255: How-To Videos – Engaging Video Made Simple with Jake Poses

Alexa Peduzzi: Hello. Hello. Alexa here from team FBP officially welcoming you to The Food Blogger Pro Podcast today. Thanks for making this show a part of your day today. We have a really interesting episode for you today and it’s all about a new social platform/editing app called Jumprope and we’re talking to its founder today, Jake Poses. So if you’ve been around Food Blogger Pro for a while, you know that we love recipe videos. We have whole courses about creating and planning and editing recipe videos. We’ve done podcast episodes with people who make recipe videos and we talk about recipe videos in our member Q&As and our member Happening Now videos. That said, creating recipe videos can seem like a big undertaking between the setup, the lighting, the gear and the editing. It could seem like a lot for people who are just getting started with video.

Alexa Peduzzi: Jumprope is a new app that’s designed to make the process of producing video for your audience easier. Not only can you edit and share how to videos within the Jumprope app, you can then export your videos from there in the sizes and formats you need for YouTube, Instagram, blog posts, and more create once and share everywhere. It’s a really slick app and we think you’ll get a lot out of this conversation with Jake between his understanding of what it takes to build a business, to his insights into what it means to drill and find “oil”. This conversation will inspire you to do, share and create. So excited to jump in and without any further ado, Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Jake, welcome to the podcast.

Jake Poses: Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I’m excited to talk about all the stuff that you’re working on and all the stuff that you have worked on because it’s an area that… I’m in the Twin Cities, I’m in Minnesota, but I feel like there’s this world of startups and quick growth and consumer platforms and you have a ton of experience with that. You also have a lot of experience overlapping with this specific type of content, which is food and recipe, which we’re going to talk about in a little bit. But let’s rewind the tape and go back to Thumbtack. You were early on at Thumbtack and I want to hear a little bit about that. When did you start there and can you explain to those who don’t know what Thumbtack is, what that company is all about?

Jake Poses: Sure. I’ll start with what’s Thumbtack. So Thumbtack is a marketplace for hiring local service professionals. Anything from a plumber, to a math tutor, to a wedding photographer, instead of calling ground, you go on Thumbtack and Thumbtack immediately matches you with pros who can do that job. I really stumbled into Thumbtack. I a business school student at Stanford looking for something to do for 10 weeks over a summer and got put in touch with them and thought I was going to work at Thumbtack for 10 weeks and ended up spending five and a half years there. So I was lucky enough to see it from eight people, no revenue to 500 people, a hundred million of revenue, about $2 billion going into the pockets of professionals around the country. And feel really lucky to have gotten to go on one of those rides as you said and the classic from the TV show Silicon Valley.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Which is a great show. At what point did you say, “Hey…” Did it go from 10 and a half weeks, or 10 weeks to five and a half years. Was there a point when it switched over and you said, “I want to stay here longer and be more involved.” Or was it more the other way where Thumbtack reached out to you and said, “Hey, we want you to stick around. Would you be willing to go on this ride with us.”

Jake Poses: Yeah. They probably, week five into my internship started joking with me, we’re going to make you drop out and stay here and do this with us. And I was “No, I’m not going to do that.” I’m going to go back to business school, I’m going to finish my degree at a great school. And then by week eight, I was “Yeah, I’m going to go do this.” And there were several things that flipped the switch. I think one was, I was enticed by the scale of the problem we’re solving. That local services is one of the biggest pieces of the economy that at the time and frankly still remains largely offline. I’ve always been enticed by big problems and the ability to really change how the world does something, and two is, I knew after a couple of weeks or five weeks I liked the people and really like I’d always wanted to go build something and I’m like, “This is a chance to go do it. So why am I going to go do another year of business school just to try to find this opportunity 12 months from now? Let’s make it happen.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So how many people were there? Did you say when you started?

Jake Poses: They are eight when I joined.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. And then when you left, it was at what size?

Jake Poses: 500.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s insane. What did you take away from that experience? Being in the single digits, joining a company, seeing it grow to 500 to then going and starting your company Jumprope, which we’re going to be talking about. If you could only take away two, three, four things from that experience, what did you take away and what are you applying today to Jumprope that you learned at Thumbtack?

