443: Why David Lebovitz Switched from Blogging to Substack

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Emily Walker: Hey, there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team, and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast, we are welcoming back David Lebovitz. It has been six or seven years since he was last on the podcast, and we have really missed chatting with him. We always love everything that David does. He is just a joy to listen to on the podcast. His sense of humor is unmatched.

This is an awesome interview for really every food creator to listen to because David has been in the food blogging space for a long time. He started out as a pastry chef and started his first food blog back in 1999. He has been around for every new social media platform, algorithm update and trend in the last 25 years and has so much knowledge to share from it. In this interview, David and Bjork chat a lot about David’s recent change from food blogging to writing his newsletter over on Substack.

He shares lots of tips and tricks that he’s learned about Substack and why he loves the platform so much. He also talks a bit about what he misses about blogging and just how he thinks he’s had so much success with his newsletter. In the interview, he mentions that he has been able to quadruple his food blogging income by switching to Substack. He’s definitely a great resource on this topic and you won’t want to miss this episode. Without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: David, welcome to the podcast.

David Lebovitz: Hello. Thanks for inviting me back I’m happy to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s great to have you back. You were last on in 2017. A few things have changed since then, but that’s the name of the game, though is in this world, things are often changing, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today is showing up, being willing to change and evolve. You have lots of different iterations of that over your career.

I mean, we could go way back if you want to include general food as the focus. You started your career as a 16-year-old washing dishes and went on to be involved in restaurants. For those who didn’t catch that first interview years ago, catch us up to speed on your general arc, your story as a creator, as a publisher, and before that, as somebody who was in the world of food.

David Lebovitz: Well, one word you didn’t use was adapt, and I know that you talk about adapting elsewhere. It’s true, whatever you do in life, you really do need to be adapting to what’s going on or adopting. I was a pastry chef for many years, and when I hit 40, I moved to France and I was writing cookbooks. I thought I would take advantage of this thing called the internet and do a blog, which really nobody heard of. This is 1999.

Bjork Ostrom: What was it on? Was it on blogger Blogspot?

David Lebovitz: It was on movable type. Most people, this is when they start blanking out, but it was thrilling to be able to use this media, this medium, I guess I should say, but I had to code everything just to write one sentence, I had to learn how to code. Before I was a baker, I was making chocolate cakes and ice cream and sharing recipes, but I’m also very communicative. I like talking to people. I like learning from people.

Bakers, especially, we like to learn things and we’re social. We’re like antique dealers. We work well when we’re together. We’re this group of people. I thought I would try, I would start a website and a blog, and I didn’t really know what was going to happen, but everybody thought I was crazy, and they were like, “Why are you writing for free? This is bad. You shouldn’t share things and so forth.” I did that for eight years, seven or maybe six years or eight years, then a couple people started reading it.

Bjork Ostrom: After years of hard work.

David Lebovitz: I’m not really exaggerating. People think now, a lot of people come in, start blogging, and they’re like, “How do I get traffic?” It’s like, “Well, okay, build something for eight years, and then…

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s one of the things that people don’t see often, is the incredible hard work that people put into a thing. And part of that too is your story also existed eight to 10 years before that because you were refining your craft and you were learning how to do what you’re doing to then be able to write about it. Then, the writing was a craft that you were refining and figuring out.

It seems like often we look at somebody and we’re like, “Oh my gosh, they’re an overnight success.” Often there’s years of focus and effort and hard work. It sounds like that’s a little bit of what you’re saying too with creating content online. It was years of doing that, and then there was a few people and then more people, and then more people, and suddenly you look and you have an audience.

David Lebovitz: Then, there’s a tech element that people don’t see. You publish this beautiful blog with great recipes and photos with Lindsay, but people don’t realize to get that photo, you’re not just putting the food on the counter. I mean, now it’s much easier to take a good photo than it used to be, but it’s a lot, formatting. People are like, “Oh, you should have a button that keeps the recipe on the screen.” I have no idea how to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: The act of pressing the button is really easy. The act of building a button that does that, it’s like that is really hard. It’s one of the things that I think exists in the world of technology. I think this also applies to social media is technology now is relatively easy to use. It’s relatively easy to publish something to Instagram, to sign up and have a newsletter. It’s not easy, but it’s a lot easier to publish a piece of content on a website.

Therefore, it seems like the building of a following and momentum and having success should also be easy, but that’s actually really hard. That takes years and effort and it’s easier than it was, for sure.

David Lebovitz: Well, there were platforms like Blogger and TypePad where you could just start going, but then if you wanted to do anything interesting, and also you didn’t own the content, it’s the same thing we’re seeing with Instagram. All these people are becoming Instagram stars, I guess, whatever, lack of a better word, recipes and so forth, but you don’t know the platform. Instagram can change their mind or they decide who sees what.

Bjork Ostrom: For people who have been creating long enough, Facebook there’s this really infamous season where people grew these really popular pages, and then it was kind of overnight you’d be looking around and your friend over here would have their organic reach turned off, and then somebody else would have it turned off and you’d just be waiting for it to come for you. Eventually, it was all pages where the generally speaking, organic reach on just normal posts was turned off.

I hear you saying that you have these platforms that creates this ease of publishing. You can grow a following. You still have to be a sharp creator. You have to create really good compelling content, but even then it could be turned off and you have to evolve into the next thing. You’ve done that so many times, and it’s one of the things that I’d be interested to hear your reflections on, your mindset on it.

What we’ve seen is, especially when we first started publishing content 2010, 2011. There was still maybe some of that lingering idea of, “Wait, you’re publishing stuff for free online.” It’s a little bit of a disruption to an industry. Then it happens and now we’re seeing it again in multiple different ways. Search is changing. We have artificial content like AI-generated content that’s being created. There’s all of these different kind of evolutions that are happening.

