Preserving Tradition While Scaling a Modern Business with Shen Chen from Just One Cookbook

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Member Kitchens. Let’s talk about real results. Member Kitchens, creators — actual food bloggers and social media chefs — are adding an average of $2,500 each month to their revenue with some consistently surpassing $10,000. These aren’t hopes or guesses. These are documented numbers from creators transforming their brands into thriving, sustainable businesses. Member Kitchens offers a fully branded platform that looks and feels like you, your recipes, your style, your unique message members get dyNamic meal plans, automated shopping lists, and much more. All within an ad-free mobile app they’ll rave about. Getting started is simple. Using AI, Member Kitchens imports your existing recipe library so you can start selling subscriptions quickly. Plus, before you launch, an expert will personally review your app to ensure it’s ready for the spotlight, ready to see results for yourself. Visit memberkitchens.com today to start your free trial, and you can get a special discount by being a listener to our podcast. You can use the promo code foodbloggerpro for 50% off the first two months.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there, and from the Food Blogger Pro team here, welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Today, Bjork is sitting down to chat with Shen Chen, who jointly runs the English language Japanese food blog, Just One Cookbook with his wife, Nami. She shares the behind-the-scenes story of how a Humble Food blog grew into a multifaceted business spanning YouTube, e-commerce, and digital memberships. He talks about the impact of shifting traffic trends, how COVID changed the game, and why sometimes the business pivot isn’t just smart but necessary. Shen also opens up about their newest venture, a brand inspired by Japanese craftsmanship and cultural preservation from navigating the complexities of physical products to using social media and SEO to fuel organic growth. This episode is full of thoughtful insights for anyone looking to build a meaningful, resilient business. If you enjoy this episode, we would really appreciate if you would leave a review anywhere you listen to podcasts or share the episode with your community. And now, without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Shen, welcome to the podcast.

Shen Chen: Hey, Bjork, thank you for having me on the show. We’re excited to be here.

Bjork Ostrom: We’re excited to talk to you. We go back years and years. We’ve gone to conferences, we’ve interacted online. These are my favorite conversations because it’s somebody that I know, somebody that I like and somebody that I respect in terms of what you and Nami have done with your business over the last decade plus. And not only have you continued to do what you’re doing really well, growing your YouTube, following to over millions of pages on your site, but also you’ve recently had some fun things that we can talk about, like launching a membership component of your website and even in e-commerce adjacent brand. So let’s start maybe somewhere in the middle. We’re not going to go all the way back, but let’s start somewhere in the middle. Talk to me, pre e-commerce, and before you launched that somebody would run into you. How would you describe what it was that you and Nami were doing?

Shen Chen: So that’s the most interesting part of our history because people, we have friends, school friends that would ask us what we do, and we would tell people we are food bloggers. And some people knew that it was as a job, but a lot of people were kind confused like, what’s a food blogger? So we just end up telling people that we’re YouTubers. And that kind of makes sense because people knew about YouTube. And then the next question is what you guys can support yourselves as YouTubers.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right. That’s a thing.

Shen Chen: That’s the thing. But we would mostly tell people we’re food bloggers or YouTubers. It’s kind of give an idea of what we do from day-to-day sharing recipes online.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that makes sense. And there’s something about YouTube that for some reason makes more sense to people. It’s like, oh, I know other people who do YouTube. They create videos online. There’s always this component of publishing recipes to a website seems a little bit more abstract for people. We have all these different versions of how we communicated with people. We will say it’s kind of like an online magazine. And for some reason when you say magazine, people are like, oh, okay. I get it. You publish content, you work with the ads, things like that. Tell us about when, because you started in 2011, tell us when Nami went full-time with it and then you are also working full-time with it. What did that look like? And then do you also have a team that you work with now?

Shen Chen: Correct. So Nami started Just One Cookbook in 2011 when she was a stay at home mom. And it started out purely as a hobby, if you will. Our friends at the time, a lot of our friends were getting married and having kids at the time, and they were asking Nami, how do you cook Japanese recipes? And Nami started sharing recipes on Facebook and it became a really difficult experience. So one of our friends suggested, why don’t you start a website? So 2011 we started with WordPress and it was a complete hobby and she was full-time mom. Our children were three and five at the time. So very close to your kids’ age right now.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, four and six we’re in the thick of it.

Shen Chen: So she kind of matched everything from recipe development to photo shooting. And then I started getting involved with it on nights and weekends. I still had a corporate job all the way through 2018, so she was kind of managing the entire theme from answering reader’s emails to shooting recipes, testing recipes. I would get involved on the nights and weekends to help. So I started helping her shoot recipes on the weekends. With photography, it’s very hard to shoot, shoot and prepared ingredients at the same time. And so the website, so we can go through a little bit of the page views and growth,

Bjork Ostrom: I think it’s always interesting for people to hear what that journey looked like.

Shen Chen: So in 2011, we started with, and I actually kept all the historical data. We started in January and we had Google Analytics running at the time, and by April we actually have 11,000 page views. Can you imagine that?

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, right when you’re first starting out too, it’s like, alright, that’s pretty good. And my guess is a portion of that was maybe Facebook and maybe some search and maybe hard to know.

Shen Chen: Yeah, it’s hard to know at the time, but most of it was through search. I had a bit of experience working in online marketing at the time, my company was very focused on SEO and SEM, so kind of knew how to target the right keywords for recipes. So it’s really developing recipes. We weren’t doing it blindly. We used the Google keyword tool, the time to find out what’s the search volume and the opportunity when we create recipe.

