in the startup world, but I think it’s still helpful, this idea of a minimum viable product, but essentially, putting something into the world that you feel like is basic enough to get some feedback on to see if people are actually interested in that thing or if it’s just in your head, you think it’s going to be a good idea. A lot of times that means you’re not spending a lot of time building. You’re spending that early time having conversations and validating the idea. So I’d say that would be a piece of it.

Bjork Ostrom: I think another important piece to think about for anybody who’s in that head space of thinking about the next thing is to be aware of the transition from maker to manager. If you are interested in building, growing, scaling, maybe having multiple businesses that you’re working on, but you also really love being a maker, which I think a lot of people who listen to this podcast probably are makers, it’s something that you should be aware of, and it’s okay to continue to be a maker and be a really good maker and to have impact in that way as opposed to attempting to scale and grow and build a team because it’s a very different skill set, and they’ll feel very different when you’re doing that work.

Bjork Ostrom: A couple years ago, we actually had that conversation, and that’s why when Lindsay comes on she’s like, “I’m a content director. That’s what I focus on. That’s what I do is I’m good at content.” I don’t want to speak for you, Lindsay, and maybe you can speak to this a little bit, but if your role was purely management of a team, producing content, that would be a very different job, and my guess is maybe not as fulfilling.

Lindsay Ostrom: Yeah. I think it’s exactly what you said. I feel like there was this fork on the road and we went this direction and I realized for myself I’m really excited about all these things and want these things to happen and want them to grow, but I don’t like how it feels to do this work as opposed to the other work I was doing, which was a little more hands-on with the creative process. I feel like, yeah, that was a significant, I would say a significant moment.

Lindsay Ostrom: I think of that meeting we had, Bjork, whenever that was, a year. I think I was pregnant with Lena at the time, and yeah, just having this realization of, “Okay. If we’re going to build and structure this way, we’re going to just make the decision that I’m not going to be a part of that because that’s not where I’m happiest. I’m happiest over here doing the thing that I’ve always been doing, yeah, and separating that.”

Bjork Ostrom: I’d be interested in your thoughts on this, Kate, as well, but I feel like one of the things that is important in what we’re doing, and I think we’re continually learning this and always will be, is that sometimes you can get, in this world, you talk to a lot of other entrepreneurs, you talk to business owners, you see other people doing other things, and I think one of the things that can happen as you can start to anchor your decisions based off of where you’d place yourself against other people in terms of growth or whatever it might be, revenue, traffic, Instagram followers, Pinterest traffic, Pinterest followers, team members, all of those visual, tangible, trackable metrics.

Bjork Ostrom: One of the really important metrics that is hard to track that we have the ability, everybody, really, but speaking to entrepreneurs, contentpreneurs, publishers, creators, one of the metrics that I think is important to track is, “How is this thing that I’m building fit within my life? What does that feel like in terms of the work that I’m doing, the satisfaction that I get from it, the alignment that it brings me in my life? Does it make me more stressed or less stressed?” Those are harder to track, but I think also really important.

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s worth calling out because it’s individual. It applies to each person, and nobody’s going to look at what you’re doing and say, “Hey, I can see,” maybe they will, but like, “Hey, I can see that that serves them really well. That thing that they have built serves them really well.” It’s easy for us to say like, “Oh, that thing they built has a bunch of followers,” but it’s a vanity metric if in the end it’s not giving to you in a certain way and/or, and I think this is both, and/or giving to other people in a certain way.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. I think what the disadvantage from maybe even going back to when you started with 2010, ’11 with Tumblr and just Facebook and very limited Twitter is we did have so much more … We had less of this different vantage point that we now have. So we do take these things of what we see as snapshots on Instagram or snapshots of somebody’s Pinterest traffic, and we tend to make those things the whole instead of coming back to this place to say, “Yeah. There are things that can’t be measured.” I love to think of my impact in helping other businesses to release them to do something that they love or something that they want to pursue.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Exactly.

Kate Ahl: I think maker versus manager was such a good call out and you, Lindsay, acknowledging that piece to say, “I just want to be the maker because that’s really what lights me up.” I don’t know if there’s enough conversation around that sometimes because people do feel either they feel like they have to do all the things or there’s in the 12 years too that you have grown this business, your lives have gone through so many different things and the iterations of who you are and having kids.