You have creators in the food world who are TikTok creators, and it’s like, oh, this is very different than creating five, six, seven years ago. For you as a creator, and this was actually a question that somebody wrote in our Facebook group, we have people who follow along with the Facebook group, with a podcast and a Facebook group, and they said, this is Alexandra. She said he’s been writing about French food and life in Paris for such a long time and knows how to adapt to new technology without losing his true message or vision. I’d love to hear him talk about all his evolution.

What does that look like for you to endure through all of these different technological changes and to preserve your passion and vision and authenticity as a creator, which you’ve done, you’ve had as a through line, despite using different technologies?

David Lebovitz: Well, I was going to use the word through line that you just mentioned, which is great. First of all, authenticity, the Internet’s all about authenticity. Even now, we’re seeing all these TikToks and Instagram and people are staying in these fancy hotel rooms in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Are we going to look back on these people and go, “Wow, that was amazing.”

To me, I’ve always been authentic for better or worse. Initially, I actually got criticized a lot when I moved to France. I was new here. I was writing about this culture that a lot of people have this image that everybody in France is beautiful, skinny, they eat well, they’re polite and so forth. That’s not necessarily the case. It’s a real city. People… also, there was a book Why Frenchmen Don’t Get Fat, which is not presenting an accurate view of the people here because everybody’s different.

Now, I always wrote about the real stuff in my life and I didn’t varnish anything. I also tried to make it funny. Nobody was really doing that about France really and Americans are fascinated by France. I had a little bit of a maybe if I was living in Brisbane or Nagoya, Japan, I might not have had the success that I have or had. There was always a straight line and I’m the same on Instagram.

I use things like Instagram and Facebook and my blog and my newsletter, all for different things parts of me. For social media, I don’t really, I remember using Facebook a lot. I had a friend who when Facebook changed their algorithm, his whole website, he had a whole big, huge website and it just collapsed. You should do a little bit of everything, whatever you like, whatever works, but I like to believe that people will see through inauthentic content.

A lot of flashy people doing all this stuff on Instagram, eating in fancy restaurants, showing caviar that costs a thousand dollars. I love this or the waiter shaving truffles in their mouth. It gets a lot of comments, which-

Bjork Ostrom: Happens at all French restaurants. Isn’t that how they do it in France?

David Lebovitz: How do I reserve that table? I still wonder, the number one cookbook last year was by a TikToker, or number one book maybe. I think the number one cookbook, it’s a fellow who does recipes from yesteryear. He’s not a professional. He didn’t even have a website. He was just looking for something to do. I find it very interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Is the same thing that I was going to say. One of the things that I think is true in the world of content creation right now is that you almost have to have hybrid skills. You have to have some skills in the area of content that you’re creating. For us, we talk about food, but for other people it’s humor or finance, but you also have to be really good.

If we’re talking about platforms right now, you also have to be really good at understanding, and this probably has to be one of the primary skills. You have to be really good at understanding the platform itself, what’s working, what goes viral, how to build a following. What can happen is you can have people who are maybe the ultimate expert in a subject matter, but they don’t have a strong expertise in a platform or in viral content or in mass-producing content.

Whatever it might be that’s working well on the respective platforms. What you get is people who are kind of these hybrids, they have some understanding, a passion and interest in the content, but then they’re really good at understanding the platform. That’s neither here nor there, it’s just an observation around the reality of success on some of these platforms.

One of the places it feels like that’s not true, that really what it comes down to is your expertise, your ability to a pure content creation is building a following through a platform like Substack, which that’s something that you’ve done. You have over 200,000 people subscribe to your Substack newsletter. That to me feels like and would be interested in your thoughts on it, but a platform for a writer, for a creator, for somebody who’s word forward.

Who isn’t thinking about viral content the same way, a platform that’s a pretty good fit for creating content. Has that felt true for you? What does your journey into Substack look like?

David Lebovitz: Well, when I was blogging for so long, near the last few years of it, I started getting the feeling search was all about recipes. What are people looking for? All these blogs started and they were all doing the same recipes and viral recipes without a lot of authority in it. People were just doing them because they wanted to get Google search and I just didn’t want to do that.

I was focusing on recipes because they were organic to me. I would feel like, “Oh my god, I got these carrots, the market, I’m going to make pickled carrots or I’m going to do something.” My blog, it started becoming a recipe blog. I remember telling Elise Bauer who had Simply Recipes, wonderful website and while smiling…

Bjork Ostrom: I think also started on movable type, which is such a weird fact that I have in my head.

David Lebovitz: That’s another story. I actually went to their office once. I was like, “Can you make this easier?” I forgot where I was, but so I was doing recipes a lot, and then I said to Elise once, I said, my blog is not a food blog. She looked at me and she’s like, “What?” I was writing about a lot of other topics like restaurants to go to in France, travel tips, maybe something goofy French people’s obsession with keys everywhere. They really… it’s like $300 if you lose your key. I started just doing recipes, churning through recipes. I’m burnt out on it.

Bjork Ostrom: It felt soulless for you to be doing that type of work?

David Lebovitz: It felt soulless. Plus I was using other people’s recipes like adapting them, which isn’t a bad thing in a way, but my blog was also becoming, well, this is adapted from so-and-so’s new book. I really liked the book and I would promote the book and so forth. On the other hand, I was like, “Well, basically when I’m writing a cookbook, if I’m going to use somebody’s, if I have Lindsay, if she has a caramel cake recipe there’s a story about that.

I could say like, “Lindsay has this wonderful caramel cake recipe and I make it. I like to add kumquat sauce and blah, blah, blah.” There’s a story there. It’s organic to me. I got burnt out on recipes because I was getting the same questions over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

Bjork Ostrom: Questions about the recipes, can you adapt this by adding, can you use sugar instead of brown sugar?