Jake Poses: Yeah, absolutely. I think that the first is just how much having the right people and the right structure, like organizational structure for those people to work in really matters. It doesn’t matter at eight people, but when you get to 100 and 200, having your organization aligned effectively with your goals and having the right people who are in the seats to drive those goals forward, I think it’s all about people and that was one big thing. I think the second was the fact that you need to think about what is the experience of the product and how are we going to get it into the hands of millions of people simultaneously. And many companies are good at thinking about, “How do I build a great product?” But they don’t have any mechanisms built in for that to make it grow. And some try to grow, but they don’t actually have a great product and so it doesn’t have legs. And so really thinking about the combination and building a product where those two things are inextricably linked instead of one as an afterthought to another.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s interesting, before we started this call you’re talking about the nebulous, it’s not concrete but this idea of some of the changes that you made with Jumprope and you talked about how that feels from a product perspective when you’re using it, when there’s this tweak that it’s not like the colors change or the layout changes, but it’s how the app works and there’s this experience with product that’s hard to define and it’s not concrete but it allows you to as a user use it and feel like, “Oh, this is really cool. This is a good experience.” But then there’s also that piece that you talked about, which is the intentional growth around that product.

Bjork Ostrom: And you have to have both of those things. You have to be able to have a product that’s awesome and then when you have that awesome product, you have to have some type of mechanism to grow it. So with an app like Jumprope, how do you know if you are building something that has that awesome product nest to it. Is it NPS score? Is it conversations with users or is it an art and you know that you’re creating good art and you have to rely on that based on your previous experience?

Jake Poses: No, obviously there is an art to creating it but you ultimately have to use data and information to know whether you’ve built something that people love. I really look at two things, right? In this early stages of it, I actually rely a lot on qualitative feedback and I’ve been through building things enough times to know when is someone saying something nice and when does someone really, really love something. People are going to say nice things about your product even if it’s just okay, but where am I getting the sense that people really love it?

Jake Poses: And then once the product matures, and I think we’re definitely at a stage here with Jumprope, you can look at retention or engagement, right? If someone uses the product today, if someone creates an awesome recipe on Jumprope today, do they create another one in two weeks? They can create another one in a month? And this is true, whether you’re a food blogger or building a ride sharing app. Do people stick with your product? And a clear measure of that is generally the best longterm metric of do people love it and have you built something great.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and idea of being at its core, are people coming back after they experienced the thing that you’ve created? Whether that be a recipe and do people come back and continue to make that? That’s a really good indicator of if they had success with that or whether it be a platform and they come back because they had a good experience using that platform. So that makes sense. So to rewind a little bit, you talked about people, the importance of people, talked about the importance of product obviously in our world that has content, like really good content that you’re creating that people come back to in your world. It’s obviously a little bit different. In that you are creating the thing that allows people to create. We’re going to talk about ways that Jumprope does that. Are there other things that you learned at Thumbtack that you’re now applying to Jumprope in regards to business building and creating something that can grow quickly?

Jake Poses: Another thing I would say is a concept of quickly iterating and testing and learning and sometimes I liken this to drilling for oil. If you think about when you go drill for oil, your goal at first is to how do I spend the least amount of effort to figure out is there a bunch of oil in the ground here? And once you’ve probed and understood, “Oh wow, there’s a big reservoir of oil here.” You then go build a much more robust well to harvest that oil.

Jake Poses: I think early stage companies, and again I think this is probably true if you’re a food blogger I’m not one, so this is a little bit me projecting trying to grow, is you want to figure out how do I quickly run as many tests as possible to understand where there is oil or where there is gold or where there are users or where there is engagement and set yourself up to get a lot of reds and then once you strike oil, you then figure out, “Okay, how do I take this thing that I built in a hacky way and make it so that I can then actually make it propel my growth.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I feel like there’s two different scenarios that exist where people are maybe drilling for oil incorrectly. One is they will go around and look for oil. They’re drilling for oil and then they find some, they’re like, “Hey, there’s oil here.” And then they go and chase a new idea, but it’s like, “Wait, go back, stick with what you’re doing. It’s working, continue to drill oil there.” I think the other way that people do it is they will continue to drill where there’s no oil. They’ll just go deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and it’s, “Wait, we need to stop here. There’s not an oil here. You need to pick up and go somewhere else and see if you have some traction there.” By like you said, having those conversations early on, getting customer feedback, seeing if there’s stickiness to what you’re doing and obviously that depends on the industry.

Bjork Ostrom: Content is different than building an app where people would use it as a consumer. And a creator is different than a brick and mortar retail store. But the idea is you’re trying to find where’s there some engagement, some stickiness, some interest, and then stick with that. Don’t go and create a new thing, like go deep with that which I think is a lot of times, especially for serial entrepreneurs, to use kind of a rolly buzzword, but for those people it’s easy to move and start something else and neglect the thing that was started. So what does that look like? Yes please.