Kate Ahl: I even heard that yesterday in one of my entrepreneurs’ organization meetings. Somebody was saying, “I’ve had this company for so many years and I’m now a different person and I’m going into a different phase, but I want to get back to the maker phase. I love that thing, but I’ve become so manager entangled.” That is just, I think, a really interesting topic as people have these businesses that go longer than three, four years because there are all those people that burn out with trying to be maker and manager overall.

Kate Ahl: When we think of a legacy business we go, “Yeah. That is a really important question to ask is, ‘Do I want to be doing this the rest of my life?’” It’s also different because our parents didn’t ever ask that question around an online business. So they don’t even know what that looks like. They’re like, “Well, you just worked this job for 40 years and that’s what you did,” and we’re like, “Yeah, it’s a little different now.” So it’s good.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think it’s a wonderful thing to be able to question and also a difficult thing. I think there’s some simplicity in saying, “This is what I do. I show up, I do it, and I know that I’m going to do it for a long period of time.” We have this wonderful gift of being able to say, “There’s actually a lot of opportunities that I have in front of me. I can build around that,” even if it’s not online business, but maybe you want to put together.

Bjork Ostrom: I was interviewing somebody on our podcast yesterday and he said, “I made this decision for a month. This temp job I had was stressing me out, and so I was going to deliver Instacart.” That’s an option that we have now. If the job that you have is stressing you out, in a week, you could potentially be shifting to another thing that is entrepreneurial, it allows for autonomy, flexibility. We have all of these options, which I think is just this wonderful, incredible thing. Also, potentially creates a little bit of analysis paralysis of like, “There’s so many options. What do I do?” but yeah, it’s a new set of circumstances that are before us that create a new set of questions that we ask ourselves.

Kate Ahl: Right. Okay. So here’s a few questions I like to ask everybody who’s gone through the story series with me. Number one, what has surprised you most about being entrepreneurs? Lindsay, I’ll start with you.

Lindsay Ostrom: Whoa. Okay. I’ll get my brain thinking fast.

Bjork Ostrom: I have one. If you want me to go to give you some time.

Lindsay Ostrom: Sure. Yeah, yeah. So I won’t actually listen to what you say. I’ll just be sitting here thinking.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s like ordering at a restaurant where somebody’s like, “Yeah, we’re ready,” and then you realized one person’s not.

Lindsay Ostrom: I know. I am the slow orderer. I know.

Bjork Ostrom: I think for me, I think I came to realize you have to be comfortable with always having open loops. You’re never going to be able to get to a point where everything is closed and you have everything buttoned up. Once you have that, something else will open, something will change, something will evolve. So I think there has to be a certain comfort level with things always changing and being different, and you’ll never get there.

Bjork Ostrom: I think at one point in my life I would’ve maybe thought, “Hey, you get to a point, and that point is maybe this point of resolution where things resolve and feel better and you’re not struggling through something or wrestling with a big question,” and that just doesn’t happen. It’s always there. It’s always changing. There’ll always be something before you that will be a challenge and difficult. Also, there’ll be seasons where those loops do close and maybe you have a stretch where it feels like, “Great. One, two, three, these things that I’ve been working on, that I’ve been pushing hard for for a really long time have all come together and resolved,” and that can feel really good.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s that balance of, really, … I heard somebody described being an entrepreneur and I feel like this speaks to this a little bit as each day, if there’s four days that you look at an entrepreneur, each day for three days you take one step back, and then on the fourth day you take four steps forward. So on any given day, it can potentially feel like you’re going backwards, but when you look at it at a macro level, you’re actually making progress.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s what I’m speaking to a little bit is there’s always these challenges and then you’ll have these unlocks that move you forward. I think in pre-entrepreneurial seasons of my life, I would’ve thought it would’ve felt more like every day sequentially is a step forward, but I don’t think that’s always true. So that’s my rambling answer to give you some time, Lind.

Lindsay Ostrom: Oh, thank you. Thanks for the rambles.

Kate Ahl: Love it.

Lindsay Ostrom: Appreciate it. So you touched on this. This is two things, but it just I would second the first part of what you said for myself, which was you vaguely mentioned, Bjork, about everything’s always changing and the industry, and I think this is true of any industry. For us in the food slash internet content, whatever, industry, I think when we started doing this, it’s like you expect that you’re going to master a skill and then you’ll be good to go. You master your skill, you build your system, you build your business, and then you just go. I think that’s only true to a certain extent because of how much things change right now, always, but especially, it changes a lot right now with the internet and various social media platforms, and how people consume information, and how money is made through that, and all of that, it just feels like it’s always shifting.