Bjork Ostrom: And were these people searching in English for a Japanese recipe?

Shen Chen: Yes, they were.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, got it. Yep. This is a little bit of a tangent, but is there also an opportunity for people who are searching in Japanese for the recipe or can you talk a little bit about how that would work within the world of search? It’s just something that I have no clue how it works.

Shen Chen: Not really. The part reason is there are a ton of very successful food blogs in Japanese in Japan already cook

Bjork Ostrom: Padd is huge. The equivalent of all recipes. Yeah,

Shen Chen: Correct. And Cook Padd is really, really strong. I think there page using, it’s in hundreds of millions per month. So for us, most of our audience come from English speaking countries around the world. So Singapore, us, Canada, Australia, you can and so forth.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Great. So 11,000 pages views by April it’s starting to see, hey, this is kind of cool, we’re starting to get some traction.

Shen Chen: Correct. And then by December of that year, we actually had 66,000 page views. So that’s pretty successful for a 1-year-old blog at the time, especially, you got to go back 14 years now at the time, Japanese food is not as well known as today. So at the time we couldn’t really share the super authentic stuff because the keyword search volume just wasn’t there. So this was mostly the more, I would say more common keywords at the time, the chicken teriyaki, the shrimp tempera of the world.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s things that maybe wouldn’t be, like if you were visiting Tokyo and you go into a little restaurant on the corner, they’re probably not going to be making that.

Shen Chen: No.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s people that would be thinking like, Hey, this is something that I want to make. There’s an opportunity there. It maybe has echoes of traditional Japanese recipe, but it wouldn’t be something that would be more like long tail in the world of search.

Shen Chen: Correct, yeah. And in the 2000 from 2011, 2019, something very interesting that happened is a number of visitors to Japan grew exponentially, I think like tourists. Yeah, tourists.

Speaker 4: Yeah.

Shen Chen: And that did a couple of things is one, it brought this awareness to globally, our traffic is 50% us 50% rest of the world. So globally, the awareness of what a real Japanese cuisine became more common besides the typical things you see in restaurants, people understand, oh, there are so many different varieties of Japanese food that you can actually make it home. And so our pageview grew from 2 million in 2012 to 2019, 38 million.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow. Yeah. So over that span, 2012 to 2019, it went from 2 million to, what did you say? 30,

Shen Chen: 38 million.

Bjork Ostrom: 38 million. And one of the things that we talk about occasionally in this podcast is this idea of waves and waves being something that is like a macro trend. And in this case it would be tourism to Japan, awareness of Japanese traditional cooking, and then the ability to surf that wave really well. And you and Nami did that. Not only was there an awareness, a growing trend around this, but you had the skills, the expertise, the credibility, the work ethic to be a surfer on that wave and to be one of, or if not the best surfer on that wave. And so this, I feel like is such a great example of that where it’s those two things in tandem resulting in a really successful business where you’ve been able, or in that season where able to grow that. What did that trend look like 2019 to today?

Shen Chen: Well, I think for our food blog 2020 was a catalyst year. The covid year where people were forced cook at home because the restaurant weren’t open. And so I think the covid year was our highest traffic that year was like 70 million page views.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow.

Shen Chen: And today, I think we’re back to, if the trends hold correctly, we’re back to in that 30 million page views per year range.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. One of the things that is great about your story is not only have you built the site, we were talking about page views. Growing those page views, similar to Pinch of Yum. I think one of the highest traffic months for us was like April, 2020. If you look back at the charts, everybody’s at home and they’re suddenly inspired to make recipes so they don’t have to touch their fast food that’s coming in and if there’s any fast food open. But not only did you continue to publish to the site, have success with the site from a search perspective, but also just general traffic. But you also then launched these adjacent brands. You even said for some people you wouldn’t even say your food site, even though that’s maybe the majority of where your income was coming from in any given year. But you also then created a really successful YouTube account and have a following there. So when did you start publishing videos to YouTube? And let’s talk about that for a little bit because an important piece of the puzzle and important part of the business.

Shen Chen: So Bjork, all I’ll say inspirations, actually a lot of it goes back to you and Lindsay.

Bjork Ostrom: Alright.

Shen Chen: So way back when you used to be very transparent about your revenue. I think this was probably 2012, you were very transparent about your monthly revenue and the growth. I think I don’t remember exact number, you guys were doing kind of modest monthly revenue in the thousands. They’re all sudden in tens of thousands, then almost a hundred thousand. And you were very transparent about, oh, blue Host gave me this much revenue. The next part is ad. And I’m like, wow, these guys are food bloggers, but they’re not really focused on their website as their so source of revenue. They’re looking at affiliates, they’re looking at sponsored posts. And that really inspired us, to be honest. We were just full blogging and we share recipes online and we love engaging with our readers. But you as an entrepreneur show, I don’t know if you are aware how many food lockers you influence in that generation. It is like, wow, there’s so much more we can do with our business besides just writing recipes online.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. The thing that we often talk about is this idea, the four-minute mile, as soon as I’ve talked about it before, but as soon as there’s somebody who ran a four minute mile, there’s all these people the next month, I dunno if that’s what it was. We ran a four-minute mile and I think what we were doing was similar where everybody had the skills, the capabilities to do that. It was almost just seeing somebody else do it and be like, oh my gosh, I can do that. I’m going to do that. And for a lot of people I could do it five x, 10 x. As soon as you see somebody else doing it, you get inspired. But also it’s just seeing that the door and the path is there and it’s fun to hear stories like yours where you can point back and be like, Hey, this was something that we saw was possible and then did all of the hard work and took the skills and expertise and insight to really create an amazing thing. So it’s cool to hear that.