Jake Poses: Let me just give you one, I think very easy and doable tip to I think avoid both of those scenarios. Before you start drilling, so before you start your test, write down somewhere, what does success look like? After what point am I going to say, give up and say, “There’s not oil here.” And after what point am I going to say, “Oh wait, there is oil here.” And I think to hold yourself honest is as simple as writing it down. Because as you said, you can often get in this trap of, “Oh, if I just work another three weeks on this, I’ll find it.” Yeah, just write it down. It’s simple. Pen and paper or Google Doc.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, I think that’s awesome. There’s no right answer with it, but I think it does need to be a consideration as you are starting a company because there also is something to sticking with what you’re doing for a long period of time because a lot of successful creators, artists, they have paid their dues over a long period of time and have been grinding away and then suddenly they become an overnight success. So no easy answers with it for sure. Let’s talk about junk Jumprope.

Jake Poses: Most big Silicon Valley companies were not overnight success stories, right?

Bjork Ostrom: Even though they seem like it, yes.

Jake Poses: Airbnb almost went out of business. Yeah, exactly. Instagram did not start as a success story. Instagram was meandering for the first several years of its existence and then hit on the thing that people loved and were engaged in, so.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, yes, I think it’s important consideration and one that often isn’t the thing that the article is written about. It’s not as interesting to read as the overnight success story. So at some point you have gone on this ride with Thumbtack, have experienced this incredible growth, but I’m also guessing that you get to see the inside of how difficult that is to scale a company from eight people to 500 people over a short period of time. What made you step back and say I want to step off this high growth train with Thumbtack and start my own and create my own company knowing all the trials and tribulations that come along with that?

Jake Poses: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it was several fold. One is, I’ve always been super passionate about content world. I grew up in New York thinking I want to go run NBCUniversal as a middle school kid. As I said, stumbled into Thumbtack but wanting to get closer to the content media world. But I didn’t leave Thumbtack saying I’m definitely going to start a company and I got a lot of advice from folks that if you start a company because you feel like you need to, you’re likely going to start the wrong company. So I took some time off, relax and travel during which it was the early days of Snapchat stories and Instagram stories and really was using Instagram stories just to tell stories about what I was seeing in the world.

Jake Poses: Found the format to be a really powerful storytelling mechanism and had this realization that the format of it applied really well to learning how to do things. Whether that be a recipe or craft project or beauty tutorial that are inherently step-by-step. I think, I had some of this in my background because my brother has a pretty severe learning differences and often growing up and still to this day I have to think about, “How do I break something down to explain it in a kind of novel or interesting way to him.” And so the combination of just like seeing this magic with the stories format, realizing that applied to learning how to do things, having that passion with my brother, I ran towards Jumprope. I didn’t say I needed to start a company, I ran towards, “I want to start this company.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, and what was it specifically when you started out that you had envisioned Jump roping? Is it still something similar to that now or has it evolved a little bit?

Jake Poses: Yeah. The interesting thing is it is shockingly similar to the initial idea. I think this is not by any means the typical entrepreneurial journey. But if I had described Jumprope to you about three minutes after I came up with the idea, and you saw Jumprope now, today, I think you’d be like, “Yep, this is about what I thought it was going to be.” Obviously the tactics have evolved over time. We’ve learned a ton about the best way to enable creators and who’s going to be on the platform and incentives and all of these things. But the core of the concept is really similar to the initial idea I had.

Bjork Ostrom: Can we pause and can you do the elevator pitch of what Jumprope is for context as we start to talk more about it?

Jake Poses: Yeah, absolutely. Our vision for Jumprope is to be the place everyone goes to discover how to do anything and our belief is that there’s no great place on your phone or on the internet where in the right format where everyone goes to learn, whether it’s to discover something new, to be inspired or to do something right now. Going back to what I said about stories, our belief is that the stories format is fundamentally better for both people with knowledge, passion, tips, tricks to share and better for people learning how to do things than either traditional written content or traditional continuous videos. And it’s better for several reasons.

Jake Poses: One is it stops and starts where you need it to. Two is, it’s actually shoppable. So you know what you need to buy and where to buy it. And three is by having this very structured information, we can be much better at surfacing the right content at the right time. On top of it, it’s, I think as probably many people on this podcast have experience, making a traditional video is really hard. It requires mastery of complex timeline based video editing tools and it’s very unstructured. And the reality is, and like I knew this at the time, but I really know this now, a lot of people have tried to create videos and have thrown up their hands and given up.

