Creating with Intention — How Shawn Blanc Became an Entrepreneur | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

Sean, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Glad to be here. We've had many conversations, none of which I don't think have been recorded. I mean, we did. We did. We were hanging out in Colorado, which is the first time that we hung out in person, which is an awesome kind of group of people that you get together to talk about business and life. Maybe technically some of those were recorded but not published. So this will be our first recorded and published conversation. And these are podcast interviews that I love doing because it's talking to a friend, but it's also talking to somebody who I respect and has a lot of business insight that can share with his audience. So for those who aren't familiar, can you share. Rewind the tape, kind of go back and share your business story? I think a lot of people who listen to this have a business story or. Or they want to have their business story. And in hearing other people's stories, they can find either inspiration or potential, kind of like a business Sherpa, to see if they can kind of guide themselves in a similar way. So what's your story? Yeah.

Thank you. This is awesome. I'm so happy to be here and everyone who's joining and listening, watching, et cetera. Just an honor to spend a little bit of time here. So my story kind of actually starts 10 years ago, just. Just celebrated 10 years of being an indie blogger, basically. I've kind of expanded since then. I started by myself back in 2011, and now I have a small team. We've got a few people that are full time for us and several contracted writers and editors who are on retainer. And I now went from one kind of personal blog to now a handful of different blogs and different brands kind of around some similar topics, some a little bit different, some overlapping. So I'll kind of share the story behind all of that. So it's 2010. This is one year before I quit my job, and I was the marketing director for a pretty large nonprofit. And, you know, it's fun. I loved my job. I was working 70 to 80 hours a week, but I didn't have any kids.

What does 70 to 80 hours look like? Because some people say that. And I don't think I've ever worked 70 to 80 hours. And I'm like, wait a minute. That's like, pretty extreme. Are you doing that every day? You're working weekends?

It's basically 5am to 9pm Most days of the week, five, six, seven days.

A week, and that's what you're doing. So you're getting up, going in, sitting down. It was in person, I'm guessing, so you're at an office.

So I would work a few hours at home before going in, and then I would go in, and then I would come home, and then I would have dinner, and then I would finish working and then go to bed. And part of it was we were just, you know, a large is a nonprofit. And so I like to joke with nonprofits that you have all of the red tape of a big corporation and then none of the money. So I did love it. I really enjoyed that season of my life. And I worked with a great team, and we did some really amazing work. And I probably grew more. I was in that role as a director for three years, and. And I grew a ton as a person, as a leader, as a manager, as a creative person. But my wife and I ended up getting pregnant at the end of 2010, and then a couple weeks later miscarried that baby. And that was our first pregnancy. And like this, that moment of going, oh, my gosh, I'm going to be a dad, and then actually losing the baby and going through that with my wife, and it was just this. Everything kind of slowed down for me. And I sort of felt like Neo in the Matrix. That first scene when the bullets are flying to Eddie and they're all like, they're going by slow. And suddenly it was like all of these things in my life that had been going so fast and felt like they were so important flying at me. I'm now able to stop and look at them and, like, you know, pick them up almost and analyze and examine.

Yep, this.

A lot of this stuff actually is no longer important to me. And just values in my life almost changed overnight. And I realized that I will be a dad eventually. Not right now, but I'm going to be a dad again. And I don't want to do 70 hours a week as a dad. I want to have more flexibility for my schedule. I want to be home more often. I want to have more freedom to travel, to go on adventures with my kids or whatever. So I had this little side blog that was kind of my side hustle. And at the time, I had been working on the side and was doing like a. Maybe like a thousand dollars a month. And I did some affiliate stuff through Amazon. We're doing sponsored blog posts. I had some sidebar ads. And so it wasn't a ton, but, you know, about a thousand bucks a month. And I would just spend that money on, like, computer gear or whatever. And I'm like, well, if I'm spending, you know, five, ten hours a week on this here and there, and I.

Can do it from 2am to 5am, right?

Exactly. Somewhere in the in between hours.

Yeah.

And I mean, it wasn't always. It was, you know, sometimes like an average week might have been like 60, like, or like a low, low average week. So.

Yeah, but you're like on lunch or weekends, maybe you have a post that you want to write, which is very similar how Pinch of Yum started. It was like early mornings, late nights, weekends and lunches.

Exactly. Just all the in betweens. And it was kind of one of the things that I was just thinking about constantly. So when I'm at work, I've got downtime in between meetings or whatever. I'm. I'm writing up ideas for these articles or just doing links to other stuff. And so just kind of fun stuff, like, well, if I'm doing this on the side, I can make a thousand bucks a month. I was like, I bet if I gave it 40 hours a week, I could do 4,000amonth and that would be enough. That's all I need. I live in Kansas City. That would be great. So I decided I'm going to quit the marketing job and I'm going to start this blog full time. And let's see what happens. And so I just announced it to my readership. I had about 6,000 people on RSS. I didn't have an email newsletter at all at the time. Twitter was still. This is 10 years ago, so Twitter was pretty young. I had a few thousand followers on Twitter. It was just my blog and just people would read my blog. And so I just put up a blog post that said, I'm quitting my job and you can support me to write this site full time if you want. And it's three bucks a month. I called it like a good cup of coffee. And there was no Patreon. So it was going to be through PayPal.