David Lebovitz: Well, I actually love when I was baking in restaurants, I loved when people had food issues. This is before everybody had all these diets, but when the waiter come in, go, these people don’t eat sugar or they don’t eat flour. This is before the whole everything. To me, it was interesting. It was a challenge. We had one woman that only ate white food. She showed up wearing this all white outfit and we made her white asparagus with white truffles.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a fun challenge in that season. It was like, “Hey, this is fun.”

David Lebovitz: Then, people started challenging my recipes. Well, they would start bragging about how much sugar they cut out of it. I was like, “I’ve been doing a recipe the last three days here I have six pages of notes. It’s like when I post the recipe, I test it and this is how I like it. Then, people were showing off how little sugar they ate and finally had to post something.

I was like, “Please, stop. If you want to reduce the sugar, it’s fine. I got burnt out and I liked having a blog, but then all of a sudden WordPress is like, ”You need to switch to block editor. That was the breaking point for me.“ Also, the photography like Lightroom, I just never figured it out. It was a mess. I figured out how to use some of it, but I was like, ”This isn’t why I do what I do. It’s not just in front of my computer.”

I remember you helped me once with a issue, it was retina screens. That was one of the nervous breakdown moments, I had a timeline. I had a three-week nervous break, and you guys were amazing. The good thing about the blogging community, people are always helpful. When Substack approached me, they said, “We have this platform and would you like to switch?” I said no.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s another thing to do and another…

David Lebovitz: Well, I didn’t believe in it so much.

Bjork Ostrom: When was this?

David Lebovitz: It was three or four years ago, maybe three years ago. I had a newsletter. I’d had it since I think 2006. That’s another, this would be part two of this podcast video cast. I had my newsletter over the years, and I was also a little upset how much it was costing me to send it out. It was like $400 a month. I don’t mind paying people for a thing. I don’t mind paying for services. I was like, “Well, that’s like a trip to Hawaii.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, every year for me to email people.

David Lebovitz: My newsletter there’s no monetization in it. Although people might buy my books and go to my website. Anyway, I started thinking, I spent a few months thinking about it. They actually said, “We think you could make a lot more money than you’re making now.” I’m not motivated by money, which is I’m reading Barbara Streisand’s thousand page memoir. She’s also, she’s like, “I never do things for the money. I always do things the quality first.” That’s why, I mean, she’s wealthy, she lost a lot of money over the years and so forth.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s also like Simon Sinek talks about it as fuel for your car and your car gets you to where you want to go. Similar with the paying, if you’re paying $500 a month versus making $500 or whatever it might be, makes it easier if you do have something you want to do to justify whatever it is that you’re doing.

David Lebovitz: I have a podcast and I pay an editor $300 or $400 per episode to edit it. There’s no ads. It’s not sponsored or anything, but I’ve always wanted to talk to people and in my field. And maybe chat with people that people wouldn’t know, but it was very interesting. I was very nervous about leaving my blog, shall we because it was a part of me for 18 or so years.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and around the same time, you’d won an award of Blog of the Decade. T was right around that time, wasn’t it?

David Lebovitz: That was Saveur Magazine. I was a professional cook and cookbook author, but I also appreciate the fact blogging, one of the great things about blogging, especially when I started, you had people in India and Vietnam and Syria writing about their cooking and food. It was like, “Wow, this is great. There were no gatekeepers. We could do whatever.” Saveur Magazine was like that. They focused on different kinds of people. It was a little surprising. I felt like they were putting me out to pasture.

Bjork Ostrom: How so?

David Lebovitz: No, it was just when you get a lifetime award.

Bjork Ostrom: I see, like applaud.

David Lebovitz: They’re coming back. What’s interesting about Saveur is one of the old editors, she bought the magazine and she’s bringing it back. She’s self-financing and everything.

Bjork Ostrom: Interesting. Can you talk a little bit about that stretch? Because my guess is there are people who can relate to you as you reflect on what it was like to feel a certain amount of burnout. Maybe there’s some industry changes that are happening. I think on the podcast, I’ll occasionally talk about this idea of waves and surfers.

What happens is with the internet, there are these waves, and sometimes there’ll be a wave of early blogging and people can catch that wave. Maybe they’re also a really good surfer. I feel like in your case, there’s this wave of early blogging where people are following blogs and you’re also really good at it. You have this tandem thing where you’re excited about it, there’s a wave, you catch it, inevitably waves will…

David Lebovitz: Crash.

Bjork Ostrom: Crash and then there’s another wave. The question is, do I want to ride this next wave? Do I think I’ll be good at riding this next wave? Another example would be Instagram. It’s very photo forward. People who are great photographers curated that’s a wave. You have people who ride that wave and they’re really good at riding that wave. They love riding that wave.

Suddenly Instagram’s like, “We’re going to do videos and we’re going to do videos that are short form, reel-based story, and it’s 60 seconds.” Now, suddenly these people who are really good at photography, writing story along with it in a description, having a curated feed, now it switches and you have somebody who’s really good at humor and doing short form content and video, and that’s a wave.

For you, what was that season like as you felt either your desire to ride another wave or a certain wave crashing or subsiding as you analyzed the landscape or the seascape and made decisions around what the next wave was that you wanted to ride? What was that like?

David Lebovitz: Well, one of the waves I let go back out to the ocean was Twitter and X. I was never getting any traffic from it. It wasn’t a place where I used to spend time there. It was more interesting. Then, it’s not necessarily for any political or sociological reasons. I left Twitter X, although I hate the name X.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s all right. We can just call Twitter, we’ll call it Twitter.

David Lebovitz: No, I wasn’t getting anything out of it. I used to like Facebook. I liked the interaction I was getting with people, but Instagram’s a very good example because I was doing fine on Instagram and then they were videos, videos. I was like, “I am not a video person. I can’t, it’s just not my skill set.” I once tried to edit a video and it took me literally eight hours to do.