Jake Poses: And so we know by moving to the stories format, we can empower lots more people to share their knowledge and passion. Like many of the platforms that have come before us YouTube, Instagram, TikTok being examples, we’re taking the somewhat classic strategy of starting as a tool for creators as a pathway to becoming a network. And so if you think about YouTube in the early days, it was really a way to host your videos online and embed them in your website. The initial people who uploaded content to YouTube, we’re not looking to get discovered on YouTube. Similarly, in the early days of Instagram, when I started using it in 2010 or 2011, we were using it as a photo editing app. It was a simple way to filter and edit photos and show them to Facebook and Twitter.

Jake Poses: And so we’re taking a similar path with Jumprope. What we’re saying today is we want to be the best place for creators to create a step by step how to, whether they want to share that to Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, their blog, et cetera. And so we make it really easy and quick for creators to create and then we programmatically create the videos that are horizontal, square, stories, four by five images for Pinterest, a bunch of HTML formats for blogs so creators can create once and share everywhere. I was talking to a creator yesterday and she said she spent eight hours creating a video with a traditional video editing software and wasn’t particularly happy with it. And then, spent 20 minutes creating a video with Jumprope and was much happier with it. And that was what we were hoping to set out to do and I feel increasingly confident we’ve done it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s one of my favorite things to do is to think about the arc of how we consume content on the internet historically. And if you go way back, it’s Oh, it was text and it was links and that’s all that you could do. And then it’s, ah, then you could layer in photos, but they weren’t that great and in my lifetime I’ve seen the change from photo and text primarily to like, “Hey, you can start doing video now.” It’s not super successful and it buffers and you have download it and now it’s so easy to consume video online. There’s a nuanced change to video consumption that Jumprope is addressing, which is like the horizontal traditional classic video that you’d watch as you would TV, which would be like YouTube to the switch to phones.

Bjork Ostrom: There was a time five years ago, 10 years ago, whatever it is, you’d see somebody taking a video and they’d be holding their phone up and down. Like you normally hold your phone and it’s like, “Oh classic mom holding her phone upright and it’s not horizontal.” And within the past three years, that’s completely flipped where I’ll take like a family photo of us now and I’ll hold it horizontal so we can all fit in and Lindsay, my wife is like, “What are you doing? Don’t hold the phone horizontal.” And that’s true for stories. So with a platform like Jumprope, are you leading with that as a bet to how video content specifically and how to content will be consumed moving forward? Is that strictly what content looks like on Jumprope as a platform? Or are you also trying to play into some of those other types of content when people go through the content creation process in Jumprope?

Jake Poses: Well, our bet and I think we’re not the only ones who think this is, as you mentioned, there’s this lineage of content and that stories for things that are non narrative, like a recipe or craft project, even a news story. That stories are for people holding a mobile phone, the best way to consume it. And the reason why is it takes the best of an article or text, which is much easier to skim or move at your own pace and combines it with the storytelling power of video, which is much more immersive and compelling and explanatory. And what really all stories does is it chops up that video into lots of little pieces and put some interactive elements on top of it. And what that enables you to do is take that same piece of content and if you just want to be entertained by it and inspired by it, tap through it very fast.

Jake Poses: But if you’re actually trying to cook a recipe right now, move at a totally different pace and yet use that same piece of content in effectively that same format to do both things. And that’s just on the consumption side. That says nothing about the creation side and I think, as I was talking about, we believe that kind of the stories format opens up and it is opening up a whole new set of creators to create compelling content quickly. So when we think about us as a platform is to bet on stories. That being said, as I was kind of alluding to, is we want to support creators today on whatever platforms they want to be on. And so we take that hyper structured content you’re creating in Jumprope and we can still make for you a horizontal video for YouTube, a vertical video for RGTV, HTML for a blog post, images for Pinterest out of that same content. But our bed is a platform for Jumprope is board batting on stories even though we’ll give you all of this other content today to use on other platforms.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. Strategically, one of the really difficult questions for anybody who’s building a consumer platform like this is how do you get creators to use it? So then consumers who will consume that content will come and look at it. And what I hear you saying is, “Hey, we’re going to do whatever we can to really lean into building a service and a tool for free like YouTube did with hosting video content, which is really expensive. And then suddenly YouTube opens up and says, ”Hey, we’re going to do this for free.” You’re doing that with the content creation process both for stories but other types of multimedia to make that as easy as possible for people to create that.