Shen Chen: Yeah, I mean you really opened up our eyes as far as, okay, they you’re successful with affiliate. What kind of affiliate can we work with? Your successful sponsored posts, who can we reach out to with the products that we use already that we can partner with? So we work with Koman soy sauce for years. We work with Tata sakes meeting for years. And it feel natural because it’s product we use in our recipes already. It wasn’t something that we were using just for revenue sake.

Bjork Ostrom: To have an adjacent brand that is something that you already use. Those are the best products and for the most part, for Pinch of Yum, what we’re trying to do right now, is there a sponsor that we already use that then we can just talk about and in an intentional way and get compensated for it? It feels genuine, it feels authentic. It doesn’t feel like you’re having to create content that’s outside of the content that you usually create. But what you’re saying is all of that, you start to see these opportunities everywhere where you’re like, Hey, not only is there opportunity to publish blog posts and to monetize those via ads, but maybe we can work with this brand. Correct. Okay, let’s try that out. Or my guess is that all kind of leads up to also opportunities to say, Hey, maybe we’re not just publishing recipes on a website. Maybe we can also create a video of it and publish it on other platforms.

Shen Chen: So we started creating YouTube videos in 2013 and today when I watched them, they’re pretty cringey.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, relatable. I think for anybody who’s created for a long time,

Shen Chen: I mean just like you guys, we had to learn full photography by ourselves. Lindsay had a great book on food photography. I think you guys did extremely well on. We also purchased a copy of it. How do you bounce lights? How do you make your food look pretty? And with the video, it was the same thing. We didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t know what shoulders speed, frame rate, aperture lighting. We didn’t remove any of our old embarrassing videos. We still kept them there. But if it was something, because Japanese food was a little bit foreign to a lot of people. With video, the primary purpose is get more people cooking it. And this is why our recipes always have step-by-step pictures. It’s because not a lot of people are familiar with Japanese cooking methods, ingredients. And by having step-by-step pictures, by having videos, we want to encourage people to make this food. That’s actually the primary goal.

Bjork Ostrom: You have to educate as well as inform. It’s like here’s maybe some of the background on an ingredient. Here’s how to use this specific ingredient. Some people might be coming with all of that contextual information, but there might be a lot of people who don’t. And so it makes sense. And that is content at its best, which is content that somebody can come, they can use and they can be successful with. It’s like that’s a little bit what you’re alluding to it sounds like. It’s like how do we help people be as successful as possible, interacting with any piece of content? It might be step-by-step videos in a recipe, but a lot of times it might require a video where you’re walking somebody through the specifics of how to make a recipe and showing them the step-by-step within the video itself. So that started in 2013, a couple of years after you started your site. Let’s fast forward and talk about today a little bit. So you have the site, you have the YouTube, you also have other social platforms.

Shen Chen: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: You have e-commerce and you have the membership for the site as well. Can you maybe rank order as it stands right now, the importance of the different components within the business? And then we can look into some of those just to talk about how you do the day-to-day specifically with the e-commerce piece. I’m interested to talk to you about.

Shen Chen: Okay. Today I would say the ad revenue on the blog is still by far the biggest piece of our revenue driver. And for us, a lot of our business ideas came from our reader’s request. We started with publishing e cookbooks. That was kind of our first foray into a digital publishing and kind of side additional revenue on top of the blog just because our users kept asking us, can you please publish a cookbook and we actually talked to book agents and so we’ll publish it about potentially publishing real one. But as you know, it’s a two year process and you’re fully committed to working at cookbook for two years. And we were raising our kids at the time, so we didn’t want to sacrifice family time or time we have on the cookbook. So we decided to publish ebook just because based on our reader’s request. And same thing with the membership site. Our readers ask, can you please give me a membership login so that I don’t have to look at ads? So that’s why we developed a membership site is based on our reader’s request.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Can you talk about the membership site? How do you run that? What does the day-to-day look like for it? It’s one of the things that we are continuing to talk about, the importance of not only additional revenue streams within your business. We talk about this idea of, Hey, if you knew that for the next decade, traffic wasn’t going to change, how could you continue to grow your business? And so I think it’s fun to think about from a diversification standpoint, but also just from a business growth standpoint, what are the other areas that you could improve? One of which is we talk about a subscription or a membership, lots of different ways to do that. Can you talk about how you guys do that within Just One Cookbook?