I just don’t. It’s fine, I make really good desserts. Instagram reached out to me. It was right at the beginning of COVID and they go, we really like you. I was like, “What? Huh?” They helped. They said, “You should do lives.” I was like, “Absolutely not.” Then the pandemic hit, started doing lives every day because my book tour got canceled. I had written a book on spirits and alcohol and French drinks. I had 250 bottles of liquor to use up and everyone had nothing to do.

I was working really hard. That was, but the videos were a success, so it showed that I could, even though my voice goes up like an octave when filmed, and I lock this up because you say something like, “I hate X.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, totally. 3:00 AM you’re thinking, you hear that words of you echoing, “I hate X.”

David Lebovitz: Right, all of these people like “he hates X.” Anyway, I try to do reels, but it’s not my skill set and it’s fine. We don’t have to be good at everything. I mean your parents and you make mistakes. People drop their babies. It doesn’t mean you’re a bad parent. It means you made a mistake.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally.

David Lebovitz: Don’t drop your baby.

Bjork Ostrom: Pro tip. What did it look like for you to come out of that? To essentially put a bow into, or maybe it’s not putting a bow on it, but to say, “Okay, I feel this tension. I know that things have evolved and what was now isn’t, but I’m going to endure as a creator and find the next thing that feels like a good fit. Do you feel like you have that now with Substack? It feels like a little bit more of a pure place to just write. How did you navigate that season for other people who are trying to figure that out, what advice would you give them?

David Lebovitz: Well, there were some caveats. I was worried about before I switched to Substack. One was, who owns the content? They’ve actually thought of everything. They’re like, “You can actually download your whole newsletter. Here’s a button to do it.” I was like, “Okay.”

Bjork Ostrom: Export all your subscribers and the content you’ve created.

David Lebovitz: Also, at the time they were, Facebook had started their own newsletter service and so did Twitter and a couple of them. I said, “What if you guys get blocked by Facebook?” They’re like, “That will never happen.” I was like, “Hmm.” Facebook and other newsletters were offering some writers a substantial amount of money to move to the platforms. We discussed that and it was a lot. It was probably, I know your audience is very open about talking about money, but it was more than twice what my annual revenue was writing my blog.

Bjork Ostrom: That was an offer to come to Facebook specifically?

David Lebovitz: That was Facebook was making a similar author offer to other people, and people took them up on it, but this was Substack. My contact at Substack, he said, “To be quite honest, you’re going to earn that kind of money anyways, so I don’t think you need to take it.” They actually dangled. They actually mentioned a lot of money to me at the beginning. I was like, “What? Not me, I would never.” That said, it’s been very fruitful. I’m making about four times what I made from my blog with my newsletter.

Bjork Ostrom: Which I think is encouraging for people to hear because, and I’ve mentioned Substack specifically. One of the things that I feel like is great about it is the game is different. You’re playing a different game and there are people who are passionate about food, who are passionate about creating content, who are passionate about connecting with people and sharing that content, but they aren’t passionate about writing a piece of content that’s structured to be discovered on Google and to do keyword research.

There are people who are really passionate about that and they do great with search optimized recipe content, but it’s like a different wave for a different surfer. For us as creators, part of what our job is, I feel like, and I’d be interested to hear your thoughts on this, is to find what is the wave that we feel best fit to surf? It sounds like to some degree you’ve maybe found the new version of that in writing an email newsletter. Does that feel true?

David Lebovitz: Yes, it does. I mean, just backing up a little bit, people have asked me about Substack and moving to Substack. When I showed up at Substack, I already had about 80,000 newsletters subscribers. Well, I came out of the gate and I was already the number two newsletter on food newsletter on Substack. Once again, I had that longevity. I think people starting now, I see, and you talk about numbers a lot with your followers and listeners and people are like, “Yey, I finally got 10,000 followers.”

Then, how many of those are paying subscribers? I had a really hard time asking people to pay because I had what I do for free for so long. I didn’t really necessarily want to put up a barrier to me. In Substack for people that don’t know you have a free version and you can have a paid version and you can set it so that only paid people comment. You can do special content for those paid people and so forth.

Their philosophy though is to put your best content forward for free to get people to come and subscribe, that’s what makes them subscribe. That said, I think a lot of people might be thinking of moving to Substack like it’s hard to get people to spend $50, which is what Stack recommends. It’s $4 a month, which anybody who has a computer, $4 is not a huge amount, really not a big ask.

I do a sale once a year on Black Friday, but I think it’s going to get tougher, there’s a lot of newsletters. I mean, I can’t read them all. Some people are really excited about having a newsletter and they’re putting out one every two days. I’m like, “Well.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, settle down. I think it comes back to one of the things that I think can often happen when I have conversations like this with people is you hear the strategy, you hear the tactic, you hear the platform, and it’s like, “That’s cool.” I should go and do that. It’s like if you and I were carpenters and we were talking about the things that we had built, and it was like, “Here’s this really cool cabin on the North Shore in Minnesota on Lake Superior. It’s really beautiful. The primary tool I used was a hammer and a saw.”

If everybody ran out and got hammers and saws, they’re like, “Awesome. You can build cabins with this thing.” I think it’s important to remind people that really what people are buying isn’t the tool or the mechanism or the strategy. What people are buying is the content that you are creating and whatever that offers them. It could be education, it could be entertainment, it could be, could be connection. That is the thing that really takes time and effort.

We’ve talked about it a few different times. For you, it’s decades of work and consideration around you as a creator and people wanting to follow along with what you’re doing and if purchased your books. It’s the ultimate example of Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans, and it’s just that amplified. Are you familiar with that, Kevin Kelly? He has this great iconic blog post where he talks about the internet and 1000 True Fans.