Bjork Ostrom: The thing that I love about stories is something you’ve referenced a couple of different times is the fact that it captures 80% of the value or more with what you’d get with a traditional high quality time consuming video and you can create it in 20% of the time and some might even argue it’s more valuable because there is this level of authenticity that’s hard to capture in a more traditional type video that you’d see on a recipe video on Facebook. That’s sped up and has background music.

Jake Poses: Well, I think it’s authenticity as well as operability, right? It’s this concept of I can actually cook along to this. Like you don’t know the number of people who have told me how many times they’ve used their nose to pause a video while their hands are filled with all the oil on the kitchen.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I imagine it almost like headlines and they talk about how important it is to break up your content with a headline like an H2 if you’re writing content and video doesn’t really have that, but stories allows you to do that. And what’s interesting is you see companies, big companies and startups like Jumprope, you see these companies realizing that and people who use any platform like Instagram, Facebook, you see that. But as we’ve had conversations, you’ve also said, “Hey, there’s actually some other companies who are starting to experiment with that.” Can you talk a little bit about what you’re seeing in regards to the stories format with social media platforms that are starting to really lean into that more?

Jake Poses: Yeah, absolutely. We know that…

Bjork Ostrom: That’s social media.

Jake Poses: Yeah. No, I can get this right. We know that Snapchat really, they made stories a thing. Instagram unabashedly said, “We get that this is a thing, we’re going to rip this off.” It was Instagram that really where stories became relatively ubiquitous on the internet. Then obviously Instagram’s cousin Facebook said, “Wait, that’s what everyone on that platform wants.” And they made a big pivot to stories. And now everyone else in the content world, namely Google and Pinterest are also making big bets on stories. And so let’s talk about Google first, right? Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information. But the challenge Google has, and this may be the most existential threat that’s happened to Google and its existence, is that all of this content and stories doesn’t really work today on the web and exists in these closed platforms of Instagram and Facebook. And Instagram, which wants you to come to Instagram, doesn’t have a lot of incentive to index that and make that open for Google and Google says this is the problem.

Jake Poses: So Google is actually over the past year or so actually built a format for stories for the open web that they’re calling Google web stories. Those are showing up in search results, they’re showing up other places on Google and because Google, like Facebook, like Snapchat believes that stories are the future of a lot of the content that people are searching for on Google. Similarly, Pinterest is going in this direction as well. They’ve been testing something called story pins in the UK for, I want to say at least a year, maybe a little bit less than that. And they also believe that this concept of stories is the future of a lot of the content that does exist on Pinterest.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s interesting. I have the site pulled up here that you had linked to as we were trading some emails back and forth about web stories. For me it was like, “Oh, of course.” When we were having this conversation, it makes sense that Google is interested in trying to capture some of this and display it in some way in search results. And you see that with them hooking into Twitter’s API and displaying tweets when you search a certain topic, hooking into video, in displaying video results within search. But it’s oh, they’re kind of boxed out of stories especially when it’s on a platform like Instagram or Facebook. Can you talk about how that works from a search perspective? Like what does that mean for publishers that Google is going to start to look at this as a potential type of content to include in search results and how do we as publishers start to prepare ourselves to be in a place where we can take advantage of that?

Jake Poses: Absolutely. Just to be clear, I’m speaking from a perspective knowing a lot about SEO here, not from a perspective of knowing exactly where Google is going because frankly, as Google does things, they don’t know exactly where they’re going because they’re always testing and learning their way into it.

Bjork Ostrom: So do we. Yep.

Jake Poses: So just to be clear about the perspective I’m speaking from here, but you think about what Google has done on search results over the last five years is they’ve increasingly gone to these, away from the 10 blue links and to these kinds of richer formats, as you were alluding to. They’re often called carousels, right? Their recipe card carousels, their video carousels et cetera that rise to the top of search results. I think it’s pretty clear if you look at what Google is doing here, that that’s what they want. Is that when you search for any query where stories is a logical content type and a recipe would be that case. As I said, a news story would also potentially be that case to actually be displaying a carousel of web stories at the top of the Google search results.

