This past year, I came close to shutting My Food Job Rocks down.
I spent all of my time building Better Meat Co, and the anxiety to do both was piling up. It was getting harder and harder to post episodes weekly. People told me I should reduce my workload on the podcast, but it just didn’t feel right. It was like breaking a streak that you just can’t break. The persistence of posting week after week for years is something that really was respected, and what made My Food Job Rocks one of the most well-known food industry podcasts in the world. It’s what made it special.
This is a review of 3 years of podcasting. We kept going, but what happened? why is it growing? and what’s planned for the future?
The Public Speaking Goal
I wrote in this article that I wanted to try more public speaking gigs in 2018-2019. I had a lot of fun at IFT’s Ignite session and wanted to continue trying it out.
Well, I got what I wanted. Alex Shirazi allowed me to present 3 times at his events in Silicon Valley about food science, My Food Job Rocks, and Better Meat Co. It was fantastic and I can’t thank Alex enough to really give me the confidence to do things like that.
I’ve returned the favor to Alex, as I invited him to be on a panel at IFT2019 in New Orleans. It went well and I’m so happy that Alex had the chance to inspire the audience, along with Jessica Gavin and Nicole Gallace, that you can do it too.
The other side of the story was when Universities have invited me to speak. My alma mater, Cal Poly, invited me first last year. UC Davis, Ohio State, and North Carolina personally flew me out to talk to their students and I loved it! It was so fun talking about podcasting and inspiring students that the opportunity to communicate food science is changing, and is ripe for the picking.
What was really surprising, is that more than one student in most of the colleges I went to, asked if I was a food scientist, and asked how I liked podcasting as a full-time job. I had to tell them, podcasting wasn’t my full-time job!
Though I never planned for it or gave it much thought, I completed my goal on public speaking. I never gave a specific number of speeches, or anything like that, I just thought it would be fun and stuck it in the back of my head. When the opportunity came up, like a sleeper agent, I just said “yes, I’ll do that”.
What? Why are we Still Growing?
In my 150 episode touchpoint review, I told people I was going to put My Food Job Rocks on maintenance mode. Just a podcast, just an article. I still wanted to have the platform be active because it’s good for me to keep doing it, and people liked it. If I saw a decrease in downloads and growth, it would give me a good excuse to shut it down. So I just posted interviews, articles, and didn’t ask for sponsorship unless it was very short term.
But it didn’t slow down. The opposite happened.
The stats for both the podcast and the website kept on growing, and kept on growing faster. For some reason, people started to hear from their friends, the live events started to matter.
With a total of 90,000 downloads and around 4500 downloads monthly, we’re building momentum. The site is now being recognized constantly by Google as a resource with the blog views surpassing podcast downloads for the first time since inception. We are growing steadily, and it’s been amazing seeing it.
Could the growth of the platform be because of the synergy with Better Meat Co? Probably initially, but I think a majority has come from word of mouth. Like a game of telephone, people didn’t actually know what I did for a living. Some people didn’t even know I was a food scientist let alone a founding member of a startup.
Originally, I told people in my inner circle that the goal of My Food Job Rocks was to get a strong enough network to start my own company or something. And I definitively achieved that last year and felt a bit lost on what to do with the platform. However, I still had to satisfy my ad contracts, I still had PR firms asking me to interview amazing people, and people still loved the content. I had to keep going, or, I wanted to keep going.
The beauty of goals is that they always change, they morph when you do something often, and generally morph when things get difficult. Through all of the interviews and all of the speaking opportunities, things have slowly morphed. The goal has changed and now I really do think there is an opportunity to tell people’s story within the food industry. We need it now, more than ever.
The Decision to Step Down
I was recently informed a couple of weeks ago, they gutted the innovation department at my last company and a lot of my friends lost their jobs and morale has sunk to the ground. Some say I was wise to leave. But I was just lucky jumping in blindly to start Better Meat Co. I guess I won the bet.
Better Meat Co became successful because we have people who are very good at what they do. We raised over $1 million dollars in a friends and family round on an uncapped SAFE, which apparently is unheard of. I don’t know, I stay away from that jargon. We got PO’s with a couple of meat manufacturers, and we are looking into the future in terms of innovating in the space by investing in some amazing technology. With this burst in growth, and events that are actually having us turn into a company, things got stressful for me.
My personal funds were dwindling because I challenged myself to suffer as a co-founder, I wasn’t taking care of my health and wellbeing, and I was emotionally unstable. I even went to therapy without insurance a couple of rounds to deal with the issues I dealt with. This is the basis of it, I couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t enjoying being a co-founder. I never liked talking about it unless I had to push something through fast, and get information quickly. Maybe I kept it on the down-low because I felt like it would go away soon. Being a co-founder, especially at a startup with so much at stake, was starting to break me and caused me to be extremely temperamental.
With 1000 options about the outcome of leaving everything, and calling dozens of people for advice, I rationalized that the best option was to step down, and become an employee.
Being an employee allows me to focus on treating Better Meat Co as a transactional process rather than being married to it. Yes, that sounds weird, but I realized that adding my emotional opinion to the company lead to bad decisions and unnecessary tensions. At the end of the day, I could not see myself being a leader of this type of company, but I could still see myself just diligently working there. To a point, a startup like this would just feel like a job anyways as a co-founder of my skillset. There are too many stakeholders, too much risk, to be truly creatively free.
The question sometimes comes up that if by some miracle, we cash out, I could be a mutli-millionaire as a co-founder. It is a lot less likely that the cashout for an employee will make me set for life. Money is not a concern for me, in fact, I love living like a bum to a point. However, I do enjoy the thrill of earning my own money through sweat and persistence, and the pay-off would be incredibly long at this type of start-up. Take that however you want, but with the My Food Job Rocks platform, I could tangibly see everything and control the things I wanted to control.