If you have a thousand true fans, in the case of Substack, true fans would be people who subscribe that you can start to play the numbers game a little bit with that. Not that that’s like a living salary in Paris France, but it’s like, “That’s a salary that you can get if you find these 1,000 True Fans. I feel like you can play the numbers game differently when you have Substack and subscribers. I think that it’s a exciting platform in that way.

Do you have thoughts on or does Substack provide general numbers around, “Hey, if you have a thousand people who sign up, two of those will be paid subscribers?”

David Lebovitz: It said 5% is a good number to go for. 10% is you’re successful. It’s getting back to that point you just made about the thousand hits. I used to tell people when I had my blog because I write code books and they’re for sale on my site. I’m like, “It’s better to have five people reading your blog if all five of them buy your books than 5 million people and none of them buy your books.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s the difference between that true fan and somebody who’s kind this passive observer. It feels like Substack is a way to quantify a little bit. Are these people true fans? Are they willing to pay.

David Lebovitz: I didn’t believe actually that people would pay. I have a contact there and we talk a lot about it, and he always tells me I’m too cheap, not cheap, cheap because my newsletter is 50 a year, and some people are 60 or 70. He’s like, “People pay because they like you and they want to support you. We’re living in this time where people don’t like paying for things, just somebody using the F-word.

You didn’t want to go to somebody’s link in the profile to get their recipe and use the F-word. I was like, “It’s a free recipe. I went to the profile and it was easy to get. You just tap on the picture.”

Bjork Ostrom: You literally have to click twice, yeah.

David Lebovitz: That’s what a lot of us are facing. On the other hand, you want those people as your fans, you need them. One thing my first editor told me, which is amazing advice for anybody who, especially in I’m talking to you and your audience who are food people and writers, she said, “Don’t waste people’s time. When you write something, she didn’t elaborate on that, but when you write something, when you do something, you should do it, do a good job.

“Think, am I being useful to people? I think when I write my newsletter, am I entertaining people with this story? Is recipe going to be something they’re going to want to make and enjoy reading about? You have a different tact like Elise Bauer, when she had Simply Recipes, I remember she was like, ”I want to do a meatloaf recipe. I want to show people how to make meatloaf.”

She was into teaching people how to cook, whereas Lindsay might be doing a tofu bowl with broccoli miso sauce. It’s not something that people are searching for online, but they like her.

Bjork Ostrom: It feels like that’s this a little bit of a crossroads that as creators, we need to figure out is are we optimizing for discoverability, are we optimizing for a following that we have or want to maintain? How do you view as a Substack newsletter? What does it look like for you to get people to discover it? You have your site, you have a social following, so you have those avenues, but what does it look like to get people to actually sign up? Does that come from Substack, your site, social, a little bit of everything?

David Lebovitz: I don’t really look at the stats, they send them to me. I do have, when you go to my website, I have a thing at the top says, follow me on Substack and so forth. I do put links in Instagram stories. I don’t know how many people I get, but I just got a thing today as an email they send every month or something. I lost 160 paid subscribers the last whatever, either month, year, I don’t know.

I gained 2,000 free subscribers. I don’t really know where they come from. It’s very easy, I used to, when I linked to paid things, people would get furious. They’re like, “You linked to a paid thing.” Now I say, for paid subscribers.

Bjork Ostrom: Wasted their time by having to click link in profile.

David Lebovitz: I did do something very interesting though that got a lot of paid subscribers. I had written a book about an apartment renovation 10 years ago. People kept saying they really wish I had put them, wanted to see pictures, and the apartment renovation was a nightmare. It was a disaster. I wrote a book about it. It might be a TV show at some point. It was a horrible, horrible thing.

I post pictures and I didn’t take pictures and I was crying in the court, crawled up in a ball crying in a corner for two years. This time, this is a year or two ago, I took pictures and I thought I would share these stories and pictures, but only with paid subscribers. Once I found a way, I didn’t really want to have pictures of my apartment out on the internet. They were like, “We want to see your bathroom.” I’m like, “Uncomfortable with that.”

Bjork Ostrom: For a price.

David Lebovitz: It’s like your bedroom. People are like, “We want to see your bedroom.” No.

Bjork Ostrom: Can we see your pillow? Can we see a close-up of your pillow?

David Lebovitz: Yeah, people do that. They have all these sponsored posts with kitchens. That was a really good way that I found to do something fun for people. It was fun for me to show and people had to pay and it worked out well, and those people stuck around.

Bjork Ostrom: It provides a little bit of a fence around certain content that, like you said, maybe you don’t want mass distributed and living on Instagram forever or on a blog or online. It allows you to control it in a certain way. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors.

This episode is sponsored by CultivateWP, specifically a new offering they have called Cultivate Go. CultivateWP, the agency or the company focuses on designing and developing food blogs, and it was founded by Bill Erickson who’s this incredible WordPress developer. We know him because as I’ll share, we’ve worked with him and Dwayne Smith, who’s this incredible designer. Bill developed a version of Pinch of Yum before we had our own internal team.

It was one of the fastest growing versions of the site that we’ve had. As you know in this industry, word spreads quickly about people who do good work. Bill and Dwayne have really filled their calendar over the past few years with doing these custom websites for some of the biggest food sites on the web. You can see the list on their website. They would create these fully custom designs, but they would cost literally multiple tens of thousands of dollars.

That makes a lot of sense if you’re a site that gets multiple millions of page views. What they realized is there’s a lot of really successful sites who need the best technology in the world to power them, but can’t justify spending multiple tens of thousands of dollars. That’s why they launched Cultivate Go. It’s a semi-custom theme design and a White Glove site setup.

