Turning Followers into Revenue with Ben Jabbawy from Grocers List

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across Comment for DM tools. Using that functionality within Instagram can result in some huge wins, but the tools are really complicated and they’re oftentimes built for marketers, like people who are in the tool day in and day out, not built for food bloggers or recipe creators specifically. That’s where Grocer’s List comes in. It’s built from the ground up for food creators. So if you’re looking to grow your email list, get more traffic to your site, or maybe earn more affiliate sales all without spending a ton of extra time or having to learn a complicated tool, then Grocer’s List is for you. And what’s really cool is they’re seeing some pretty impressive numbers, like 75% click-through rates, which is kind of mind blowing, and 5% opt-in rates from people who are engaging with content that is sent through the Grocers List platform. And they’re actually doing an Office hour session soon. So if you want to see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at grocerslist.com. And a little bonus for you as a podcast listener, if you use the promo code podcast, you’ll get your first month completely free. Again, that’s grocerslist.com, promo code: podcast.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. I’m Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. This week we’re continuing our Grocers List miniseries and chatting with Ben Jabbawy, the founder of Grocers List. Bjork and Ben will talk about how social media isn’t just a place for likes and comments. It’s a real launchpad for building a business. They’ll also get into the power of email lists. Owning your audience means you’re not at the mercy of the algorithm gods, and that’s huge for long-term success. They’ll round out the interview by diving into how to make content work smarter for you by repurposing what you’ve already made, automating workflows and using smart tools to keep things moving without burning out. So whether you’re looking to grow your audience, boost revenue, or just make your content hustle a little harder for you, this episode is packed with gems you won’t want to miss. And with that, let’s dive right into the interview.

Bjork Ostrom: Ben, welcome to the podcast.

Ben Jabbawy: So pumped to be here, Bjork.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’ve been chatting a lot about all things software, Instagram, our Slacks are officially connected now, which feels like that’s a relationship in the digital world where you connect the Slack accounts. And we’re going to be talking today about Grocers List, but really what we’re going to be talking about is this shift that we’ve seen in the world of content creation around really trying to prioritize, capturing the value that people are creating on social media specifically Instagram, it’s really relevant for us, meaning Pinch of Yum because we’ve been working for 13, 14, 15 years, whatever it is. Whenever Instagram came out building this audience previously we’re kind of loosely directing people to the site or maybe occasionally doing meal plans. But now we really have this tool, and a lot of people have talked about on the podcast as well that allows you to capture some of the value that you are creating on social media and on Instagram. Before we get into the specifics of talking about that, tell me about the opportunity that you saw when you first launched this because you had sold a company for hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, I don’t know what the number is and if it’s public, but then you came back to it, you got into the weeds again and started to create a new company. So tell me about the origin story, and maybe you can start the story by talking about selling your first company.