Shen Chen: Sure. So with the membership site, I think now we have a little bit over 2000 subscribers now, and we don’t really push it because we feel like everyone, we want our recipe to be accessible by everybody. So we don’t put any contents behind the paywall. Some creators, they do put contents behind the paywall so that members get a little bit extra. But our firm belief is everyone should have access to our recipes. But we do want to give our members value. So they do get all of Nami’s eBooks with it. We do a monthly giveaway with our members as well. So we give away Japanese. Nice. We give away merch, different things to engage with our users. We have a monthly membership only newsletter, and our members are all pretty happy. I mean, when we talk to them on why they subscribe, most of ’em actually just wants to support Nami. They really believe in what she does and they really appreciate the effort she puts into creating this website. And for readers around the world,

Bjork Ostrom: They talk about this idea of a thousand true fans. And I think Kevin Kelly wrote this famous post, and I think it’s really important for us as creators to think about this idea. Food Blogger Pro could be an example of that as well. We don’t have this mass reach, there’s not multiple millions of food creators. There’s maybe millions of food creators, but even then it’s probably a stretch. It’s probably like hundreds of thousands of people who are creating food related content online. But if you have a thousand true fans, people who download your podcast, in our case, sign up for your membership or a part of what you’re doing, you can create a sustainable business from it. In your case, it’s not the primary source of income, but it’s just a reminder for anybody listening. That’s one of the ways that you can create an income is to find those thousand true fans and then to have an offering for them. And like you said, a lot of times it might be people who it’s not necessarily this huge need that they have that they’re signing up for. It’s just they want to actively support you as a creator to make sure that it’s a sustainable business for you because they benefit from it. Can you talk about what you use to do that and then what’s a part of the membership and then the cost?

Shen Chen: Yeah. The plugin we use to run a membership program is called Member Mouse. It’s fairly straightforward to set up. I don’t want to get too technical because you can get really robust plugins where you can put stuff behind paywall. You have courses and lessons. I was looking for a very simple solution where can we have a plugin which blocks the ads when members logged in? That was almost the only functionality we were looking for at the time.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And so people sign up and they get access to these free, they get access to some of the premium products, eBooks, cookbooks, things like that. If they’re logged in, they don’t get ads. And then what is the cost that members pay?

Shen Chen: The cost is $25 per year.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So these are the people who, Hey, we’re big fans, we want access to this. There’s a recurring nature to it, which is really great. Do you have a sense for if a hundred people sign up? Does it autorenew and how many of those hundred people would autorenew?

Shen Chen: Actually, our renew rate is pretty high. I would say it’s somewhere in the 90% tile.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s great. And so you can think about that as a creator. One of the things that’s really nice is, and my guess is that’s spread out January, February, March. Every month within the year, certain people sign up. And so you can start to see, okay, if you get a hundred people who sign up every month just using round numbers and you had a hundred people last year who signed up and 90 of those people renew, then you can start to see, man, this is really cool because it becomes predictable revenue in a way that you might not exactly have with ads because there’s the unpredictability of seasons and algorithms and things like that. So not only is it a great way to diversify, but it’s also nice just from a predictability standpoint to know what’s coming down the line, how much you’ll be able to earn, what the renewal is of those. So that’s great to hear. And it sounds like the other thing that’s kind of nice is it doesn’t require you to really churn out a lot of content. No. You have a newsletter, you have the ad free component, you have the free digital products, you have the occasional giveaway. So it’s a great way to capture some of those additional super fans who just want to sign up and be a part of what you’re doing.

Shen Chen: Correct. And then part of the mission for us is we also donate 10% back to Fight Against Hunger. Awesome. So we as food bloggers, we try get a lot of support from our community and we try to figure out ways we can give back as well.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And it’s one of the things that we have the ability to do, not only are we having an impact within our business and the content we create, not only are we having an impact in our families by creating revenue, putting food on the table, being able to pay the bills, but we can also direct some of the attention that we have or the resources. It’s like time or money. Those are the resources we have into areas that we want to support. And that’s like, man, what a cool thing to be able to do that. And cool to hear that you guys are doing that. The other thing that I like about it is this idea of a little bit of a system around it. It’s like I’ve been thinking of this idea of a system of generosity. We do that in, we have what’s called a donor-advised fund, and we’re putting 10% of, we pay ourselves salaries within the business. So 10% of our salaries are any distributions. So anytime that we’re just taking money out of the business and we’re taking that and putting that into a donor-advised fund that we’ve set up. And for those who aren’t familiar with the basic ideas, once you donate into a donor-advised fund, that money then has to be granted to a nonprofit. And so we have a specific use for that of supporting infant and child related. That’s amazing. Nonprofits and not saying that as a, Hey, this is a cool thing we’re doing. Just saying that as another example of something that you are doing as well, you and Nami, which is creating a system and then not for us, what’s nice about it is we’re not having to make decisions each time around. Are we feeling generous? Are we not feeling generous? Are we feeling greedy? I don’t know. It just is set and it’s part of our process Every year at the end of the year, we do a calculation, we transfer it in. And for anybody listening, that would be my encouragement. And I’d also say if there’s anybody listening who’d ever be interested in setting up a donor-advised fund, would love to share our process for that. I’ve even thought about creating content around it. So folks can shoot me an email, [email protected] if you want to learn. I’m happy to trade some emails back and forth how we did that, but really cool to hear that. And the other thing that’s cool about it is it’s aligned with what you’re doing, which is food and recipe content.

Shen Chen: Yeah, I’d love to understand more. So I’ll email you on that. Cool. For us, we know there are a lot of people who goes hungry every day. And so for us to contribute what we can to make sure people aren’t going hungry around the world, I think not a lot, but we feel like makes every small bit makes a little bit of difference

Bjork Ostrom: For sure. And collectively, there’s enough resources for people to not go hungry. And so we need to figure out ways to do that. And you guys are a part of that. Let’s talk about the e-commerce part of what you’re doing. This one was fun for me because my dad is a potter. He does ceramics and he was deeply inspired by my mom and my dad lived in Japan for three years. My brother’s Japanese, he’s adopted when they lived there. And so we have, when I go back to their house, we’ll eat from Japanese dishes and there’ll be Japanese paintings. And it’s a huge part of my growing up, a huge part of my parents. And they live in this small town in northern Minnesota, but yet have this Japan as kind of a through line with their house and home and experience really. So this was something that you just launched last year. Talk about the thought process going into that and how you made decisions around doing that.