You choose one of the core themes, they have multiple options, and then their team customizes the logo, the brand colors the typography, so it matches your brand exactly. Then they set it up on a staging environment where you can test it out, get a feel for it, and can launch your site within just one week. The cost is only $5,000. Here’s the thing, you have the exact same features, functionality, and support as the themes that cost up to 10 times as much as a Cultivate Go theme.

That means your Cultivate Go site can compete on an even technological playing field with the biggest food sites in the world. If you’re interested in checking it out, go to foodbloggerpro.com/go or you could just search Cultivate Go in Google. Thanks so much to CultivateWP for sponsoring this episode.

In a normal week or normal month, what does the rhythm look like for you? Do you send out one free newsletter and then one for paid subscribers? Is it just more week by week what you’re feeling?

David Lebovitz: I send out a monthly newsletter on the first of the month, which is what I’ve been doing. When I switched to Substack, I said to everybody, if you’re a subscriber to my newsletter and nothing changes, you’re going to get my free newsletter and extra content throughout the month. Paid people will get premium extra stuff. It ended up being, I probably send out five newsletters a month, two of them might be paid.

I’m working on a book now, and I was like, “What should I do? What do I do?” I actually want to focus on that. Another thing Substack has and I’m not an ad for Substack, but we have what’s recommended you do a paywall. You send out a post to all your subscribers so people can read the story of my nervous breakdown remodeling, and you start writing the story and then there’s a cutoff.

It’s like click here to subscribe seven-day free trial or click here to read more. That is a proven way to get people in. They keep telling me, “Do that, do that, do that.” Don’t do that.

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t feel good to you to send out something that’s partial-

David Lebovitz: Content.

Bjork Ostrom: … you want to send out either something that’s anybody can get and read fully or if you pay for it, then you get all of it, but not something that’s halfway.

David Lebovitz: Well, it seems and I don’t want to use the word mean, but a lot of people do it they put the recipe behind a paywall. I would do it if I wrote a story like favorite restaurants in New York, and I would list 20 restaurants and I might do top the first 10. Then I would save it for the rest, I just don’t use it but that’s actually they say that’s very good to do.

Bjork Ostrom: The interesting thing as you talk about before you have this newsletter, you’re paying for it, and then now on Substack you’re not, but you’re making money from it, do you feel like you lost anything in terms of your ability to even, I think of some email service providers, most of them will have an onboarding sequence where you can send out automated emails. Is there anything like that that you feel like, “It was really nice I had this before and now I don’t,” or not necessarily?

David Lebovitz: No. I remember when blogging, we had the RSS feeds, which were amazing. I don’t know what happened to them, but I remember when I had my blog redone, the designers like, “David, no one’s using RSS feeds anymore.” That was a blow to me because that was such a great way for people to get your content without having to subscribe or anything. One thing I do miss is to me a blog is like you’re home on the internet.

No one can take it away from you. It’s available to all you have. I was looking at, because writing this book, I have a thousand recipes on my website, I think, and then there’s like 220, no, 2,025 whatever posts, and there’s 300,000 comments. I miss that feeling like you’re building something.

Bjork Ostrom: In a central place.

David Lebovitz: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: When people ask you what you do, how do you describe what you do now?

David Lebovitz: Well, it depends. People ask me that a lot and it depends. I was an am or pastry chef. I’m a cookbook author and a blogger. When you say newsletter, especially in France, France is five years behind. Blogger was a bad word. It depends if I’m in a group of pastry chefs professionals, especially in France where they might not, they don’t know that I actually know what I’m doing as a pastry chef, pastry chef.

If I’m with a group of journalists, it depends. Sometimes people used to make fun of me when I had a blog and I’d go to these French food journalists meals, and the guys, the American, they were trying to teach me about food.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re a blogger, so you don’t know. Let me teach you also.

David Lebovitz: They were showing me what arugula was. I’m like, “I got that.” They were like, “You have a blog. Do you have any readers?” I’m like, “Yeah, I have 1.8 million a month.” They would just… I would use that in that. Now with my newsletter, nobody knows or cares. I have a newsletter with a couple hundred thousand people. They’re like blank.

Bjork Ostrom: Just because there’s no context around what that is necessarily.

David Lebovitz: Well, they want a number, but they want to quantify it. People know what Instagram is now people have this big thing, I have 320,000 followers.

Bjork Ostrom: That means something because Instagram means something.

David Lebovitz: It does, but on the other hand, there’s people that have a million followers and those people are thinking, “Wow, that’s a lot.” As you know, you can buy followers. It’s not that hard to get a million. If you really wanted to do it, you could do it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like what really matters is engagement. Are people interacting with the content? Is it people who are actually wanting to follow it?

David Lebovitz: That’s actually such a word that so few people who don’t do what we do, don’t understand. I have a really engaged audience. When I was building my kitchen here, I was trying to work with a kitchenware company like a Bosch or someone, and nobody wanted to talk to me. A friend of mine said, “They’ve been trying to get everybody to use induction stoves in America, you’re the perfect person. They should have made you the guy.”

I had to learn how to use induction. I’m just like everybody else, I’m trying to make coffee in the morning, and it’s like, “How do it with this thing?” Brands are not necessarily, they’re looking for whatever, maybe somebody who has a million followers on Instagram.

Bjork Ostrom: A really engaged audience for the thing that they’re selling. I actually just had this conversation. We went to a hockey game last night. My friend’s brother plays in the NHL. He was talking about how he was trying to work with a brand to get a cold plunge and all the brand, he’s a fresh hockey player. I don’t know, he has maybe tens of thousands of followers.

How he’d reach out to these brands and wasn’t really getting anybody to reach out to him. My friend’s wife has a site and a social following. He talked about the interesting contrast between her reaching out and brands or not even her reaching out, but brands reaching out to her. She just had this influx of people reaching out. What we came up with as we tried to figure out why that is this idea of engagement.