Lindsay Ostrom: So you always have to be learning. You always have to be ready to be flexible, to adapt, and you can’t just, at least I feel in our space, our little sector, you can’t just get something and it’ll be good to go forever. Maybe that’s just true across all businesses too, but the other thing I was going to say is I’m surprised at how difficult it can be to determine what the most important thing is to be working on or what the top priority should be because I feel like a big part of being an entrepreneur is looking at all the things in front of you and building your priority triangle or whatever, what goes on the base, and what’s above that, and what’s on that.

Lindsay Ostrom: I just feel like I’m constantly doing that, and I find it sometimes challenging. I think for some people, it obviously depends on the business, depends on the person. It might be easy if you just know the bottom line is, “Whatever produces revenue and income and, therefore, I’m going to follow those paths and then those become my top priority,” but even if it’s that straightforward, that’s always shifting. To my previous point, there are always things evolving.

Lindsay Ostrom: I feel like a good example of what’s happening right now is you have social media. I’m sure this is your world too with Pinterest, but for example, Instagram. It’s like, “Oh, we worked so hard on these videos,” and you get all these views on this. You have one video go viral and it’s so exciting and it’s so fun and it’s like, “What does that mean for my business?” This was mentioned. One of the two of you said this earlier, but the vanity metrics like, “That feels so good to have that many views. What does that mean? Am I getting more people to my website? Am I making more money from that? How does that play into the business plan and not getting swallowed by all the extra things that feel good?” but maybe aren’t necessarily serving you from a business perspective.

Lindsay Ostrom: So I think that’s one of the surprises that I’ve found is I think I thought it would be a little more straightforward to say, “This is where you need to go and what you need to do,” but it’s not always easy to tell what the most important thing is.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. It’s like a moving target all the time.

Lindsay Ostrom: Yes. Totally, totally.

Kate Ahl: I’ve always said this that anybody who is in the food content creation space, it seems like the hardest job to have, the hardest industry to be in because it is such a moving target with promotion, and then it’s a moving target with SEO and connecting with your audience and getting feedback from them of what they like and what they don’t like. I will forever have admiration for anybody who is a food content creator because I think I would make one recipe and I would be like, “I’m out. I’m done forever.”

Bjork Ostrom: “Too hard.” Yeah.

Kate Ahl: Exactly. It’s so hard, and I think I really because, Lindsay, you and I connected really early on. I want to say it might have been 20 14, 2015 as you guys were really wading into the waters. I think we had a brief phone conversation, but I think that led me into exploring this world of food content creators and going to their conferences. That gave me such a depth of understanding about the business. I think that made my work better because I knew all these spinning parts and plates. To have you say that’s what surprised you and speaking to that moving target piece, I get it. I think it is a really hard thing to lean into, and that’s the feedback that I do get from food content creators is, “Why can’t they stay the same? Why don’t we just do one thing for-”

Lindsay Ostrom: “We just got good at this. Let’s just let it stay.” Yeah.

Kate Ahl: Exactly. Exactly, which makes it so much harder, but I think my next question would be, what has been your greatest joy in all of the businesses that you have been starting and growing and scaling? What just what’s been the greatest joy for your bowl?

Lindsay Ostrom: Yeah, I can go. That’s an easy one for me. I feel like it’s a twofold answer again, but my greatest joy, and I even just get tears in my eyes just thinking about it, but it is such a joy to do, to talk about something I love to talk about and share something that I love with people who also love that thing, and the connections with people. Even though it’s all via the internet, it’s all via social media, emails, comments, whatever, but knowing that I can put something into the world that actually touches people’s real lives is just so fun for me. So that is the first part.

Lindsay Ostrom: Then I would say the second part maybe feels a little more, I guess it’s a little more self-focused, but really, it’s been such a joy for me in having our own thing that I’ve been able to have the flexibility that I’ve had to be with our girls as they’ve grown up and to be able to take time off when I need it. Our three-year-old last fall, she had a heart … We found out that she’s going to need a heart surgery. She was going to need a heart surgery. It was just really scary, and to just know that we have the freedom with our jobs to be able to give ourselves the time we need and to be able to give our team members the time that they need when something like that inevitably happens for something else, I think just ultimately the flexibility of being an entrepreneur.

