195: Some Exciting Updates Coming to Food Blogger Pro with Bjork Ostrom

Ladies and jelly beans, just want to make sure if there are any jelly beans listening, that we give a little shout out to them. And gentlemen as well, we today have a very, very fun podcast episode. This is something that's actually been a long time coming. We have been talking about this, thinking about, hoping for this for a really long time with Food Blogger Pro. And we are finally at the point where we are starting to talk about it and share it not only with Food Blogger Pro members, but also with people that listen to the podcast like yourself. And the reason that we are sharing it on the podcast, number one, we have a lot of Food Blogger Pro members who listen to this podcast, so we are talking to you. And number two, because I think there's value in hearing a story and hearing people talk about the current transitions that are happening. And we're going to do that today. But before, before we do that, I'm going to bury the lead and I'm going to share a little bit about the story of Food Blogger Pro. Now, I've shared about this before on the podcast. It's something that I've talked about before, but I thought it'd be good to rewind the tape on Food Blogger Pro, almost like I'm doing an interview with the membership site and talk a little bit about our story for the business or the story of the business of Food Blogger Pro. So I'm going to have to have to rewind the tape all the way back to 2012, which is crazy to think it was that long ago. But it's almost seven years now, and Lindsay and I were actually living and working in the Philippines. Lindsay was teaching at a school that was associated with an orphanage that we're still connected with called the Children's Shelter of Cebu. And during the day, all the kids were in school and there wasn't a lot for me to do during the day. We had a lot going on in the nights. We had a lot going on on weekends. And there's ways that I could get plugged in. But during the day, I found myself one working for the nonprofit that I was working with before we left for the Philippines. So I stayed plugged in and worked remotely. And number I found myself kind of exploring and thinking about different things that we could be doing. And we had been working on Pinch of Yum for about two years at that point and started to kind of understand the ins and outs of the business side of what it took to grow a food blog. And so Lindsay and I kind of started throwing around this idea of Creating this community for people that have a food blog or publish recipes. And I was at a coffee shop. I remember the coffee shop was Coffee Dream in Cebu City. There's multiple Coffee Dreams in Cebu City. They had this acoustic pop cover playing and there was this CD that played on loop. There was maybe like 12 songs and it was acoustic pop covers. And I remember sitting down and kind of brainstorming names and thinking, okay, what is this that we want to be doing with this site? What is the intent of it? We, we knew that we wanted to focus on a certain niche, and so we knew that we wanted to have the content be around food blogs, and we knew that we wanted it to be for people who are interested in doing it at a pro level. So we didn't know that was the word at the time. But the idea being these weren't people that necessarily just wanted to have a hobby or kind of do something just for fun. Not that that's bad. But we, we said, hey, we want to work with people who are interested in growing and building something and going pro with it. And what does it mean to go pro? Well, if you think of, you know, college athletes, when they go pro, they transition from college to maybe the NBA, if it's basketball, the wnba, and they start to get paid for the work that they're doing, they start to get paid skills. So we wanted to create a community around people that were creating food or recipe sites and wanted to transition to the point where they were figuring out ways to take that pro to get paid for their work. And looked up and saw that foodbloggerpro.com was available. So he said, hey, this is kind of what we're going for. People that are starting recipe sites, that are starting food blogs, that want to go pro. So we launched Food Blogger Pro. Well, at that point, we didn't launch it. We registered the domain and we actually went into the launch process. Now, the launch process is actually something that's also really interesting because a lot of us are thinking about launching something. What does that look like? And I was going to share just a little bit about what it looked like to launch Food Blogger Pro. So this was the quarter four of 2012, and this was October, November, kind of December range. And what had happened was we knew that we wanted to launch this, but we didn't know how to create a membership site. We didn't know all the components that went into it. And I knew that if we're going to be creating the content, recording the videos, putting together all of the Lessons that I also couldn't put in the time to learn how to get up and running with the technical components of a membership site. So what I did was I went into research mode to try and find other people who had done something similar. And I had reached out to a few different people. And one of the individuals that I reached out to, his name was John. He had a site called 47 Media, and his partner at the time was Nate. And they had recently been on a podcast. And I had listened to that podcast and they had talked about launching their own membership site. And it was literally me going into the podcast. It was actually itunes at the