Yep.

And I had a friend who did some stuff like, similar to that, and he recommended. He's like, hey, you should do have them pay like three months at a time at least, because then you're bulk.

Yeah.

Minimizing the transaction fees.

Yeah.

So I was like, okay, well, so I'll use three bucks a month, but it's nine bucks a quarter is basically what it really is. And my goal was, I was like, well, if I got 1000 bucks a month from this, if I can get like 500 members, then I'll be at 2,500amonth. Because of 500 plus 15, 2500amonth. But they'll pay three months in advance and so I'll have some chunk there. My wife still was working part time for the ministry, so she had a little bit of revenue. I was like, between that and this, that would be enough to get started and I could be profitable from day one, basically, if I can get 500 members. So I put up the blog post and 400 people signed up the first day. 24 hours.

Amazing. And 400 people. And how long have you been publishing content at that point?

Probably three, four, four or five years, I think.

Okay. Consistently. Yep, yep. And you had given a lot. Like, there's a. There's a Gary Vaynerchuk book that came out long, long time ago that I looked through. But the concept was jab, jab, jab, right hook. Like this boxing analogy for like you give, give, give, and then you ask occasionally.

Yep.

You had essentially been giving for like five years. And then this was the really the first ask that you had of your audience. Is that right?

Yeah, pretty much. I think so.

Do you think you could have done that earlier?

Probably, I probably could have done it earlier, yeah. I bet I could have done it a year earlier. But there was also like in the transition. So this was, you know, it was like a four month transition from when I decided I was going to do the, the go public or go indie to when I actually did. You know, I started reaching out to people that I knew that had been in this space, people that had been successful here before me and just asking for advice and getting input and then kind of writing about some of these things like on the side. And so a lot of people that were paying attention started to sense a transition was coming and so they were kind of like looking forward to it, I think. And when I finally did go live, uh, with the, with the announcement, like, a lot of people just knew it was coming. And then a lot of these people that I had reached out to who were a step or two ahead of me and I'd asked them for advice, they then in turn shared it with their audience. So I got some pretty decent promotion from like, I think Jason Kotki helped support it and John Gruber and some of these guys that had huge audiences.

Yeah.

So that definitely helped boost the signal of that. Um, and then within John Gruber, I.

Don'T know your space as well, but that when I, even when I hear that name, I'm like, wait a minute, like the tech Jon Gruber, like that's a big deal.

Yeah, he was so helpful. We had several conversations because he had been writing Daring Fireball for a few years before I went full time. And he was super generous with any advice and input and really appreciated that. So.

Yeah, and you've referred to it a couple times as your blog, your site. Can you talk specifically about like what that was and the focus of it, the niche, the genre and. Yeah, so a chance to do kind of some promotion of it, but also wind that into the story a little bit.

So the site was just. My name is SeanBlanc.net and I wrote quite a bit about Apple and tech and design. So sort of that space of I do product reviews of iPhones or new apps. I was just huge Apple nerd. And so that was kind of the space. And then the main business model, like I said, was the affiliate stuff. So I'd link to some on Amazon here or there or like at Christmas I would do a roundup and you know, like 300 bucks on Amazon affiliates. And I was like, whoa, so much.

Yeah, yeah.

And then the sponsorship. So people would pay for me to promote one of their products. Like once a week I would do a sponsored blog post type of a thing and it was just kind of whatever I'd want to write about. So sometimes I would do long form articles that were in depth reviews or just stuff I was really interested in or research I had done. And then a lot of it was links to other interesting things around the web. And this was something that Jon Gruber kind of pioneered with his link list on Daring Fireball. And a lot of sites now do that, something similar, which is super cool. And so I just kind of would do that links other stuff with a little commentary here or there. And then when I took it full time, the perk of being a member was you got access to this podcast I did every day. It was called Shaun Today and it was like a five minute podcast. And I did, I think I did seven or 800 episodes of it over the years. And just that was, you know, you pay three bucks a month and you got that. So that was the perk. And yeah, so that was SeanBlanc.net that was sort of the genesis of it. And that was my. I did that full time for a while before moving on or not moving on, but adding to sort of like the site sphere stuff. The portfolio. Yeah, exactly, the portfolio.

Yeah. So do you think. Couple questions with that because I think it's an interesting story. That's a little Bit different than how most of the audience would think of how they're building their site, which is like, hey, I got to get a lot of traffic, and then I got to monetize with ads and sponsored content, which is something that you did, but it's actually asking people to support you. Do you think that. Do you think you could still do that today? Or is there some function of what you're doing today where that still exists? And what would your advice be for people who want to ask their audience to support them? Like, I'm even thinking of the newsletter subscription company Substack. Yeah, Patreon. I think there's a version of that. I think Ghost is maybe like the open source version of Substack. So it seems like it exists, maybe not in our niche in the exact same way. But how do you think of that today? Like asking people to support you in your endeavor?