Jake Poses: That’s one of the reasons why they’ve created this framework called Google web stories so folks can create them in a format that Google can understand and like they’re doing with AMP cache so they can serve that to the user quickly on search results. Again, it’s fairly clearly if you look at the lineage of other formats where Google wants to go here. In the short term though, stories are already showing up as search results and those search results likely are rising because what Google cares about is they care about, what is the experience for that searcher when they hit that webpage or that experience, right? And they’re looking at metrics of how long are people staying? Are they click bouncing back and clicking on another link et cetera? And stories, as we know, are an engaging format.

Jake Poses: So presumably if you create stories, people are spending more time, they’re engaged in that content. It’s loading well on their phones and therefore those results will rise up on the search results even before they’re privileged in the carousels. The other thing is that Google is looking to other surface areas, sorry, that’s a very tech word. Other places where they put content to further promote stories as they’re trying to get this ecosystem going, right? They need people to create content in stories format. And so they want to reward people for publishing content in that format. I think about this very similarly to where Instagram was with IGTV a year ago. Where if you published on Instagram and IGTV a year ago, you got an outrageous number of use because they were giving it extra kind of juice in the algorithm. Because they wanted to encourage more people to post IGTV. Google is doing some things today that are similar to reward the early adopters of web stories for publishing in that format.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. So a couple of things that would be great to pull apart there. Number one, you had talked about AMP and it’s something that I feel like a lot of people here and are familiar with but don’t really fully understand what that is and how that works. Can you talk at a high level what AMP is and then specifically what that means for stories?

Jake Poses: Yeah. What AMP stands for is Accelerated Mobile Pages. The problem Google really tried to solve with AMP is that they know that when people search for things, they want pages, they click on to load fast and they know that that’s a better experience for the searcher, which is one of the things Google optimizes for. And so they built, this was probably five or six years ago now maybe even longer than that, this concept of Accelerated Mobile Pages that let Google basically with stripped down JavaScript or limited JavaScript and just HTML and CSS cache pages in a way that they could load them very quickly. So the web stories I would say, a distant cousin to AMP. It shares some of the actually same components, but what Google is doing with web stories is something similar, right?

Jake Poses: They’re doing several things. One is that they know they need to enable publishers to have the framework of stories, right? Like websites historically, don’t have the little segments on the top, right? And the ability to tap on anything. We’ve built all of that into the Jumprope app and Instagram has built that into the Instagram app and Snapchat obviously into the Snapchat app, but it doesn’t really exist in the web. And Google said, “Because we want to promote this stories ecosystem, let’s create this and just give this away.” It’s often called open source to anyone who wants to use it. So that’s one piece of it is basically saying, “We’re going to give you this framework that enables you to publish stories on the web. Everyone is welcome to use it the way they want to use it.

Jake Poses: The second thing is if you publish in that framework and meet a certain set of conditions, then it enables Google to take this content and what they call cache it. And caching means that they’re actually storing it on their own servers so they can therefore deliver it to the searcher much faster than it would if you were serving it yourself and they’re going to privilege content like they do with AMP, that they can cache because it gives the searcher a better experience.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Because it loads fast and especially when you think of mobile, not a big deal for me when I’m here in the Twin Cities and I have 5GE, whatever that means and a fast wi-fi connection. I can load a video, I can load a page pretty quickly, but when I go with Lindsay’s family to their cabin in Three Lakes, Wisconsin, it’s like wow, that’s suddenly a very different story. But it’s the reality for a lot of people especially when they’re on their phones and so this is something that allows you to load it really quickly, especially important when it’s video, because video is very bandwidth intensive. So it makes sense why Google would want to think through how do we make this as quick as possible and ways that they would do that is to take over the process of downloading that and caching it and then distributing it to people as quickly as possible.

Jake Poses: Yeah. There’s some other fun things they’ve done with stories is that they’ve enabled us to… well, we’re building on top of them. We’re building with them on this, but another layer of interactivity. So unlike Instagram stories, Instagram stories, unless you have 10,000 followers, you can’t even do a swipe up. With Google stories, you can do a lot more interactivity, right? So you can have them be shoppable. For example, if you publish a recipe on Jumprope and include products, whether pots or pans or ingredients or supplies and put in links, those are actually shoppable via Google web stories in a way that they are not with Instagram. They’re somewhat going there with Instagram shopping, but not giving the publisher anywhere near as much control as you can have with Google web stores.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. That would make sense in the open source format where they say, “Hey, here’s the framework that you can use and you can kind of use this however you want. If you want to include affiliate links, you can do that. If you want the ability to swipe up, you can control it on your own. But we’re going to give you the basics of how to put that together.” So talk to me about the difference between doing that on a platform and the reality is, as I understand it on Jumprope, if you are creating a story that is built in a way where Google can index that and display it versus doing it on your own website and having that embedded on your site. What does that look like in terms of the difference between doing this on your own, on your own site versus doing it within a platform like Jumprope?