time and searching membership site, and then just listening to every single podcast that I could that had to do with somebody launching or starting a membership site. And this podcast that I had listened to, it was John and Nate being interviewed about what it was like for them to go through the process of building, from a technical side, from the technical side of things, their membership site. So I reached out. It was an email. It was late at night. I remember thinking, I should just go to bed. And I thought, no, I'm gonna send this one email to John and connect with these guys to see if they'd be interested in partnering and working together. So I sent an email. I recorded a quick video, a little screencast, explaining my idea, and I said, hey, would it be possible? Would there be any possibility of essentially replicating what you've created with. Their site was called Kicktastic, which is such a great name, replicating what you've created with Kicktastic. Except for this thing that we're trying to create for food bloggers called Food Blogger Pro. They said, hey, love that idea, love what you guys are doing, love the potential of working together. Let's have a conversation. So we had that conversation. And the biggest thing for us at the time was we needed funding in order to get this off the ground. Right? It's not free to work with somebody to do all of these technical things to put together the components of a website. As many of you know who have worked with designers or developers, they appropriately should get paid. They should get paid appropriately for the work that they do, which oftentimes that's an expensive relationship. And so we had to do some creative thinking. We didn't have the funds for it, so we had to do some creative thinking around what that looked like to raise that money that we then put into the site. And what we decided to do was what we called a pre sale. And that also helped us gauge interest for how many people were would actually be interested in something like this. A membership site for food bloggers. We didn't know if there was 10 people out there, a hundred people or a thousand people. And so what we did is on Pinch of Yum, we did a post that kind of outlined what Food Blogger Pro is all about. It was called Introducing Food Blogger Pro. And on that post we talked about what it was going to be. We talked about the things that we were going to teach, we talked about the videos that were going to be available. And we also said, hey, for the next three months we're going to do a presale and you can sign up for a discounted one year membership. It was kind of like a Kickstarter. And those pre sales were structured in a way where it was a deeply discounted price on what a normal membership would be. And we had said, hey, a normal membership at the time it was $25 a month or 250 a year. We said this is going to be the cost when we launch, but if you sign up now, you're going to get a discount. We actually did it tiered. So we said if you sign up three months in advance, it'll be $49 for one year. So this is a super discounted price if you sign up two months in advance. So getting a little bit closer to the launch date, it'll be 70 dol. And if you sign up the month before we launch it'll be 1 29. So we still have some of those first time members, those early members that are part of Food Blogger Pro today, which is so cool. And those people signed up and they said, hey, we don't know exactly what it's going to be, what it's going to look like, but we're interested in learning these things that you talked about. So then our job, my task was to create that content. We put together those videos, we edited them and it was a really difficult three months because there's a ton of content that we're creating. And then John and his team worked behind the scenes to create the site. And our goal was to launch on February 1 and to have a library of content. And we had also a pool of new members right off the bat because of this pre sale and the presale. I don't remember the exact amount, but it ended up being about $10,000 that it was able, that we were able to get from that pre sale period. And that's what we used to fund and to launch Food Blogger Pro. Now the interesting Thing when you look at the technical side, we've talked about that a little bit. What it was actually built on, what was FoodBlogger Pro built on? And the content management system that we used is called ExpressionEngine. It's still the site that FoodBlogger Pro runs on today. And it's kind of a competitor to WordPress. So both WordPress and Expression Engine, both of those are content management systems. They allow you to publish blog posts, they allow you to publish pages, they allow you to have a easy to use backend where you can organize your content. And that worked because in those early stages, we said, hey, we like what you have with this site, replicate it, and then we will use that. So we didn't have real specific things that we said, we need this, this and this. We just said, hey, we want to do this as affordably as possible. So instead of making it super custom, can you just replicate it? And we will work within kind of the parameters that we have for the replicated site and we will kind of skin it and put our information in it. Now, there's some other components that were a part of it. You have to manage billing, so that was a piece of it. You have to make sure that membership components for this site are updated. And there's things called paywalls, so members can only access certain parts of the site. And in Expression Engine, those are called add ons. So there is these add