Man, that is a great question. I get that a lot, actually. And I've thought about it a lot, too, and I think a huge factor of me being able to quit my job to get 400 people to sign up that first day was also the novelty of it. At the time, I could count on one hand the people I knew that were blogging for a living, and it was just very, very few people. And so for me to say, hey, I'm doing this, like a lot of the people that supported me, it's like, wow, interesting. Exactly. Like, this is so cool. Or I'm so glad that someone.

Hundred times and.

Exactly. And so there was much less just competition, so to speak, in the space of being an indie creator. And in some ways now there's quite a bit more competition, but there's also. It's so much easier to do it now. So when, you know, I did, I had to set up the PayPal thing.

And.

I'm getting these people to sign up, but I have no connection between the private, quote, unquote, private podcast and then the PayPal membership and my site. None of this. Copying email addresses, ending emails manually one at a time with a link to a public podcast RSS feed saying, please don't share this with anybody. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's on your honor. And it was just like, you know, it was just all. It was all goofy, but it worked, you know, and the tools now are so much better and so much easier and so much more.

It's less novel now because of that.

But it's also less novel. Yep.

Yeah. How much do you think in. In your opinion marketing is, or in the case of what you were doing. How much of it is novelty versus how much of it is having an awesome audience of excited people? I mean, in some ways it's the exact Kevin Kelly quote of like a thousand true fans. It was like 400 true fans. Right, right. And you saw that play out in a way that was life changing for you. So how much when you look back at it is like, hey, new creative, interesting thing as a form of marketing versus I've been serving this audience and doing a really good job of that for five years and these are my true fans and they're going to support me in whatever it might be.

Yeah, I think that's really well said. It's a combination of both. I think that the new interesting novel Shiny Thing definitely helps. And a friend of ours, Barrett Brooks, has kind of. We've talked about this before. He's the COO for ConvertKit, but he also has a lot of business consulting and he's just got a lot of insight into this stuff. And he's talked about the difference between the thump value and then the sticking power. And I think that the give, give, give, and not only like serving your audience, connecting with them, giving to them, showing up, sweating the details, taking pride in your work, that is the sticking power. Right. So this is what forges the relationships. This is what makes your product actually awesome and what makes people want to stick around and they trust you and they're engaged with what you do. And then like the big launch or the new shiny thing or whatever, there's like the thump value to that. And even with my own courses, like, we've kind of transitioned from the Patreon and the advertising model to. We're pretty much entirely customer funded now. And I'll tell more about this later, that progression, but the very first course I ever launched, I felt like I had to have so much stuff in it and just pack it full of all these extra resources and all these extra features and all this extra content that was ancillary around the core component of the course itself and then charge like one third what I thought it was worth. And, and you know, and that was where Barrett was like, hey, you know, the thump value, you got a lot of thump value here. But at some way you're also kind of distracting people from the core of what they're actually signing up for.

Right.

So the shiny, the new shiny stuff, where you've, you've marketed it well, you've done a good job of making sure that what you're promoting is going to resonate with your audience, or at least with the right segment or cohort of your audience that you're marketing it to. Like, that matters quite a bit. As well as have you been showing up? Have you been in some ways, like building in public, working in public? Have you sweated the details? Have you served your audience and built that relationship and that rapport with them so that they trust you? And then obviously they're excited to sign up.

It's interesting. I was listening to an interview today with Adam Grant. He wrote a few different books. His most recent, I think, is I don't remember if it's called Rethink or Think Again.

Just came out, I think.

Yeah. Like days or weeks ago. And he was talking about this idea in negotiation, how a lot of times the more points you include in a negotiation for why you're right, the less effective it becomes, as opposed to if you just have one really strong point. And I think the same can be true with what I hear you saying is when you think of packaging something up and offering it to somebody, one of the ways that it can be really valuable is like, here's the really specific thing that you're going to experience in going through this as opposed to this and this and this and this and this and this. And then the idea being like, oh, it's so valuable because there's all this stuff in it. But in actuality, if you can just have one single thing and do that really well, you in a course or in some type of offering that can be more effective because of the clarity around it. And also that people being able to envision the transformation that they'll go through if they do it. Is that a little bit of what you're getting at in the. You called it the thump value with it. Yeah, exactly.

And I think that the multiple bullet point list also is sort of a symptom of having a lack of clarity yourself about the product. And what does this actually do? And who is this for? And if you can't answer that really simply, like, if you don't know, then your audience definitely is not going to know. And I think when you can simplify it down and you can say, this is what we do, that's better than anybody else, does it like, we do this one thing. Amazing. Then you feel like you're, oh, but what about all the other people that kind of want something else that's similar to what we kind of offer? And we can add this. Yeah, it's. You're actually like when you have the huge long list in some ways you're alienating people as opposed to drawing them in when you can get really specific.

Yeah, you're drawing.