Shen Chen: Sure. We launched the business last September and a little bit of history. So Nami’s always loved Japanese tableware. And what we used to do is when we would take our annual visit to Japan, we would bring back boxes of tableware that we carefully wrap, table-wrapped. And it was difficult. You ship it in the airplane with a check luggage, but you hope nothing breaks.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re crossing your fingers when you get back and opening it up. Yeah.

Shen Chen: And it’s interesting because my family, my mom’s size of family, actually they’re tableware wholesalers. So it’s been five generation now. It’s kind of interesting that I’ll actually be doing this business. But the primary

Bjork Ostrom: Five generations did you say?

Shen Chen: Yeah. Wow. So my mom’s grandfather started business, but nothing to do with that. It’s kind of interesting. I’m doing this business now, continuing that heritage. So what the primary driver for the business? Bjork, as you know, bloggers are facing a lot of challenges, especially past two or three years. I think there was the threat of the cookies going away. But more than anything else, AI is hurting a lot of bloggers. I think if you’re in a travel blogger or different verticals, I think most bloggers have seen their traffic almost zero, right? Overnight. And so when we were in a meeting last year in Los Angeles together, we heard from our ad network rap that between the cookies and ai, we should expect almost a 40, 50% decrease in page views, revenue, and what else? And that really scared us because we had to figure out what can we do that could help supplement our income, if you will, if seeing our revenue drop by 50% would not only hurt us, but hurt our entire team that we employ today. And so we had a very good friend, business partner in Japan that we’ve been talking with. He had previous experience running a very similar store and something we’re deeply passionate about. It’s not something kind of like, Hey, let’s go start selling. I want to make this up couches, let’s start buying couches and start selling couches online. No, it’s something that we feel passionate about. Namis always loved tableware. We collected a lot of tableware through the years and we feel like this is something we can bring to the US market that’s not easily accessible. And the difference between Japanese tableware and I would say other countries could be the limited volume that’s being produced. Even today when we work with the vendors in Japan, they have workshop of four to five people. They cannot produce thousands of pieces where we’re getting 20 pieces at a time, 30 pieces at a time, if that. So after we were warned in last March when we were in la, our business could crater and disappear. We don’t even know what’s going to happen three months, three or six months from now, right? With what we do.

Bjork Ostrom: And the thing is with that is we’ve also seen that with some businesses, food sites, some were impacted significantly. And I’m sure people listening to the podcast, there might be some of those people, but to your point, a lot of people outside of the food world, affiliate sites or travel or gaming, whatever it might be, specifically with Google algorithm updates, but also just incrementally over time that traffic is going away. So it’s like not only was there that hypothetical, and also you’re seeing real time, and I have lots of friends who experienced this business goes away the business as they knew it. And so it sounds like for you it was seeing that, it was hearing that and saying like, okay, we could either put blinders on and hope it doesn’t happen to us or think about, and this is what I think is so important. What are adjacent types of businesses that we can create that would not only be things that you’d be passionate about and interested in, but would it maybe be more protected from an algorithm update or AI starting to provide answers or in some cases maybe recipes.

Shen Chen: And actually during the conference last year, that’s when the Google core update was being released. And the first few day of conference we were fine, but the last day we actually realized we actually got hit by 20%. We actually lost 20% of our traffic.

Bjork Ostrom: So you felt it in a real way. It was extra motivating.

Shen Chen: It’s like this is real. We need to do something. And so we talked to our business partner in Japan and we said, because he’s been talking to us about starting something, but with everything going on with Just One Cookbook, we were so busy already, we didn’t have extra bandwidth. But now facing a different reality of financial challenges, we said, okay, we’re ready to move forward. We start talking April about what we’re going to call the company, what’s the logo going to look like? We incorporated it by May in Japan. So we’re a legal entity in Japan. And by June we were sourcing all the products. And July, we may our first visit to different parts of Japan to visit craftsmen. So we visited.

Bjork Ostrom: Was that a super fun trip? It seems like awesome to me. Maybe it’s stressful, but it seems like it would be so fun.

Shen Chen: It would’ve been great, except for the fact that it was so hot. So we got to see these craftsmen working carving wood from black wood making into miso suit bowl. And the black wood artist, we saw Paris hand drawing each dish, each pack crafting from different modes. And so it was a huge learning lesson for us because before we saw the final product and see how pretty it was. And now we really appreciate the amount of work that goes into handcrafting, all these pieces of art.

Bjork Ostrom: We have set of the sauce dish set. Beautiful. And we use it all the time and it’s fun. We use it for all sorts of different things. But we’ll do sushi every, I don’t know, few weeks, maybe once a month. So all four of us have, our daughters have their little dish and they’ll be able to get things with their soy sauce and wasabi and get it all in place. But it’s really beautiful. And you think of what are the things that AI can’t replace it. It’s like hand-painted.

Shen Chen: They make goods. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Goods. Yeah.