ons that we had that helped us to manage that. Now, as you know, if you use WordPress, which a lot of people that listen to this podcast use WordPress, one of the really important things is making sure that everything that you're using, from your content management system to your plugins, to the theme that you use, all of those things are updated appropriately. And what happened over time was that the different components that we had for Expression Engine and the pieces of the puzzle that made up the Food Blogger Pro membership site, those stopped being supported, at least on a organizational level. So we had to hire individuals to help us support and to help us keep these different parts of the site updated because the actual add on or the plugin was no longer updated. So we individually kind of became the people that had to support and update the plugin. And, you know, we know from WP Tasty, which is the site that we have for WordPress plugins, that the great thing about what we do is we put a lot of time, energy and money into maintaining and updating plugins that we use on Pinch of Yum. And then other Other people can sign up and use those for a not huge dollar amount. Right? So when you compare 29 or 49 or $79 a year to the actual thousands of dollars that go into maintaining it, that's a great relationship for people who want to have some of the same functionality. But what happened for Food Blogger Pro was because those companies were no longer active, we had to then pay the hundreds or sometimes thousands of dollars to maintain those add ons in because nobody else was doing it and we wanted to make sure they were up to date and we wanted to make sure that everything was running well, but we had to be the ones doing it. Not only that, but we started to go really deep into WordPress. So we pinch of yum runs on WordPress. WP tasty. The site runs on WordPress. We're also creating plugins for WordPress that are great plugins that we want to be using, but we can't because we're using this other content management system. Essentially we're to going, going deep on WordPress and really understand it and know what an awesome content management system it is. And so there's this disconnect where we understand WordPress, we know WordPress, we support WordPress, but food blogger Pro as a site where we talk about WordPress, encourage people to use WordPress, it's not running on WordPress. And so for a long, long time we've thought we really need to make this change and switch Food Blogger Pro over to be a WordPress site. And that's what we're doing. We're going through the process of updating Food Blogger Pro so it's no longer running on a content management system, that it's a good content management system, but not one that we know and understand. We're switching that over to WordPress and that's going to be happening here. If you are a Word, if you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you're going to be getting updates on this switch to WordPress and you're going to be getting notifications as it happens. The great thing is that moving forward, this will allow us to add some awesome functionality and some really incredible features that we've been wanting to add, but we've been a little bit restricted because of our understanding and the amount that we're willing to invest into Expression Engine as a content management system. So we are super excited about making this change. Again. Food Blogger Pro members, you'll get some notifications along the way, but what we wanted to let you know about is a little bit of the Backstory, why that happened, what the process was like, how we got started. And the big takeaway that I want to encourage for anybody thinking of starting something is that the most important thing isn't to get every tiny little detail right. I think sometimes we can get into analysis paralysis of saying, I need this to be right and this to be exact, and I need to understand every single component that goes into it. That's important. It's important to understand, it's important to have knowledge of the thing that you're investing into. But one, one of the most important things is to start and then to continue along the way. And that's what we did with Food Blogger Pro. We said, hey, this is where we want to be going in general, what we want to be doing. Let's start, and then we can evolve from there. Expression Engine has served us well, but now it's time to switch over to WordPress. So if you are in the early stages of thinking about, hey, what is the thing that I want to do, and you feel like you're being weighed down a little bit by getting everything perfect before you launch that thing, my encouragement for you and the story of Food Blogger Pro can be a testament to this, is that it's most important to start. And then as you are building, you can start to put the pieces together as you get a better understanding of what that is. But don't get too bogged down with all of the decisions and all of the little pieces and all of the little things that go into it. Find that person, maybe reach out, maybe it's a simple email and say, hey, can you partner with me and help me start this thing? Or maybe it's as simple as if you're thinking of starting your site and you haven't done that yet, it's writing your first blog post instead of researching the best theme to use. Those are the things that are going to be really important to get you kickstarted with moving forward on a really significant project. The other thing that we wanted to talk about that's going to be really important is that Food Blogger Pro is now going to be running on WordPress. And so because