Lindsay Ostrom: There’s the shadow side of that too, obviously. You’re never working, but you’re always working. You’re in the hospital dealing with something and then payroll has to go out or whatever thing it might be, but ultimately, I really feel like that flexibility has been such a gift.

Kate Ahl: Good gift, for sure. Bjork, what about you?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I think anytime that somebody’s come to us and said, “The things that I’ve learned from what you’ve shared have helped me in my journey to get to this place where I am and I really like where I am,” it’s speaking in generalities, but that happens, and whenever that happens, I think for me it’s the greatest affirmation in that it’s not us doing the work. It’s people doing the work. It’s people being creative, smart, capable, awesome people doing hard things. I think in some ways, I use the idea of the four-minute mile a lot. It’s like us saying to people, “Hey, this is possible,” or interviewing somebody on a podcast who shares what they’ve done, and that becomes inspiration for somebody to say, “I bet I can do this,” and it does become possible for them.

Bjork Ostrom: That conversation that I had on the podcast just the other day was with an individual named Eric, who I’ve known have emailed for years, and now his blog is what is the income that sustains his family, and they’re traveling around the world in an RV and he has four kids. That’s not because of us, it’s because of his incredible work, but to be able to force some point, walk alongside somebody or to share some ideas or insights that help somebody to make that progress or to see what might be possible, that’s really encouraging, and for me, wow, hugely motivating.

Kate Ahl: Right, I love that. To follow up on that, I just want to say this too as well as I’ve … We’ve crossed paths and chatted behind the scenes and all these things over the years is that that is something I take away from both of you, and especially, Bjork, as you and I have had a lot of email conversations of just being so helpful and being willing to lean in, and I think that is such a rare attribute. I hate to say that, but it’s this rare attribute that we see in this online industry, and I think that story and that interview with him illustrates your willingness to go in with people and to say, “I’m here to help.”

Kate Ahl: You’ve asked me that a few times like, “How can I help you?” It’s like you just don’t hear that a lot, and I think with that extension of that, “Hey, if you need a hand up to work through this, I’m here to help you or if you need an introduction or anything like that.” So I just want to just say that that impact, I’ve felt that impact. I’m sure tons of other people have, but I just appreciate that about both of you.

Bjork Ostrom: Oh, thanks. Likewise. Thanks, yeah, and same to you. Appreciate that. A big part of it for you, Kate, is it makes it easy to do when you know somebody’s going to actually do it.

Kate Ahl: Right. True.

Bjork Ostrom: There are times where you have this stress test that you put through, and this has happened occasionally, where if it’s an out of the blue thing, somebody reaches out, I’m like, “Hey, awesome. Great to connect. Here’s a couple things that you could do. Read this, try this, and then circle back around. Before we do a one-hour phone conversation, here’s some places to start. Circle back around and then let me know how that goes.” A lot of times it’s like, “Oh.” You just don’t hear from people after that. Not as fun to do the work.

Kate Ahl: It’s like gatekeeping a little bit.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Exactly, but when there are people who do the work like yourself, and I’m sure you get that a lot too, people reaching out to you, you can get a feel for this is somebody who’s like doing stuff in the world, and it’s exciting and inspiring to surround yourself with those people. So equally as valuable for me to have those conversations and to hear what you’re up to and what you’re thinking about. It’s inspiring.

Kate Ahl: Yeah. Been a cool thing. All right. Last question is if you both had to give one piece of advice or share a resource, book, podcast or whatever that you think could help somebody who is an entrepreneur, what would you tell them?

Bjork Ostrom: I can go. This is something that I’ve never said before, but I feel like somebody’s going to hear this and it’s going to impact them. I don’t know who it is, but whoever it is, I’m speaking to you, but just to be gentle with yourself. I think that, especially entrepreneurs, people who have a lot of drive, people who work really hard, I think we can be hard on ourselves. I think one of the things that is important for us to be reminded of is it’s hard out there. It’s hard to do creative things. It’s hard to be a parent and to work. It’s hard to have a full-time job and to try and fit in a side hustle.

Bjork Ostrom: I think we can be hard on ourselves because I think we see our complete picture, who we are entirely, like warts and all, and then we have an incomplete picture of other people that we oftentimes default to being more generous with how we paint that picture. We don’t see as much of the shadow of other people. So we’re comparing our full story, our full self against somebody else’s highlight reel. I think that can lead to us being potentially pretty hard on ourselves.