Shen Chen: We’re so appreciative of you and Lindsay and not just you guys, but all the blogger friends. Nami was able to reach out and help us promote the store. And that’s kind of something we have going for us versus somebody who’s bringing a business is Nami already has such a strong network of readers and food blogger friends who can help spread the word about what we want to do.

Bjork Ostrom: And this is the piece that I think is worth pointing out that for anybody who is building a business content creation business, I think one of the things that you’ve now unlocked, and I’d be interested to hear what this has been like, is the ability to use your social platforms like YouTube or Instagram or any of the other platforms previously, if it were me, I would have the mindset of how do I create a piece of content on YouTube? How do I create a piece of content on Instagram and with that encourage people to go to my website? That was the transaction that happening, which is good. And I think one of benefits why, or one of the benefits of it, and one of the reasons why you still have a relatively stable traffic is because you have a strong brand outside of just strong SEO that I think provides a little bit of a moat, a strong brand surrounding a site. But I think you also now have the ability to use your Instagram Nami on Instagram or Nami on YouTube to talk about a product that then you are selling within your marketplace. And to have the ability to point people, not just to a website where somebody goes, and if you have a thousand people, you make $50 or whatever it might be. But now you have the ability to point people to this really cool soy sauce dispenser, like the kingfisher soy sauce dispenser that I’m looking at, which I’m like, that’s awesome. And you see that in a video and it creates intrigue and people, it is just a different way to create content on social. Can you talk about that and has that felt true or what have you learned in the last, it’s not even been a year yet, a year since you’ve come up with the idea at least, what have you learned now that you are creating content that isn’t just thinking about traffic, but it’s also thinking about how do we encourage kind of purchasing mindset with things that you are selling?

Shen Chen: It feels true because even prior to starting our own store, our readers would ask Nami, oh wait, did she get that plate? Where did she get that tool? And we would just answer, honestly, we got this from Amazon, we got this in Japan. And so it’s not something that we’re kind of doing out of the blue like, Hey, I’m going to study, start pitching you what I use. It’s very organic, just like the Kikkoman example I gave earlier. So if you look at our content, Nami doesn’t push a table where it’s too hard. We still use the table where organically in our photo shoots and we talk about our photo shoots and she explains in the photo shoots, oh, this plates from this series we carry in our store, but when we do have a new release, we think readers might be interested. And we say this and this new release of this new soy sauce dispenser, this very popular feature on New York Magazine and big seller, and we have it in stock right now. So it was pretty organic. It’s not something we had to push super hard.

Bjork Ostrom: Which is a great way to have product. It’s like you’re not having to sell, it’s almost like a version of teaching where you’re like, it is just really showing people correct. You’re doing what you naturally would otherwise do. And within that, people see a thing and if they’re curious about it, you’re answering their about where you got the product or what it is or how you can get it. So one of the things that I think is true is for the most part, I think people who are earning income from sponsors, from advertisers working with IV or a Mediavine getting ad income from their site, creating content, they don’t realize this is true. I’ll just speak for myself. I didn’t realize how simple that business actually is from a logistics perspective. And it is by no means saying it’s easy, but just from a numbers perspective, from a logistics perspective, from a business operations perspective, it’s pretty simple. And you get paid through a handful of people, an advertiser, you don’t have inventory, you don’t really have cost of good soul. You have your time that goes into creating the content. But if you do the books on a site that’s earning ad income and maybe has a few contractors, it’s like that’s pretty simple. It’s tell me about what it’s been like to have a physical goods business and also one that’s international. There’s a consideration there. And we can talk about tariffs too. Something that’s at play too. I bet.

Shen Chen: Yeah. Now looking back at it, we dunno how we made it through because there were definitely moments we could hardly breathe as we were staying up the store.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you mean just because of how much work it was?

Shen Chen: Because how much work? So we had to find one, a warehouse that something that we and our partner believe in is we want a warehouse where it treats employees fairly. So we want to find a warehouse where if you will, the workers are actually happy. So in the air conditioning environment, as you know, the weather in Japan can be pretty extreme and we didn’t want a warehouse where workers are exposed to the elements, if you will. So we took our time to select a warehouse that we feel like that’s appropriate, that fits our mission. And then secondly, we had to train the warehouse staff on how to package. They never ship internationally, we to teach ’em how to pack correctly. So the interesting thing, there’s a huge breakage because we do ship very fragile tableware. So at the beginning there were actually quite a lot more broken bows than we would arriving our customers. So we had to figure out, okay, why would the bows breaking, what do we need to improve on bubble wrap? What kind of bubble wrap do we need to pick? So we’re getting down the sense of different bubble wraps, which ones to buy, how thick the boxes should be. We have probably 19 different boxes that we use to optimize the shipping costs. So we have to negotiate with FedEx on the shipping rates train to, and then in addition to all the logistics of getting stuff to the warehouse, training the staff there on how to package products, we also wrap all our products in the Japanese cloth. So we got train the staff on how to package everything, wrap in the Japanese cloth, protect everything, ship international material, arrive safely, all within three months span.

Bjork Ostrom: So the warehouse is in Japan, it’s in Tokyo. Correct. And so you’re sourcing independently made goods often, probably not always, but independently made goods warehousing them in Tokyo? Correct. An order comes through, is it like a Shopify?