of that, we're going to be able to talk about the tools that we are using to build Food Blogger Pro. It's kind of like eating our own dog food, where you use that phrase. Essentially, it means the things that you are creating and promoting, you are also then using. We haven't been able to do that with Food Blogger Pro. So we're going to talk about things like, even for Food Blogger Pro, what are the components that go together to run this membership site? We get a lot of people that reach out Food Blogger Pro members, people that listen to the podcast and that say, hey, how do I start a membership site on WordPress? And we have to say, food Blogger Pro doesn't run on WordPress, but now it does. We can talk about the marketing tools that we use, we can talk about the plugins that we use, we can talk about all the different components that go into running a membership site, as well as the things that go into running a successful food blog, because we're going to be running all of those across the board on WordPress. So when will this change be happening? We haven't set a date yet. There's not a date on the calendar that we've. Well, I should say this. We've set a couple dates, we have an ambitious date and then we have a fallback date. But the important thing is for Food Blogger Pro members, you will be getting notified of that along the way. The other thing that's important to know is there will be some things that will be different about Food Blogger Pro, and those are things that we are actually really excited about. An example, a super small thing that I'm really excited about is we're going to have free use of emoji on the forums. For those of you that are Food Blogger Pro members, you know that we have emoji, but they're not like the actual emoji that you'd use with your phone or if you're sending messages to people or interacting on social media. These are going to be those actual emoji that we're going to be able to use in the forum, which is a super small thing, but I'm really excited about. The actual look and feel of Food Blogger Pro will be pretty similar. So you're not going to notice this drastic, drastic difference when you get in and see, like, hey, everything looks completely different. The design of it is going to be pretty similar. Some of the functionality might be a tiny bit different. But again, to use the forum as an example, those are going to be enhancements. So the, the, the ability to post to the forum, the way, the way that you can craft your messages, the styling that you can use when responding to people, all of that stuff is going to be an enhancement because of the features and capabilities that we have with WordPress. Now, for those of you that who are members, if you do get in, you know, once the change happens, once the switch happens, if you do get in and notice something, say, hey, this looks a little bit off. It looks like it should be working this way and it doesn't work that way. There will be a period where we'll be kind of squashing bugs and making small tweaks and enhancements to make sure that we are not only where we were before with the site, but a little bit better. And then the great thing is because of the flexibility in our understanding of WordPress long term, we'll be able to really scale and build and enhance the site. So it's something that we've been talking about, I would say, for years, our team, and in 2019, we're finally making it happen. And we are so excited for the community and for the members of Food Blogger Pro for what this means and for us as a team for what it allows us to do moving forward to create more value, to continue to create an incredible site and to continue to find ways that we can do whatever we can to help you go pro with your food or recipe site, which was the intent as we scale the. Or rewind the tape back, it was the intent all those years ago when we said, hey, we want to create a community for people who are doing similar things to us, where we can talk about the things that we're doing, but also as a community, learn from each other. And this will be a change in an upgrade that will allow us to continue to do that and to do that even better moving forward. And we are really excited about it. So Food Blogger Pro members, keep an eye out for that communication. If you have any questions leading up to it, just let us know. And once that switch happens, we would love to hear from you. Any feedback that you have, any things that you're especially loving, any areas where you say, hey, maybe this looks a little bit off and and could use a tweak or enhancement. Any of those things we would love to hear and we could not be more excited for this change. So thank you Food Blogger Pro members, for being a part of this community. And it is one of the great joys of what we do is being able to serve and be a part of this community. Thank you podcast listeners who follow along. Maybe you have a food blog, maybe you don't. You're just interested in the podcast and following along with what we do. If you do have a food blog, I would really encourage you to sign up for the waiting list for Food Blogger Pro so you can sign up up and become a member and join this incredible community. And you can do that just by going to foodbloggerpro.com and signing up there. So that is the update from Minnesota. Wherever you are, whether you are in the Philippines like we were when we launched Food Blogger Pro, or just next door or miles and miles away, we really appreciate you and are so thankful that you listen and follow along with this podcast and are part of this greater community. So that's it. Signing off. Thanks a lot. Bye.