Jake Poses: Yeah. So let me just explain how it works on Jumprope so it’s so it’s clear, right? When you publish on Jumprope, you have your content on Jumprope, you also get all these videos that you can use for YouTube, for Instagram stories, for Instagram posts, for Pinterest, and we also publish our content in a format that’s called the what we’re talking about, which is Google web stories that as I said, we work closely with Google on creating this format. And so we’ve created this for you. You can take the Jumprope version of Google web stories and actually embed it in your website just like you could embed a YouTube player or a Instagram embed, et cetera.

Jake Poses: Frankly, doing this on your own, I don’t know exactly what you would do as a food blogger and we’re actually talking to a lot of publishers, whether they be, people like Bustle or the Washington Post, et cetera, and they’re actually struggling to create these things in stories format because you really need an editor, right? If you think about what’s powerful about Instagram stories is they give you this really simple to use editor that enables you to make content. I would think about Jumprope as an editor that enables you to create content for Google web stories. Yes, as a developer you could go absolutely build exactly what you wanted on top of Google web stories, but that would be a fairly large amount of engineering investment that I wouldn’t even notice exactly where to tell you to start in doing that because there’d be a lot to build.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s similar to YouTube in that sense where you could host your own videos and spin up your own servers and you could own all of that and pay for all of that and develop that out. But it’s a lot easier to press the upload button on YouTube and then have your video on YouTube. Jumprope, it’s interesting where I feel like YouTube was hosting not much editing capabilities. It sounds like early on you knew that this was something that you wanted to do. So you built in that ability to do some editing and to create these all from within your phone. You don’t have to be shooting it on a camera and then uploading to your computer and then uploading Jumprope. You can do it all from within the app. So the interesting thing though is not only can you create these multiple versions of the content you can create stories, but Jumprope also is a platform where you can follow people, you can connect with people.

Bjork Ostrom: We actually just went through this with TikTok where we relate to the game and we had to go through this whole process of getting the Pinch of Yum handle. So I would encourage everybody this listening, jump onto Jumprope, get your handle, explore, see what it’s like because it’s a platform as well. You can create content, publish to Jumprope, have people follow along. So can you talk about what that looks like from start to finish? We’ve talked a lot about the content creation part and how great that is for content creators to be able to have all of those different formats and people will see that as they experiment with it. But what does that look like on the consumer side? Most people are creators here, but what will it look like for the audience that then discovers them on Jumprope?

Jake Poses: Yeah, absolutely. So when you sign up for Jumprope as a consumer, similar to what you do when you sign up for Pinterest or TikTok, we ask you what your interests are so we can better target content for you that matches those interests. Interests are such things as food, baking, drinks, travel, crafts, et cetera. And really people are using Jumprope for three things. One is pure entertainment, right? We know a lot of people watch recipes just because they find it fascinating to see people make crazy breads or decorate crazy cookies or make a homemade pasta and ridiculously funny shapes. So a bunch of people are watching for entertainment.

Jake Poses: A second set of people are watching for inspiration. I always use the example of, “I want to make a cocktail tonight. I don’t know what I’m going to make, so I’m going to go watch a bunch of cocktails and then be Oh, I might make that one.” And then the third is people are actually cooking along or making drinks along with Jumprope. And we’ve built two modes into our player, which again is you’re going to look at, it looks a lot like Instagram stories. In one mode is auto play where like Instagram stories, it progresses to the next panel of the story when the previous one finishes, and the second is you can turn auto play off. And so we have lots of people cooking along with Jumprope. They obviously are turning auto play off, so when they’re done chopping the garlic or done boiling of the water, they tap the screen and can move on to the next step. We have people using Jumprope all of those use cases. It’s a fun community that’s growing really rapidly. We were Apple’s app of the day just a week or two ago.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, I was going to mention that. That’s awesome.

Jake Poses: Yeah, just a week or two ago. We’ve had creators who are getting 50,000 views. It’s definitely not the average yet, but on some of the content that they’re creating on the Jumprope platform. And food is probably our most popular category. I know that’s relevant to lots of people listening.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Have you noticed during this season of people being at home and consuming more content in general that that correlates to more people using Jumprope? Just out of curiosity.