Ben Jabbawy: Sure, yeah, I don’t talk about it a lot, but I’m happy to share. Yeah, I built a company called privy.com for about 10 years, and that company got acquired in 2021 for 120 million. It was kind of an out of body experience, super exciting moment personally for the company as well. And that was focused on what I describe as vertical software. So here’s a group of people, every one of them is different, but they all kind of look the same. In that company, it was e-commerce store owners building their store on Shopify, and we built a suite of marketing tools just for them with amazing support. And that equation really helped skyrocket the business. Over a 10 year period. I worked for the buyer, I took a bunch of time off. We care a lot about cooking at home and the benefits of that for health and relationships. And in my time off, all of the inspiration for the recipes we’re cooking at home came from Instagram. And coming from my background in commerce, I was noticing A, how much technology lives around the recipe itself, WordPress, Kit or Flodesk, a bunch of other tools, Mediavine, Raptive, et cetera. But I was also noticing that there was kind of this absence of a lot of the consumer conveniences that I was used to coming from commerce, single click checkout, all these types of things that we just live with in the Amazon world or e-commerce world. So I kind of started to look at a lot of these food creators and talk to some of them. I have a really good friend, Lexi’s Clean Kitchen, who was super helpful in kind of opening the kimono a little bit. And it was the first time I really understood how big these businesses are. This is an incredible form of entrepreneurship and the businesses are meaningful, and then B, how many food creators achieve real scale? So when I really started to understand that, I also in those conversations, learned that very few of them speak highly of the software tools that they’re using And how very few of those tools are actually built for the workflows of food creators and bloggers specifically. So when I saw all these things, I’m like, wow, this is a space that I love. This is a customer that I really can get behind. It’s entrepreneurship, which is kind of what I was doing before, was serving small businesses. And I actually think that with pretty much the same team I built with before, we could do some pretty amazing things and unlock real magic for these creators.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, one of the things we talk about on this podcast a lot is there’s two different forms of content marketing. There’s content marketing where you are creating content to eventually sell a product, and then there’s content marketing, which most of us do, which is like we are marketing the content that we are creating, which is the product. Like you create a recipe, Lindsay creates a recipe. That recipe is the product. She’s usually not trying to sell something directly underneath that, although there’s huge opportunity for that to package content up, to create memberships, to create additional actual products, digital or otherwise. But generally speaking, a lot of us are creating a recipe and we are marketing that recipe, but the tools that we are using for that are almost always built either extremely broad. So they are a tool that is built for marketers in general, or I think of a competitor in a similar space to Grocers List, ManyChat. A lot of times it would be like a dedicated marketer on a team is the person using that tool. And so when you get into it, you realize like, oh, these tools are not specific and they’re generally complicated and not built for the workflow that we would have as food creators, which is you are creating a recipe, you are marketing that recipe, or you are marketing food related type content. And it’s so cool to see the overlap with your previous company in the e-commerce space and creating tools for those small business owners to help them seamlessly transact online and then saying, okay, what’s another industry where people are looking to seamlessly interact online and reduce the friction around those interactions to create more value? When you have that friction, what’s happening is you’re losing value in the interaction, and if you can make that friction list, the creator can capture more value and the user gets more value in the interaction. So in those early conversations, what did you start to see as the opportunity and what were some of the early tools that you started to create?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, so the one stat that is forever ingrained in my mind from e-commerce is that with each click that you ask your potential buyer to take on the internet, you’re losing about 30% of them along the way. And so when I was catching up with my friend Lexi or some of the other early creators we were talking to, a lot of them were kind of doing this thing where they were like, I mean, it’s ubiquitous now, but go to the link in my bio to find the recipe or go to Google and search my name and the recipe and you’ll find it. And so it’s like think about how many clicks you’re asking someone to take right there to go access the piece of content that earns you your income. So that was the first workflow, and then a bunch of ’em said, Hey, we’re using this thing called ManyChat and it takes 10 minutes every day. I need to log in, I need to set this thing up every single day. I hate it. It’s over complicated. Some of ’em were even saying they need to log in just to game the system and delete contacts to keep the price manageable. So I’m like, wait a second. With everything going on, you’re just trying to market your contact, your content that you’ve created, you’re going through this process. And look, I think it’s an amazing product that they have, so it’s no Ill will there, but it’s just not built for creators, especially food creators. So that was really the first product. And hearing the sentiments from some many chat users where we say, okay, there’s really an opportunity and because of the drop off in Lincoln Bio, this is actually the right first product for us to build because we can do it better, we can make it easier, and we can start to build a name for ourselves around driving traffic a revenue for food creators with great support.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Can you talk about when you said the drop off of link in bio, what do you mean by that?

Ben Jabbawy: So if I’m looking at a recipe of yours and the only way for me to easily access that is to go off of that recipe reel to your profile, then click the link bio, I load up the link in bio and I have to find that recipe. You would be surprised how many creators tell me that’s actually the biggest volume of follower support that they receive because those aren’t searchable. Sometimes the connection between Instagram and the link in bio service breaks and it’s not updating. And if it’s not the first recipe that I was looking at on Instagram, I’m actually looking around and the pictures match. So there’s just all this

Bjork Ostrom: Confusion, friction,

Ben Jabbawy: Friction,

Bjork Ostrom: And you can imagine, so somebody, especially the way that Instagram works now, people probably aren’t going to your feed and looking chronologically through it, they’re probably getting served a piece of content because of the algorithm. And that piece of content might be six months old, it might be three months old, it might be one month old. And so the actual process of discovering that and clicking on it is really clunky is what I hear you saying. And so the ability to again reduce that friction is such a huge advantage. And so my guess is what you started to do is how do we in a food specific way, in a recipe specific way, how do we reduce friction? And the result of that it sounds like was kind of this first iteration of the first product offering and kind of this marketing stack for food creators, which is the ability to interact with that specific piece of content and then get a DM sent to you with that recipe along with the option to sign up for email. Is that more or less kind of how the first offering evolved?

Ben Jabbawy: That’s exactly it. How do we enable that for your follower so that there’s no question, right? I was looking at this reel, now I see the image of that reel when I get a DM from the creator, so I’m immediately clicking through or I have a convenience as a follower to easily move that from my Instagram DM to my email so I can look at it later. That was it. But we wanted to do that in a way that actually did not require that the creator log in to set anything up,

Bjork Ostrom: Which is great. You see, you go through the process once you get your account set up and then it already is set up. Can you talk about how that works? And again, it comes back to this idea of removing friction. In this case, it’s removing friction on the creator side. You talked about this idea of going into a ManyChat or another equivalent taking 10 to 15 minutes. Initially you hear that and you’re like, that wouldn’t take that long, but it’s friction. And there’s a lot of things in my life that would only take 10 to 15 minutes, but I don’t do ‘em because of friction and because I’m not, I’m in the middle of a thing. Or for a lot of people, Lindsay as an example, we might be going, it might be driving back to our hometown to swim at her parents’ pool and she’s like, I just got to get this piece of content out real quick. And then the idea of logging into this desktop centric tool and setting that up. So can you talk about how that works functionally within the tool?