In times of stress, I always dig into what makes me truly happy. And I read back on an old post that it was: Creative freedom and recognition. Yes, building a company was awesome. Heck, you can say I built two fledgling products. Am I an entrepreneur yet? Or am I a failure for not making it a six or seven figure business? I dunno. I still struggle with that question. Though Better Meat Co did give me the creative freedom and recognition, it shrank as the stakes got higher. The B2B model, which I’ve learned so much about, limits those two values because of the nature of the business model.
Creating products, or things that people find joy in, really makes me feel amazing. Creating doesn’t just have to be food products or podcasts, but maybe meetup groups, or events that allow people to be together. I’m still trying to figure this out. I’m sure most people don’t know what truly makes them happy.
Becoming an employee, or actually having a food job, allows me to separate Better Meat Co and my life. The work becomes goal post-oriented rather than this long road and telling everyone we’re going to be ok, but you don’t know if things will be ok.
I trust the co-founders of Better Meat Co to make the right financial and leadership decisions and allows me to not feel obligated to make decisions that take a lot of mental energy. This is very hard to explain, but let’s say the mental energy it took to be cofounder can now be transferred to things I really want to build.
I had a ton of fun building Better Meat Co in its first year, I’m still a big part in building it to be successful. I love validating that my products work, that people love them, and that I could create not only great products but create a basis for a great company. I am fortunate that this can still happen by being an employee. Now I can finally say that after a year, My Food Job Rocks (get it?)
I recently read Anything You Want by Derek Sivers. It’s a short book, you can read it in less than 2 hours, but I find value in it every time. The author, Derek, made a company called CD Baby but as it grew, the more unhappy he became. He loved doing the coding for the website and building it, he didn’t like managing. Eventually, he over delegated and ended up staying in his home all day coding the site. Eventually, he sold CD Baby and donated almost all of it to charity. The main takeaway this time is that if you don’t like something, it’s ok to stop doing it. It’s your life, after all.
The Decision to Step Up
Starting My Food Job Rocks saved me from despair both times. One in a hard time in Phoenix, another in a hard time with the startup.
I look back at the opportunities My Food Job Rocks gave me. It allowed me to not only validate a good idea, but it allowed me to grow a passion project into something truly tangible. I’ve met some amazing people, and solidified relationships. Personal and professional.
My Food Job Rocks has always been the true form of the values I want in life. It gives me creative freedom in the media space and I can play around with how I want things to look, and I get recognized just because well, that’s the risk of publishing your voice for thousands to listen to. I never actually realized how much this project has really changed the course of my life.
It allowed me to move back to my home town, allowed me to start a legitimate company, and allowed me to have a chance to now influence and inspire the food industry whether through blogging or podcasting, or perhaps something else. There is now an opportunity that I want to explore.
Stepping down from Better Meat Co allowed some very fortunate events to happen. Not only did the mentally tough decision freed me to think more creatively, but a recent side project gave me some money to grow the platform and invest in some amazing projects.
So this year, three major things will happen.
I’ve been in connection with the wonderful people at Naturally Bay Area, and they gave me some fantastic opportunities to do short-form live interviews. I just thought of this 2 weeks ago, so the logo isn’t done yet, but we’ll be creating another podcast under the My Food Job Rocks’ name. This will be called: the Shared Plates Podcast and it will be sporadic, in-person 20-30 minute podcasts featuring fantastic guests like Dan Kuzrock from Regrained, Rusty from Kitchentown, Jon Sebastiani from Sonoma Brands, and so many more innovators in the Bay Area. Shared Plates is used because the information presented is small, but full of flavor. I hope to launch this next month but we’ll see.
Next, we’ll be launching a paid B2B service called Food Industry Rockstars, where we will be connecting with companies to create podcasts which can talk about their people and their values in this new form of media. As proven in My Food Job Rocks, people love the stories that people talk about, and if you learn something about what they do, even better! Can we replicate the model and do this for companies? We will see. I have a couple of companies already on board.
Will it work? No idea. But that’s why we test things.
And we’ll be putting Shared Plates, Food Industry Rockstars, My Food Job Rocks, and a future endeavor under the umbrella: Food Science Media Lab, LLC. Food Science Media Lab is what it is, a place for experimentation. I want to tackle on a big project next year, different from anything I’ve done and I want to learn it from scratch. With so many projects, I want to house stuff in one umbrella.
Yes, being a complete idiot, I’m starting another company. Starting a company doesn’t mean anything except registering to the state for tax mumbo jumbo (which is more of a pain than I thought). I don’t want it to be a grand empire, or want a lot of money, just enough to be sustainable, I don’t want to even think about raising money like we did Better Meat Co. But for me, the mission is important. Through all of the lessons taught to me by the entrepreneurs I’ve met, you really need to be passionate about your mission. For me, I want to make food science mainstream, I feel like this is the start of something. A kindling. And I think I can fuel the fire.
I look back at the 3 years since I started podcasting. It might be egotistical to think that without you, things wouldn’t exist, but I do believe a lot of projects that allowed people to follow their dreams would not exist if I didn’t start this little project. I’ve had friends, family and strangers’ message me about branching out because they see me living it and being authentic on the good and bad parts. Just by showing up every Monday, it’s inspired thousands. Just by saying yes, it’s created things people love or maybe might impact the world. It’s an amazing feeling, perhaps it’s what I live for.
Now it’s time to move forward and see what will happen next year. Who knows? If you’ve been reading these, you can see that every year is something new and exciting, and worth living. I have no idea what next year has in store but that’s the fun of it.
And you’re always welcome to be part of the story.
For those who have had a conversation with me, whether through a podcast, a digital message or in person, thank you for changing my life.