You can have an audience that might be the same size, but if it’s a really engaged audience that’s interested in you and the recommendations you have and what you’re doing, that’s brands I think recognize that that’s more powerful.

David Lebovitz: I don’t know, I mean, European companies operate differently than American companies, and I had some funny interactions with European companies. I don’t necessarily work that hard to try to engage with them. I did have a funny, I was doing a book and I wanted to use a certain cookware on the cover, and I contacted the French branch of the company and they were like, “Well, we can sell it to you for half price and so forth.”

When you’re doing a book cover, you never know what’s going to look good. I don’t live my life to get free stuff, but cookware is expensive. Anyway, to make a long story short, I didn’t use it. Then, when I told the American people about it, because they invited me to their factory once in France, they were like, “You’re kidding, right? We could have been on the cover of your book.”

Bjork Ostrom: Totally realizing how significant that would’ve been and the opportunity that was missed.

David Lebovitz: On the other hand, I’m not against people doing sponsored stuff, but in a way it’s often cleaner for me. It’s like, “You know what? I’ll just buy the damn pot for fun.”

Bjork Ostrom: Not have to worry about recommendations.

David Lebovitz: I get invited to restaurants in Paris sometimes, and I’m like, “Well, if I don’t like it, do I have to post about it?” Then it feels weird.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, totally. This is circling back around. We have some of those questions that people from the group are interested in. Yeah, go ahead.

David Lebovitz: I love questions.

Bjork Ostrom: Great. This one is from Betty and she says you’re one of the original food blogs, but if you’re starting out as a new food blogger or content creator today, what would be your priorities or what would you do differently?

David Lebovitz: Well, the game has changed now. Like I said, you don’t have to deal with coding and stuff. I think I would just do what I did and be authentic. I wouldn’t change what I posted. I was posting a lot of silly, if you go back into my blog, there’s like poem or Haiku about Italian candies and a lot of silly stuff. I think be useful. Create something like when you go into a blog, don’t just, or even a newsletter, say, “Hi, this is my newsletter. Welcome, hope you like it.”

Think about what do I want to do? What is the purpose of what I am doing? Do I want to make myself happy? Do I want to present people foods from, if you live in Wisconsin, maybe this blog is going to be about Wisconsin food and I’m going to go visit cheeses. Make it something a single subject rather than family friendly recipes from my kitchen with a health.

Bjork Ostrom: Be specific, be useful and be clear.

David Lebovitz: Stand out.

Bjork Ostrom: I think that’s great. That’s helpful. Then, this is coming in from Carol. This is maybe a bigger question just in general, but in the world of creating and blogging, Carol says, I’m keen to hear his thoughts on the future of food blogging, especially in relation to AI. For you as a writer, for you as a creator, what are your ponderings around the world of AI?

David Lebovitz: I guess because one day I went on AI and I said, David Lebovitz’s favorite bakeries in Paris. It said, “Sorry, I can’t show you anything about a specific person, David Lebovitz.” Same thing. Then, I did like cassoulet recipe, which is a French casserole dish, it’s thing and a recipe popped up. I want to see though, that somebody made that recipe and that whole thing about get to the recipe, or why do I have to go through all this conversation?

I’m like, because that person is saying, I tried this with potatoes and it didn’t work. Then when I stirred in a half a cup of rice, it ended up being delicious. I just don’t think AI is going to replace a well-written or a good recipe. All people really care about is a recipe that works if you buy a cookbook, I have a wall of cookbooks, some books I’ve only made one recipe from, that’s all I need to. I love Deb of Smitten Kitchen. She’s a good friend of mine.

I don’t know if I’ve ever made anything from her blog, but I’ve made stuff from her books and the recipe comes out really good. She’s behind it. You see a real person behind it.

Bjork Ostrom: Part of what I think about in the world of all things online digital technology is what are we replicating? What are we as humans trying to get out of this new experience? And one of the things that I think is deeply ingrained in us is it’s almost like storytelling. I feel like a little bit of what you hear saying is people being like, “Just get to the recipe. Get to the recipe.”

You leave out the context of the story and the story a lot of times is what builds the case for the thing that you’re making. I think when I think of a recipe that’s handed down from my grandma that my mom made, and now Lindsay makes, there’s something to that. I think we try and replicate that in our normal life by saying, “Hey, what is the story behind this? Where did you get this from?”

I think that’s an important piece of it. Maybe, I don’t think it’s to say that five years from now, there’s not some version of people getting their recipes in different ways than a Google search. It feels like the point about wanting to understand where this comes from is important. Who is this from? Where is it connected to?

David Lebovitz: I also have to say when I sometimes adapt recipes from people’s books, I have to change the recipe to get it to work right. I’m working on a book now and I’m trying to make this rice cake and a computer can’t. You can give me a list of ingredients and tell me how to do it, but I taste it and I go, “This is too flat. It needs to be hot. This needs more vanilla or doesn’t need vanilla. I could use cinnamon.” I think when people use my recipes, they trust that I have-

Bjork Ostrom: Done that

David Lebovitz: … done that work for them. Whereas, AI is taking a thousand rice cake recipes and putting them together and you’ll get a recipe. Like Dianne Jacob who writes Will Write for Food, she did a peanut butter recipe and she posted a picture of it that was AI-generated. They looked terrible, but the cookies were pretty good. I don’t want to sound conceited, but I’m sure if I got that recipe if I made it, I would change it and make it better. I’m not saying that I’m any great.

Bjork Ostrom: I think maybe as a last point that wraps the conversation well is there might be a time when a certain subset of people, 5 years from now, 10 years from now, go to whatever search engine it is and get a recipe that is functional and that process of, “I need a recipe, I’m going to go somewhere, I’m going to get it, and I have a recipe for whatever it is, French toast.” It gives you a decent french toast recipe.