Ben Jabbawy: Absolutely. So we have two modes, set it and forget it. I’ll walk through and then we have custom and all that. But for set it and forget it, you essentially create a template of what your recipe dms are going to look like. We’ll automatically pull in the cover image that you had selected the moment you upload your reel, so it’s already your creative and your content and your photography. So we pull that into the dm, you can add a little bit of text, you’ll keep it pretty generic to work for any recipe. And then we’ll add a button that will automatically pull in a link from your Instagram caption, and that’s presumably the link to the recipe or the piece of content that you’re driving the traffic to. So if the link exists, if you’ve added your keyword like recipe or save for pinch of Yum into your account, then you actually don’t need to log in and set up a automation for each post. And to your point, if some of our customers post multiple times a day on Instagram once a day, I mean 10 to 15 minutes times five or 10 posts a week, I mean, that really starts to add up. And so I think there’s, for a lot of folks that have come over from some of these other platforms, once they go live with that, there’s this aha moment where it’s like, whoa, I actually don’t need to do that anymore. We have this quote from one of our early customers, Dorothy from Crazy for Crust, that she said like, oh my God, I can finally shut down my ManyChat tab on my desktop. Best compliment ever. I hope that you log in and use all our other great tools, but I wouldn’t be surprised if she hasn’t logged in since.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Well, and it’s like part of the reality of being a creator is that you also have to be an expert in all of these adjacent tools that we’re using. And you’re doing email and figuring out Kit and you need to understand Instagram, and we just set up a WhatsApp channel and it’s like, okay, so suddenly you have all of these different things, and what we need to do is we need to figure out how do you stay lean as a team because I think you also don’t want to build a team of 10 people as your company grows, and then suddenly you’re not a creator anymore, you’re a manager. So how do you work with tools that allow you to do what you do best the most, which is for most of us it’s create. Some people are really good at management want to do that more like the idea of scaling up that team, but how do you create work with these lean tools that allow you to do that? And the thing that I think we have a journey, you and I have talked about it, we jumped on a call to process through our decisions with DM functionality. We tried ManyChat for a while, didn’t feel like it was a great fit, and also just had questions around the functionality of what does it look like for people to interact with our content in this way? And so we really didn’t see a huge benefit to it, but once we started to understand the benefit of some of these tools, not only as it relates to traffic, I think that’s a nice to have, but specifically as it relates to the ability to grow your email list, and then you have these people who are subscribers and have a long-term relationship with them, you’re taking it off of the Instagram platform or whatever social platform it would be. We’re going to be talking about Instagram mostly. You’re taking it off of that platform and suddenly you have the ability to then interact with this person with an email. And the thing that’s so great about the multiple different variables that are at play here is not only is it a great time to grow your email list because of the increased potential from email subscribers because of first party data. And so for those who aren’t familiar, I’m sure Ben, but for those who aren’t familiar, you have the ability to turn on a setting if you use Kit, which appends a certain variable to every email click, which allows every person who clicks on an email that you send out to be tracked within the dashboard for Raptive and I think Mediavine as well, that increases the earning potential from those people. And so for a site like Pinch of Yum, our email list is valuable just from the clicks that we’re getting from that traffic in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so now suddenly there is this justification that didn’t exist in the same way because we didn’t see a clear path to the value around using some of these tools not only for traffic, but also to increase email subscribers. And we’ve had many people, What Molly Made, we had Molly on and she talked about her process of building her email list. That was a great episode. If people want to go back and listen to that using Kit and Grocers List, we’ve started to do that and have had some great success building the Pinch of Yum email list, whereas for a long time it was static. So what we’ve seen is not only that growth and that being a valuable thing, but it’s happening at the same time. That search traffic, there’s a real big question mark on it and for a lot of people they’re seeing search traffic decline. AI mode was recently released by Google. A lot of people are starting to use these LLMs to chat to get their information. And so all of these things are kind of happening at the same time, and then you come in with your experience and your expertise. All that to say this is a long preamble for us saying we saw this great opportunity. Not only do we have this relationship in the official sponsorship for the Food Blogger Pro podcast, which we’re thankful for, but I reached out to you, I was like, Hey, could we invest? Is there an opportunity to be an advisor? And so we’re just at the point now where we’re buttoning up the investment that we’ll make into groceries list and coming on as advisor as well. We previously had that with Slickstream, which was another great tool that was acquired by Raptive and is now integrated in with Raptive. But whenever there’s these cross sections of these opportunities, for me personally, I’m like, wow, this is really cool. There’s all these industry things happening on a macro level, Ben has this great experience as one in a million of growing a successful company also know there’s no guarantees with any company. But for me it was exciting to see the opportunity to say, Hey, is there an opportunity to invest? What would it look like to come on an advisor? Because it’s so narrowly focused on the industry that we are in. The tool has, we’ve had success with it, we’ve seen other people having success with it. So all that to say excited about that as well. But can you speak to the kind of macroeconomic climate and some of the shifts that you are seeing in how creators are starting to think about the value that the way that they’re capturing value, the way that they’re creating revenue as a creator focused business?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, I mean, my belief after coming from e-commerce is that there’s really two things on the internet that you can own for your brand. That’s your website and that’s your email list. And I think every five to 10 years email becomes, it comes back into the spotlight as the thing that you own. Now, at the same time, the hardest thing on the internet is to build an audience. That’s what I love about this visit industry and ecosystem is like that’s actually the thing that food creators have done most successfully. That’s the hard part, that consistency, the entertainment value, the inspiration for cooking stuff that improves your life or just tastes good. That’s the hard part. And so if you can then really weave in some tools and automation, maybe some ai, whatever, that makes it easier for you to achieve that, that’s going to lead to you owning your destiny more as a business. We are hearing, we just did a customer survey the other day and the data was really telling, it’s about 40% of people that took the survey said that their website traffic is flat or down this year. And the biggest fear that people had as it related to that was centered around AI results in search. And so I don’t want to paint a negative story about where this industry goes over the next couple of years. I think, again, if you have really strong relationships that you own a move, people from Instagram to email paid memberships I think will grow in this category as well. I think you’ll be able to define how you drive traffic, but I think people that are not focused on list growth and Google search is the number one revenue driver to the site or traffic driver to the site. I do worry a little bit of what happens over the next couple of years for that.