Bjork Ostrom: So I would just remind people to be gentle with yourself, and that doesn’t mean don’t work hard or don’t try and be strategic or stretch yourself, but along the way, don’t be too hard on yourself, and I think it’s something that I think a lot of people are really hard on themselves. So that would be my piece of advice.

Kate Ahl: That’s great. Lindsay, what about you?

Lindsay Ostrom: I feel like for me something that has really kept me in this as long as I’ve been in it is … So let me reframe this. So sometimes I think of the difference between people who “make it”, whatever that means, and people who don’t, decide to leave what they’re doing or go a different direction. One of the things that we can say about every single person that makes it, again, in whatever, however you want to define that, is that they keep going. They didn’t stop. They’re still showing up. They’re still there doing it. For myself personally, one of the key things that has enabled me to keep going is to be surrounded with people who are supportive and who either have an interest in understanding or actually do understand from their own experience.

Lindsay Ostrom: So some examples would be, obviously, Bjork has been a huge … We do it together, and so there’s downsides of that, there’s like difficulties with that, but there’s also a lot of benefits in that. I feel like he’s able to understand what I’m going through and talk to me, talk me off a ledge a lot of times like, “Oh, don’t …” what he just said like, “Be gentle with yourself,” or whatever, but I also have that with some friends who are also in the space and have developed these friendships at almost where you would have coworkers, where we’re working online, we’re alone a lot of the time, we’re working on our phones and our computers. It’s just so nice to have one, even one other person who you can really be honest with about how you’re feeling or commiserate when the algorithm changes or celebrate when they launch their cookbook or whatever thing it is.

Lindsay Ostrom: So putting a bow on this is that my piece of advice would be surround yourself with people who can support you, and maybe that’s even too generous, surround yourself. You don’t need 100 people around you who understand the industry that you’re working in or the unique struggles of what you’re doing. I think even if you have one person that you feel like you can talk to, that you can go to, that you can send them a text and be like, “I’m super annoyed. This thing just happened. I just got to really nasty comment. It’s really bringing me down and I’m feeling this way and this way,” and you know that they’re going to be receptive to that, for me personally, that’s just been such really a huge lifesaver, and I feel like without that I wouldn’t be doing this anymore because we’re not made to do this stuff alone.

Lindsay Ostrom: I’m guessing a lot of the people who listen to this podcast do their work online and work alone and work on devices. I think adding in that support and that human component and giving yourself that cushion around what you’re doing is that would be my number one piece of advice.

Kate Ahl: Yeah, 100%. I think that, especially coming out of the pandemic and being even more isolated and not having in-person events where you could potentially meet somebody because I know that’s what’s happened for me too, and I’m sure you as well is you go to this event, you connect with somebody and it’s like, “Let’s keep connecting because our conversation is so good.” There is a lot of public feedback that you receive on your website, and it does take a little bit of thick skin to develop, but it’s great to have that person next to you helping you develop the thick skin because you’re totally devastated. Somebody just left a nasty comment, you just need somebody to come alongside you and go, “I’m in this with you. I’m in the trenches.”

Kate Ahl: I love that piece of advice. I think as people are listening to that, be thinking about who those people might be for you, especially over the next year, and especially if you haven’t connected with people in-person or you’ve just started your business, a lot of people became entrepreneurs by default. Some of them in this 2020, 2021, and now, and you just got to find your people. So I appreciate that advice. So thank you so much both of you for just sharing your story, sharing your pieces of wisdom.

Alexa Peduzzi: Hi. Hi. Alexa here from The Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed this episode of the podcast. If you want to go even deeper into learning how to monetize, grow your food blog, your food business, we highly suggest you check out our Food Blogger Pro membership at foodbloggerpro.com/join. It’s there that we share all of our course content about monetizing, photography, video, and everything that food creators need to know in order to move the needle on their business.

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Alexa Peduzzi: Thanks for that awesome testimonial, Tammy, and we just so appreciate learning about your journeys and being able to just be a small part in helping you get to where you want to go. So if you’re interested in becoming a Food Blogger Pro member and getting access to all of the content we currently have for our members, which is a lot, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn a little bit more and get signed up there if you’re interested, but otherwise, we’ll see you here next week on the podcast, and until then, make it a great week.