Jake Poses: Absolutely. We’ve seen about a 400% increase over the last eight weeks in people creating content. And a similar increase in people consuming content. Obviously the world, unfortunately people are having to stay home and that lends itself to us. But we’re obviously growing. As a young company, we’re growing even faster than the broader range of people doing these activities.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. Can you talk through, as a creator, advice for how to maximize, like fully leverage the things that you’ve built into Jumprope? So if I’m a solo entrepreneur, a content creator what are the ways that you would highlight? We’ve kind of talked around them a little bit, but can you really specifically say, “Hey, if you’re creator, here’s you should get in and do this. This is going to be the most helpful.”

Jake Poses: Yeah. The thing that most people love the most is that you quickly create once and then you can share to whatever platforms, all the platforms you want to be on. And so we are great for people who want to be on YouTube, Pinterest, Instagram, and blogs simultaneously because we have formats that are optimized for each of those platforms. You don’t have to use all of them. You can use none of them. You can use all of them. You can use a few of them, but it’s really the person who says, “I want to create engaging content. I don’t have the budget to go hire a production crew, et cetera and I want to be on multiple platforms.”

Jake Poses: One other thing we’ve seen a lot of people doing is it’s a great way to take content that you already have and repurpose it. So we know a lot of people have YouTube videos and would love to get those to be Instagram stories or on Pinterest or on a new platform, like Jumprope all embeddable in their blog in a different way. Similarly, we have people who have done a bunch of step-by-step stuff in Instagram stories and want to actually create YouTube style videos that they can actually use to monetize, especially if they’re more of a media type creator, and put those and monetize those on their blog. So we have a bunch of people using it, convert legacy content, a bunch of people using it to create new content.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And easiest way to find it is just to jump into the App Store or Google Play Store and search Jumprope?

Jake Poses: Yeah, search Jumprope. One word. If you start Jumprope one word come up as the top hit on both the App Store and the Play Store.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. Was jumprope.com hard to get? I’m always curious with domain names.

Jake Poses: I would say jumprope.com was moderately expensive to get. We bought it from a company that was selling Jump ropes.

Bjork Ostrom: Makes sense.

Jake Poses: It was a process. We may have overpaid a little bit for it, but yeah, I kind of say, I knew from going through this SEO world that Thumbtack that trying… we didn’t change our domain at Thumbtack, but I knew if we did, it would have been a nightmare. And so I said, “Let’s pay off for the ultimate domain we want.”

Bjork Ostrom: Let’s do this way.

Jake Poses: “And we may be getting ripped off a little bit here, but…” It’s so hard to build a company and if you can take some challenges off the table, it’s always helpful to do that.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes, for sure. That’s great and adds a huge amount of credibility as does things like getting app of the day with Apple and just the general quality of the stuff that you guys do, what you see when you go to the site or download the app. So Jake, super fun to talk to you, congrats on the early success that you’ve had. I know that you’ll have continued success as you build Jumprope. If people want to connect with you, is there a great way to reach out to you personally?

Jake Poses: Absolutely. Jumprope would only be what it is because we’ve gotten so many questions and so much feedback from creators. So in terms of reaching out to me personally, I’m just @jakeposes on Instagram or @JakePoses on Twitter, or even feel free to drop me an email. I’m just [email protected]. We also are quite good about responding to questions on Let’s Jumprope and Jumprope Eats on Instagram. And if you download the app, we have chat built in for when creators have questions. So feel free to a message our team there. Again, questions are actually great because they tell us where to go and what’s confusing. And so don’t be shy about reaching out. Our philosophy is we want all of the best creators creating on Jumprope and we are set up as a team with community managers to support whether you’re a new creator, as an experienced creator. So please, please reach out. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Appreciate that, Jake. Thanks so much for coming on the podcast.

Jake Poses: Thank you for having me. It was fun.

Alexa Peduzzi: And that’s a wrap on this week’s episode of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast. We really appreciate you being here and we hope that this episode gave you somewhere to start if you’ve been wanting to get into creating recipe videos, but I have felt just a little bit overwhelmed. As a reminder, you can check out the Jumprope app just by searching for Jumprope in the Apple App Store or in the Google Play Store. You can score your handle and then start creating and discovering new content. So that should do it for us this week. Thank you again for tuning in, and if you appreciate the podcast, if you enjoy listening to the podcast, we would really appreciate a review from you on Apple podcasts. It helps the show so much, and it helps us get in front of more listeners. But we’ll see you next time, and from all of us here at FBP HQ, make it a great week.