Bjork Ostrom: And part of it is just you hear the stories and maybe you are the story as well. Google releases an algorithm update, and that algorithm update massively impacts the traffic that you’re getting. And the hard part is with a lot of this, people are following best practices or they’re doing the thing that they were rewarded for. We talk about this in the world of search a lot where people aren’t in the recipe world, people aren’t creating really long pieces of content that have multiple sections in it to try and be annoying to their readers. They’re doing it because that’s what worked for search results. And the only reason that people saw those results and then were like, oh, these results, these pages are so long. Why are people the kind of classic, why are you telling me a story about blah blah, blah? It’s because it worked and that’s why you saw it. That’s why you clicked on it in the search result and went there is because that person was creating a piece of content in a way that was being rewarded and that switches and the game changes. So then you have to figure out, okay, now we need to go to human-centric content and less structured content around the history of potatoes and more content around me as a human. And so that’s kind of this new arc that you have, and these things change for the platforms depending on decisions that they are making. Another example in the world of food is recipe. And so we know that Google is testing, putting in three different versions. One version is the ingredients of a recipe. And this would be like in a search result, you’d see it and then you’d click on the card and you would see another screen that would show you either just the ingredients with the need to click to the recipe, the ingredients with an AI overview of the instructions, or the third one they’re testing is ingredients with all the instructions as well. And so all of these things are happening, and we’ve seen stories of people who have built a really successful site built on traffic, I think of friends who are in the affiliate world and some e-commerce sites as well. And within a week that all goes away. Some of those survive, but some don’t. And the ones that do survive are oftentimes the ones that have almost always are the ones that have another platform, Social or email in a lot of cases that they can continue to build on, communicate with their audience. And so it’s a great point around needing to diversify the revenue sources that you have, the places where you have followers and email being such a great place to do that. Like you said, there’s also the ability to do membership and community as well, which we can talk about. But before we do that, what are some specific strategies that you are seeing from people right now that are working when it comes to growing an email list? Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. If you’re a food creator, chances are you’ve come across comment for DM tools. Using that functionality within Instagram can result in some huge wins, but the tools are really complicated and they’re oftentimes built for marketers, like people who are in the tool day in and day out, not built for food bloggers or recipe creators specifically. That’s where Grocer’s List comes in. It’s built from the ground up for food creators. So if you’re looking to grow your email list, get more traffic to your site or maybe earn more affiliate sales all without spending a ton of extra time or having to learn a complicated tool, then Grocers List is for you. And what’s really cool is they’re seeing some pretty impressive numbers, like 75% click-through rates, which is kind of mind blowing, and 5% opt-in rates from people who are engaging with content that is sent through the Grocers list platform. And they’re actually doing an office hour session soon. So if you want to see the behind the scenes of how creators are using it, you can sign up at grocerslist.com and a little bonus for you as a podcast listener, if you use the promo code podcast, you’ll get your first month completely free. Again, that’s grocerslist.com promo code: podcast.

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, there’s really two components to the list growth playbook that we’re seeing inside of the DM automation game. One I’ll describe as passive list growth. And so we’ve got this awesome feature called save to email. You’re familiar that from your website probably, and inside the DM, whether that’s Instagram or Facebook, if you turn this on, your followers have the ability to essentially, without notifying you, without you having the conversation, put their email into the DM with you and have that recipe emailed to them where it’s searchable, it’s referenceable later. A lot of people use email as their to-do list, and it’s just kind of convenient for the follower. So that’s the passive list growth play. We see about 5% of the DMs that you send out are opting into email. Kind of amazing for five minutes of work, just setting it up and making your template look good. And that’s the passive list growth play. The more active list growth play is when you actually, instead of using the recipe as the core CTA, the recipe link on your site, you replace that with an opt-in form on Kit. And so a good example of this will be actually, well, I don’t want to steal her thunder. I know Lizzie’s going to talk about this, but maybe you’re doing,

Bjork Ostrom: You can still reference it. Okay. Yeah, I think repeat exposure to a story is okay.