Shen Chen: It’s Shopify. We run it through Shopify.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay. So can you walk me through what happened? So I go in and I’m like kingfisher soy sauce dispenser, which after this call I’m actually going to buy one because this is perfect for us to have not only soy sauce, but for our girls they’ll love it as well.

Shen Chen: No, we’d be honored to give you one as a gift, so please, please don’t purchase.

Bjork Ostrom: No, no, no. I’ll buy it just for not only for the sake of this demonstration, but also for the sake of supporting you in the business. But can you walk me through, then what happens after I go through the flow of add to cart and then check out?

Shen Chen: Sure. So Shopify generates the order, it goes to our warehouse endeavor, warehouse management system, and then they’ll see, okay, what orders come in? Is there a gift card involved where they have to print a special gift message or not? We offer that complimentary to our customers and then also look at any additional instruction for any of the product items that they ordered. And so once they receive it, they would check off one by one, scan the barcode, make sure everything’s in the box packed correctly, make sure there’s enough cushion, and then they go into the shipping system, different system and enter in the FedEx numbers that’s been generated and ship it off to warehouse. And it’s pretty amazing. We usually turn around the same day and it arrives in the US three days later at a customer four step.

Bjork Ostrom: Wow, really?

Shen Chen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s amazing.

Shen Chen: Worldwide, it rises in about two to three days. Everything goes via air freight.

Bjork Ostrom: But the point within all of this is not only do you have this inventory, but then you also have FedEx and you’re having to have a conversation with the FedEx sales guy about technology integration and it’s international and you have cost of goods and then you have the markup on those and all of that.

Shen Chen: That’s actually not the hardest part. The hardest part is actually working with all these cones in Japan. A lot of ’em still use fax machines to receive orders. They don’t even have email and they don’t really keep track of the inventory very carefully. So that’s actually the hardest part for us to manage is once we place the order, sometimes we don’t know how long it takes to generate these products

Bjork Ostrom: Because it’s two to three people maybe who are making these and it’s a specialty thing that it’s not like they’re just cranking ’em out thousands a day.

Shen Chen: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: About do you run this under the umbrella of Just One Cookbook? Is it integrated as a similar business or is it technically another business?

Shen Chen: It’s a completely other business.

Bjork Ostrom: Okay, got it.

Shen Chen: Yeah, Just One Cookbook is wholly owned by Nami and myself. And this one we have a third partner that works with us.

Bjork Ostrom: And that’s the business partner in Japan?

Shen Chen: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: And so is it a Japanese company?

Shen Chen: It is a Japanese company

Bjork Ostrom: With a Japanese entity. Oh, it is. Oh, so fascinating. And so not that this would apply to a lot of listeners, but I’m just really curious about it. You then, is all the banking and everything happening in Japan and then if you were to take distributions from that company, you would just get that sent to a US bank account?

Shen Chen: Correct. If there’s profit to be shared, then we would just report it as a ordinary income for us.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. Oh, interesting. Gosh, that’s so fascinating. What would you say to anybody who’s thinking about this is a very unique one and one of the things with the complexity around independent creators that you have partnered with in a foreign country is the defensibility of that. The harder a thing is, the less likely it is that you’ll ever have somebody who’s doing something similar. So let’s say on a smaller scale, if somebody was just interested in creating a Shopify account, maybe even selling their own things, I think of my dad and he creates pottery and could sell it online. What would your advice be to anybody who’s thinking about doing something like this? What have you learned in the first year? I really think that first year is like it’s drinking from a fire hose when you’re standing up a new business.

Shen Chen: I think for us, you need for a company, you need a CEO, COO, and CTO. And the reason behind that is there’s operational aspects to this entire business. And then this also technology stack to technology run this all the different apps besides, I mean Shopify is one world, but within Shopify we use 14 different apps. One’s for the blogging aspects of it, one is for the filtering, kind of how the store interacts. So you need operational site who can manage the warehousing, the FedEx, the ordering, the fulfillment. You need technology stack that runs the store. You need a marketing stack to spread the word about your product. So I would say for anyone who’s going to this, evaluate your own skills, what you’re good at. And because not everyone can be good at everything, I would encourage to seek out a partner who can compliment your skillset. So if someone’s really good at marketing, who’s got a great idea but has no idea about operational side, find somebody who experienced doing the operational side of the business and bring them in. And that will save you a ton of time making mistakes. I think the reason why a lot of business failed to get off the ground is you make so many mistakes and you just can’t recover from it. You just end up closing it. But if you have enough expertise in different elements of a company, I think your chance of success is a little bit higher.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And especially once you get into something where it’s these specific areas of knowledge and expertise, it’s like operational warehouse operations. It’s like, oh man, I don’t know anything about warehouse operations, but there are people out there who are really good at the operations of a warehouse and those people probably aren’t good at social media and they probably don’t have an audience of people who are going to buy food products. So to finish the conversation kind of on the business specifics, I’m curious if tariffs impact you or is it because that $800 mark, I don’t know a lot about this.

Shen Chen: It is,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s not like you’re getting a huge shipment in of $50,000 of products that would have a tariff. It’s a smaller amount that’s being shipped internationally. So that wouldn’t impact things. Am I understanding that correctly?

Shen Chen: So there’s this law, if you will, of everybody in the US can receive a package of $800 value or less per day. Kind of like some legislation that’s been written a while ago, and this is why a lot of packages was coming through from overseas to us not being impacted by a terrorist.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure.