I think one of the things that we need to think about as creators is in a scenario where the very transactional, I need recipe, I get recipe process is replaced, then what do you do as a creator? I think what’s great about where you are and a reflection for other creators to think about is your transaction isn’t, “I need a recipe. I’m going to search. I’m going to get it.”

Your transaction is more relational. I think that’s a great moat in the world of digital content because people are following you. They’re not transacting with a recipe and who knows what comes from AI and search generated content. One of the things that is really helpful to have as a creator is a personal connection, a following, and not as transactional of type of business. It’s not just like the recipe itself. Does that resonate with you at all?

David Lebovitz: I think it does go back though to always, people want a recipe that works and it comes out well. People take a flight and they’re like, “I’m never flying American Airlines again. It was awful.” Then, next time they’re looking for flights and the American’s cheapest, they fly that, they’re cost sensitive. Recipes, you make a recipe from somebody’s book or their blog and it’s a mess or it’s a disaster and you don’t want to go back to it again.

When I moved, I started writing books for HarperCollins, but then moved to Ten Speed Press and they said, I was like, “Why do you want me?” They said, “Because your recipes work.” I said, “Well, don’t everybody? They’re like…

Bjork Ostrom: No.

David Lebovitz: It was very interesting to hear cookbook editors talking about that and that used to be a deal breaker. A lot of times people send a proposal to an editor with recipes in it and then the editor would go home and make the recipes and they didn’t work and they wouldn’t buy that book. Same with a blog like we’re going to talk about Elise Bauer again, Simply Recipes.

She tested everything and if it didn’t work, there was comments and she would fix it and make sure it worked and talk people through it. Same with I tested recipes, I wanted to make sure you would get feedback. That’s the interesting thing about the internet is you get feedback right away if it doesn’t work. If you forget an ingredient, you guys wake up at 6:00 in the morning and someone’s like, “It doesn’t say when to add the salt.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s how you start your day.

David Lebovitz: Then you’re like, “These people are trying to make the recipe and they couldn’t figure out when to add the salt and you ruin their dinner over a teaspoon of salt.”

Bjork Ostrom: Quality, it comes back to that idea of you as a creator, your reputation, your authority, your expertise, trustworthiness, all of these things that we talk about.

David Lebovitz: I think the people that succeed also, you work with a lot of bloggers, the people that succeed do a good job.

Bjork Ostrom: Are borderline obsessive about it, their craft. David, we could talk for hours. It’s always such a joy. Can you talk about your podcast, talk about where people can sign up for the newsletter and just generally where people can follow along with you online?

David Lebovitz: Well, before we go on, I want to talk about whatever lighting situation you have is great because you rip it.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s actually these really huge lights that I have to each side, so I’m cheating and then there’s some natural light to the side.

David Lebovitz: I need to come to you for a two-day intensive-

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ll do it.

David Lebovitz: Everything is circled around my Substack right now. My Substack is davidlebovitz.substack.com. My podcasts are there. They’re also on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, whatever podcast platforms people use. I’m on Instagram @DavidLebovitz and same at Facebook. I’m a firm believer in always taking your name even if you’re not going to use the platform.

Bjork Ostrom: Just grab the handle even if you don’t.

David Lebovitz: I’m like Snapchat, I was the oldest person on Snapchat. It’s good for people to have like to have a podcast. I’m doing it for fun. Same with I do like having my blog. If people are happy blogging, they don’t want to switch to a newsletter, blogging is a great platform. You have to do what works for you. I was just overwhelmed by the technology and all this stuff.

Thankfully, Google’s now changing its parameters of how they list websites and go back to quality rather than see who’s got everything plugged in the right place.

Bjork Ostrom: Well, and you’re a great example of this. We have a lot of friends who are in the deep, the search world. Really it sounds like what Google’s trying to do is place an emphasis on expertise of a single source for a creator. You have a author, you have a publisher, you have a creator. Does this piece of content go back to that person and do they have the expertise? When you have nine cookbooks or books, nine books, and you’ve been publishing since 1989.

David Lebovitz: Also, is it a real person who’s making Lindsay writes personal stories about her life, Deb Perelman, even if you didn’t see the header, you’d know it was a Deb Perelman post because she’s writing about herself. That’s what Google says now that they want to see, rather than just people writing mechanical-

Bjork Ostrom: Optimized content.

David Lebovitz: … optimized content, I like that. That was their objective when they started to bring the best content to the top.

Bjork Ostrom: Back to that, it sounds like in some ways which is such a great thing.

David Lebovitz: Also, if you’re listening, they want to do a newsletter. It’s a very interesting medium and there’s no cost to doing it. Having a newsletter is a great thing. I when I was just blogging, I always told people it’s like, “Do a newsletter. Even if you only send out one every six months, just have a mailing list because you never know when all this is going to be taken away from you by an algorithm.”

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Maybe a great note to end on for those who haven’t either done it or haven’t placed an emphasis on it, to find ways to collect some of those subscribers, to start those conversations because you own that in a different way than all the platforms like we talked about.

David Lebovitz: You can take it with you and those people want to hear from you too.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. David, thanks so much for coming on. It’s always such a joy to talk to you.

David Lebovitz: Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: I really appreciate all that you’ve done through the years for this community. We’ll have to make it happen again here sooner than six years.

David Lebovitz: That’s okay. It’s good to check in every few years, I’m happy to. If you come to Paris, you can be on my podcast. I haven’t figured out how to do anything online.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’ll make it happen.

David Lebovitz: You guys can hang out in my kitchen with me and cook and talk.

Bjork Ostrom: We’ll love it. I’ll let you and Lindsay cook. I’ll talk, that’s my expertise. Thanks for coming on, David.

David Lebovitz: All right, thanks.

Emily Walker: Hello, there. Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro.

We have hours and hours of courses available including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business.

You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.