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah. And we see a lot of creators do this. So Lindsay had this, it was like seven freezer specific recipes, and she had that sending out through an email, but in order to access that, she had this landing page on kit, and the landing pages on kit include a URL. And so she used that URL in a DM through Grocers List, and she and Jenna cut this awesome reel of Lindsay basically in an hour preparing all seven of these dishes that get stored in a plastic bag and they’re ready for easy access in the freezer. So the flow, the funnel was the reel goes up, you comment the word save, the link that gets sent through the DM actually drives you to the kit landing page. If you want all seven of those recipes, you put your email in and that adds you to the kit subscription. So that’s an active playbook for list growth. And we see that maybe nine out of 10 of a creator’s recipes that they’re driving traffic to through the DMs are just the recipe link. But maybe one out of those 10 is repurposing some of the content you have your most viral recipes, meal prep, a meal plan, a Mother’s Day menu, something like that behind a landing page. And that more active playbook can really drive a lot of volume very quickly, which what we saw with Pinup Yum, which was super cool.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool.

Ben Jabbawy: I think that one was like 20% of the 20% growth in the overall Kit size just from that single reel.

Bjork Ostrom: It was as much growth as we’ve had in the email list over the past year. It was crazy. And we admittedly haven’t been great about focusing on email, but what’s been so great about this is it doesn’t require us to create these opt-ins on the site and for the site to gray out and then to have the email form highlighted. And I think previously, and one of the reasons why it was so uninspiring to focus on email growth was it felt like a lot of the things that were working really well was either a really significant lift around creating a resource that then would be available on your site, or it would be things that would reduce the user experience of somebody who’s on your site. So like a pop-up and suddenly you have nine things that are moving around on your site and it’s a video player and it’s a footer ad and it’s a email popup and it’s like they all work, but collectively I think they work against you. And so the question then is like, where can you do that in a way that doesn’t feel that feels more helpful as opposed to intrusive?

Ben Jabbawy: And

Bjork Ostrom: I think moving that to social feels like a better way to do it because the actual experience of consuming the content doesn’t change. It’s not like you’re having an email opt-in, show up in the middle of an Instagram reel Where you’re having it show up is in an individual’s DM in that conversation. And so the collective experience isn’t necessarily damaged. I think that all the things that work on a website, they work popups and highlighting the signup form, but it was never anything that we looked at when we’re super excited about because we knew collectively, as you start to turn these things on, it will make the user experience worse. And so the three word phrase that it came up, this is on the spot. This is a new phrase that I’ll maybe continue to look back on and use or just use it once and then it’ll forever float in the internet, ether creation, syndication and optimization. And I think a lot of times creators are focused on that first part creation. It’s 85% of what we’re focused on, and we’ve maybe focused a little bit on syndication and then a little bit on optimization. But really I feel like especially for people have been creating 5, 6, 7 years, especially for people who have been creating content that is evergreen. We have in the world of recipes, the syndication and optimization piece, there’s huge opportunities there. And the syndication piece is not only where else can you publish this piece of content, you can revisit in your email a recipe you published five years ago if it’s seasonally appropriate, but then also how do you optimize where you are creating and syndicating content for? How are you, if it’s a manufacturing line, what is something that you can add in the step add as a step in the process that results in a better output? And so it could be something as easy as turning a tool like Grocer’s list on where now you are able to, as part of your process, you’ve optimized it. So anytime that you’re creating, you’re capturing some additional emails. Maybe you go and you look and you remix some of your old content that performed well from six months ago, you republish that or you create the equivalent of a Spotify playlist that was the one that you talked about, like my most viral recipes. And you publish that piece of content. And the nice thing is if you have a video editor, or even if you are just in a different type of content creation mode, you don’t need to go back and figure out a new recipe and do keyword research and you can just think strategically around how you want to create a playlist, a roundup, a different angle for content creation. So I think those three things, if we can evenly distribute our efforts around not only creation but syndication, where is that going out? And then optimization as well. I think there’s huge opportunities for people and probably not as much work that you’re having to do because creation is, it’s a really hard thing to always be creating. Do you have thoughts on, we’re talking about Instagram and we’re talking about really Instagram reels. Are you seeing the majority of success for people within the Instagram reels vertical? Or where are the other places that people are seeing success with email list growth or even traffic on social platforms?

Ben Jabbawy: So first of all, carousels on Instagram are blowing up again from what we see across our creator network right now. So I think there’s the old school format of carousels where it’s just static image, static image, static image on an end, feeded post. Those still work, but it’s this combination where, hey, maybe the first one in a carousel is a video. The second one can be a static image. The third might be a video or a static image, those multiple at bats in front of your audience. Sometimes you notice that where you log in and the first time you see the initial card in the carousel, but then a few days later, maybe they’re showing you the second one of that because you haven’t swiped through yet. So that’s just something to keep in mind. But interestingly, this feature that we offer called Story Reply has completely blown up in the last, I would say, three months. The same kind of value prop of someone raises their hand in your audience, they get the DM from you, they can move it to their email through save to email. That playbook has really, really worked well and it’s surprised me. And what’s happening there is on a story reply, if you’re not familiar with that, you set it up in an automation platform, Grocers List or whoever. And then rather than putting the link element in your story, if you do that, Instagram sees the traffic leaving instantly and say, okay, maybe I’m not going to show this to a large percentage of that person’s audience because they make money when people stay in platform. Instead you say, Hey, reply with this word and we’re going to send you the DM. And what happens there is Instagram sees a lot of two-way communication on this story frame, and as a result, we’re seeing a lot of our creators are telling us that Instagram showing that to maybe 10, 15, maybe even 20 plus percent of their audience when normal stories don’t see that even some of their reels don’t even get that.

Bjork Ostrom: So you have a hundred thousand followers, you might see 10, 20,000 people consuming that story, whereas that would be pretty rare if it was just a regular story that you’re creating in publishing. Obviously it depends on the audience and the following and whatnot. Can you talk about carousels a little bit? So the idea with that is you are creating a carousel. It has multiple different types of media. It could all be photos, but it could be photos and videos. And that to me seems like a really cool opportunity to do some of that syndication. So you have seven recipes that are perfect for July 4th, and so you kind of create what we would call in our world like a roundup, and you publish those in a carousel. Can you talk about the actual content that people are putting into those recipe and food related?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, there’s kind of two approaches that we’ve seen around carousel posts in the feed. One is just like you said, roundup. Hey, I’m publishing or republishing the seven recipes that I love for Easter. So each card in the carousel associates to one of those recipes. And typically when we see that those are static, the other emerging approach to carousels that we’re seeing kind of mirrors a lot of the media that we see on the blog post for the recipe itself. So think you’ve got the hero image of the recipe when it’s done and the sandwich is being squeezed in the juices coming out. We also see on the blog, the nicely organized image of all the ingredients. Maybe they’re in bowls. That’s a perfect thing to include in the carousel, right, the making of, and then maybe there’s a quick video of the creator like taking that first bite. So those are three different pieces of media that you’ve probably already filmed or have taken or photographed that you can syndicate into a carousel post on Instagram that just creates a different type of feel from some of the other content that you’ve published. That’s more of a soup to nuts reel or a static image

Bjork Ostrom: That makes sense. And all of this for us as creators, this content exists already. That’s the nice thing. It’s like it’s just remixing it and packaging it in different ways. Are you seeing people release a reel for a recipe and for that same recipe, publishing a carousel for that?

Ben Jabbawy: I haven’t seen that yet.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Ben Jabbawy: I haven’t seen that.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s mostly people creating, you’re either publishing the carousel, maybe it’s like a recipe you did six months ago that performed well as a reel and you’re testing a carousel or rounding up and saying, Hey, here’s these seven different recipes that will go really well in this season. That’s kind of what you’re seeing.

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly. And the nice thing about repurposing, whether it’s in the form of a carousel or just cutting together a reel, is that if you’re doing, let’s talk about Pinch of Yum’s freezer recipes. If those are all recipes that existed prior, you could have gone to the videos for those recipes, taken the hook for those, pieced those together, and then you’ve got your Reel. I mean you guys shot an entirely new thing, but this is the whole idea, whether it’s in carousel format or repurposing these together into a Reel, you have a lot of at bats to leverage the content you have to drive traffic or less growth depending on your primary goal of that.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Traffic obviously comes from just a click directly in the kind of card that is sent over in the dm. The email opt-in then would go through, we’ve talked about Kit, but whatever Flodesk, or email service provider you use, can you talk about what happens on the email side, let’s say after somebody signs up just to complete the arc of the story of what’s happening? So let’s say somebody does click. I know it’s not your responsibility at that point, but what happens and how do you see people best ushering people over into the email list and interacting with them after they bring ’em over?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, there’s two things that happen. One, the recipe that they just saved to email inside the DM, we take the cover image of that Reel, we take the link of that recipe, we take your profile photo, we’ve got this really nice format, you can add your brand colors to the template, but we send instantly the recipe that they saved to that person’s email. And that’s important because it’s actually hard to get this data appropriately over to Kit or Flodesk. So we handle that email send instantly, and then in your settings with Grocers List, you can connect to your email platform. And what we recommend that you do is you choose your welcome series so that the recipe is sent right away, but we also move them and kick off a welcome series about who you are and all that. And the nice thing is if they’re already a part of that series, they won’t receive it again from Kit or Flodesk. But if they’re not, which is a high likelihood because these are mostly new contacts to your file, you have that opportunity to kick off the automations that you’ve already invested in that introduce them to who you are and your brand because most likely from social, they’re going to be new to the database.

Bjork Ostrom: So that would be somebody comments, they get the recipe sent to them, there’s the option to go visit that you get the traffic from that, or if they want to save it to email, they click that button it sends you immediately send them the email, which is great. But then the contact, if it’s not already part of your email service provider, Kit, we’ll say as an example, then it will add them there. At that point then it’s your decision around how you want to structure your welcome series. The interaction looks like we have a lot of podcasts interviews with Matt and Allea, two folks in our world who are really email experts that folks can go back and listen to around ways to then optimize creation, syndication, and optimization to optimize that process. So you make sure, and this is where it gets really great, once you get these emails that you’re highlighting your best recipes, that you’re introducing yourself, that all of these things that you can do where you can turn one social media interaction into multiple clicks over a long period of time. And not only is that beneficial, but then you also have this first-party data, which again, you need to turn on as a setting within Kit; you have this first-party data for anybody who is clicking on your email list. And the last thing I’ll say with email that’s been helpful is we’re starting to have conversations with brands who are interested in sponsoring. And so that email list not only is a traffic driver, but it’s also a revenue creator because they’re interested in having a newsletter sponsorship or maybe we’ll send out a dedicated email if it’s a certain brand around their product or whatever it might be. So that not only becomes a megaphone, but it also becomes another revenue source for you as a content creator similar to working with brands on Instagram or your blog. So we’ve talked a lot about Instagram. Do you see that as being like 90%, 95% from a platform perspective, and why is it that Instagram is really, if that’s true, why is it Instagram is really the focus?

Ben Jabbawy: Do you mean for Grocers List in our

Bjork Ostrom: Platform, right, for the creators that you are working with and this type of interaction where people are commenting and getting a point being, my understanding is you can do it within Facebook, but one of the things that’s different about Facebook is you can also include clickable links in Facebook. So Instagram is kind of this unique platform where you don’t have that, and so this becomes more important for that platform.

Ben Jabbawy: I think it started on Instagram out of necessity for convenience and clickable links. I think also just the audience on Instagram compared to Facebook is a bit more digitally native than Facebook. No offense against Facebook, but I think that’s

Bjork Ostrom: Just no offense against Facebook users.

Ben Jabbawy: And then we are looking very closely at TikTok. I think there’s certain technology components that need to be revealed to third parties like Grocers List before. This sort of functionality can exist on TikTok, but obviously that’s something we’re monitoring very closely. But even from a creator perspective, prior to us getting involved, the data that we see from our creators is that typically top channels for creators are Google, social media, which is mostly Instagram or TikTok, and then sometimes Pinterest or email. But again, in a lot of these other places, like you’re saying, there are clickable links, so you don’t need to optimize to your point, some of these other channels because you can just get the link that you need already.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. So I know there are going to be some people who listen, they’re already users and they’ll have some action items, maybe some insights, some additional things that they could do for somebody who’s not. Can you talk about what’s the, I’m such a huge believer in what is the thing you can do in 30 minutes to start the ball rolling, and I know that you also have, you talked about customer support and supporting folks being such a huge part of your previous business and also this business as well. And so I know that you are super supportive of creators, so as people think about wanting to kind take the next step to level up the optimization around some of the social content that they’re doing, what’s the best way to do that?

Ben Jabbawy: The platform is designed to be what we call self-serve, where you create an account, you connect your Instagram, and by default, we kind of have a nice looking template ready to go so that you could actually be live in five minutes. I mean, that’s the goal. Now we know people have questions and they want those answered, and so we do offer onboarding calls and we do offer live chat inside the product as well. If you just have a quick question and that’s something we take seriously, the sooner we can get you live, the faster you’re going to see clicks to your site. You’re going to be making money, you’re going to grow your email list. And so I think when you can speak with someone that really understands you as a food creator and what you’re trying to achieve, that’s just going to be a better experience for you. That’s great. So you can do it yourself, but we’re here for you in a number of different formats.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s awesome. We could dive deep onto some of the additional things that Grocers List offers. I know that you’re doing some deep linking with Amazon Links. We’ve had conversations around the importance of deep linking before in the podcast, so people should be sure to check that out so they understand if you are including affiliate links within social, you want to make sure that those are deep links, and I know that that’s something that you offer and Facebook integrations as well. We talked about Instagram being the main focus, but what’s great about this and the sense that I get is it’s not just one tool. It’s almost this idea of a marketing stack and as we are thinking as creators, food creators around being content marketers, we talked about this. This is the bookend of the conversation as we are thinking about being content marketers, we’re creating content and then we are marketing it. One of the most important things for us to do is to find tools that work well and are custom built for us as marketers. So as you look forward to the degree that you can share, what are some of the things that you’re excited about, whether it be tools or even industry opportunities as it relates to us as content creators, because I think the sentiment can sometimes be doom and gloom becoming harder. Google’s changing the algorithm, AI, but I’m also a huge believer in massive opportunities for creators moving forward, and I think today is the best day to start a business as a creator. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, but it’s better today than it was five years ago than it was 10 years ago. There are more opportunities now today, not fewer, and so I’m optimistic, but I’m curious, as you look ahead both for Grocers List, but also the industry, what are the things that you think are going to be cool opportunities moving forward?

Ben Jabbawy: Yeah, the amazing part of where we are is now we have hundreds of creators on the platform and we hear pretty regularly we’re not trying to come in as outsiders and innovate on how you should be doing your job. You hear from your audience, you see those engagement metrics. I think our job as the technologists that try to be your core partner on marketing your content is about making some of those hard tactical concepts much easier for you as the creator. So to start, it’s just delivering that clickable link. One of the other kind of pieces of content that we hear from our creators gets amazing engagement but is actually really hard to produce is meal plans. So we just launched a new offering centered around making that easier to create Paste in the five links or 10 links in your meal plan. We’ll combine that into a calculated shopping list. We’ll provide an Amazon fresh checkout link that you earn affiliate sales off of even launching next week, generate a PDF linking to all those recipes with your content, with your logo and the shopping list. So amazing. I’m super excited about the feedback on that so far. We’re definitely listening to what you’re doing and what’s hard in your job and trying to make it easier for you to unlock, and then a little bit of forward thinking around, Hey, what are some trends we saw in commerce and how is AI impacting that and how can we get ahead of some of that to innovate for creators, maybe around some concepts they’re asking about, but unsure of how to execute. I think that’s a good opportunity for where Grocers List can continue to round out that marketing stack for food.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have a teaser, not even what the solution would be, but what are the conversations that you’re having around that you referenced?

Ben Jabbawy: Yes. I mean, you talked earlier around the Google AI search results specifically around some of the stuff they’re testing for recipes and

Bjork Ostrom: Recipe. Yeah,

Ben Jabbawy: Exactly. So we’re thinking about, okay, how do some of these concepts impact traffic trends for our creator base over the next 2, 3, 5 years, and are there ways for us to unlock new forms of monetization in a world where traffic is down, but you still have this really core audience that you own that values and trusts your recipes. The natural direction there is around paid memberships, and that’s something that we’re thinking very seriously about and working towards.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Yeah, there’s a huge opportunity for us who have created content for free for the longest time to connect with those mega fans, of which we all have them for an offering that is more helpful, more exclusive, there’s more time involved with it. They always talk about this idea of at least 10%, so you have a $25 offering. At least 10% of the people who are on the $25 offering would be willing to pay for a premium above that. And obviously there’s a thousand different variables that exist within that, but I think about that a lot, especially if you have a free tier. What does it look like for somebody who has millions of people who are following along with what they’re doing, even if you capture just 10% of that audience with a paid offering or a membership, there’s huge opportunities there. So anything that you feel like we didn’t cover that would be helpful to talk about?

Ben Jabbawy: No, I think we covered a lot of ground there and it’s just great to catch up as always, and super excited to bring you and Pinch of Yum on board.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, it’s going to be great. We’re excited about it. Ton of opportunities. We’ve loved using the tool. Do you post online, Ben? Can people follow along with you or if people wanted to get in touch with you or, how do they do that?

Ben Jabbawy: It’s funny, in my last company, I did a podcast. It was a daily podcast, E-commerce Marketing School. I haven’t released anything yet. I mean, you can find me on Instagram at Jabbawy. It’s pretty boring account, but we will be coming up with something new in the fall, so follow Grocers List. We put out a ton of educational resources and content there, and we do kind of like an office hours every two weeks that you can find on our website as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. Those, I would encourage anybody for those, anytime that a brand or company has office hours or a chance to do a demo call or anything like that, there’s so much that can be learned from that. We just had somebody from Kit reach out and we’re like, Hey, it was kind of a templated email. Hey, just wanted to reach out and I want to jump on a call. And not always, but a lot of times I’m like, yes, because in the example of Grocers List or in this case Kit, you and your team have such a center of knowledge around a specific vertical and what’s working and what’s not working, and some of the best use of our time is to engage with those people who have that very specific knowledge base and to learn what’s working. And then for us to take that and apply it kind of in that creation, syndication optimization, it’s a great way to optimize content. So I would encourage people to check that out. Ben, thanks for coming on. Excited to work with you, and I’m sure we’ll have you back on in short notice here.

Ben Jabbawy: Awesome. Such a pleasure, Bjork. Thanks. Bye.

Emily Walker: Hello there, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed listening to this week’s episode of the podcast. Before we sign off today, I wanted to mention one of the most valuable parts of the Food Blogger Pro membership, and that’s our courses. In case you don’t already know, as soon as you become a Food Blogger Pro member, you immediately get access to all of our courses here on Food Blogger Pro. We have hours and hours of courses available, including SEO for food blogs, food photography, Google Analytics, social media, and sponsored content. All of these courses have been recorded by the Food Blogger Pro team or some of our industry experts, and they’re truly a wealth of knowledge. We are always updating our courses so you can rest assured that you’re getting the most up-to-date information as you’re working to grow your blog and your business. You can get access to all of our courses by joining Food Blogger Pro. Just head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about the membership and join our community. Thanks again for tuning in and listening to the podcast. Make it a great week.