Shen Chen: I think the current administration has put a stop to that for packages from Hong Kong and China starting early May. So that benefit goes away from, but for the rest of the world that benefits still applies.

Bjork Ostrom: Got it. So it’s not something that you in this case would have to worry about. Correct.

Shen Chen: But if we were having a US warehouse and we were shipping in bulk from Japan to us, now we would have to pay the 10% reciprocal tariffs that’s in place for the 90 days. But after the 90 days expires, I think the terrorist for Japan goes up 24%, so that would significantly impact our business because now a hundred thousand dollars of good you had to pay $24,000 just to just in terrorists,

Bjork Ostrom: Probably a lot of the margin.

Shen Chen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s this reality I think that we all have within business, which is there’s, in our world content publishing world, there’s algorithms and changing algorithms and competition from other content creators. But for a lot of people that I know or have read about who are in the world of e-commerce, like they had a really successful business and they’re importing hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of product from China, and now suddenly that because of a change that happened quickly similar to an algorithm change, except in this case it’s legislation around tariffs that can change. And all of it just comes back to this reality that we need to be aware that at any point something can change and either have an idea of, okay, if it does change, what do we do? Or you’ve done in your case to protect against a changing shift in the world of content creation, having something that’s kind of already happening that you could build up. So two more questions related to the JOC goods. One would be, do you have thoughts around long-term? Would your hope be, Hey, let’s grow this into Just One Cookbook. Is the number one English written Japanese recipe site, would the hope be to build this into a staple of Japanese goods that would be accessible outside of Japan? So a little bit of the future that you envision for your respective companies and how those would kind of build over time. Any thoughts on that?

Shen Chen: Yeah, absolutely. That is our goal is to bring goods from Japan, and we only source goods as absolutely meeting Japan or a handcraft in Japan. That’s kind of our philosophy. We don’t want to just go and source any mass market good that can sell thousand pieces to on pieces of, we want to bring Japanese craftmanship. And one of the challenges we have even within Japan is a lot of these crafts are dying because it’s so much hard work into making each one of these pieces. And we want to help preserve this art. So there’s two mission right here. One is we do want to a second business that’s healthy and robust in case the blog is not, cannot sustain us financial anymore. We have a second business fall back on. The second one is our mission to promote Japanese arts and crafts and help hopefully by generating more revenue given these, because a lot of these are produced very rural area, giving these businesses more financial stability so they can continue to create these beautiful tableware for us to enjoy it.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. The presence of artistic quality, artistically made quality things in our life is unquantifiable, but undeniably important to have well-crafted things. I think of, there’s this video I saw years ago, maybe it was a couple of years ago, about the barrel-aged soy sauce. And my parents got some when they recently visited, this was maybe a year or two ago, went back and visited and went through Tokyo and saw a lot of their friends and they picked up some of the soy sauce and you taste it and it’s like, oh my gosh, this is so different than the soy sauce that I’m used to. But you need people to purchase that and you need the global market to have access to it. And these aren’t necessarily people who are going to be like, Hey, I’m going to list this on Etsy and sell it through that. So really appreciate that. Last question that I have for you around the site is what has been most valuable for you from an exposure standpoint with the site? My thought is you could run paid ads, you can talk about it organically within social, and I think it would help listeners fill out the picture around if you do have a physical product, if you do have something that you’re selling in a Shopify store, what have you found to be the most beneficial way to not only get people to know about it, but also to create enough intrigue or desire for people to actually purchase the products?

Shen Chen: Absolutely. So we do paid ads on both Meta and Google. It’s just really hard for a new store to get out there and be in front of people if you don’t do any paid ads. So we’ve been investing quite heavily in the paid front. On top of that

Bjork Ostrom: As a quick point is something that’s really amazing to have at your disposal when you’re used to organic as the only way to reach people,

Shen Chen: Correct.

Bjork Ostrom: The idea that you can figure out a certain video or a certain keyword or a certain angle that results in you putting a dollar into the machine and it giving you $2 is really nice as a resource for building an online business. So anyways, you were saying paid ads.

Shen Chen: Paid ads. And the same time, because of our experience working with SEO, we know how to write the product description correctly, targeting right keywords, doing research on keyword volume, looking at what our competitors are doing, what’s driving traffic, so making sure our product descriptions are written correctly. We also make sure the structure of the site, so make sure we have all the vendor information, everything. So Google can read not just the content, but the data structure.

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And just like in the recipe world, there is structured data for the product world.

Shen Chen: Yeah, exactly. So our benefits, because we are experienced with these sites, so we have the paid portion, this SEO portion, and obviously Nami is also talking about the table where she loves organically through Instagram and other social media channels. And in our newsletter as well. And we have a section on our homepage which talks about, just on our homepage, we talk about secrets.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great. And you kind of have that in the world of e-commerce, that unfair advantage of an audience and eyeballs that are preexisting. So anybody who’s listening, we think often, how do we get more traffic? How do we build page views? But one of the things that I think is so smart, what you guys have done here, is to think about how do I build an adjacent brand? We had Nathan Barry, the founder of ConvertKit now Kit on the podcast, he had this whole series that he did called Billion Dollar Brand, billion Business or Something Billion Dollar. But the whole idea was as creators, one of the things that we can do that is most beneficial from a wealth creation value creation is to build an adjacent brand that isn’t necessarily the content brand, but it’s something that the content brand can feed into and eventually, oftentimes that can become bigger than the content brand itself as you figure out all of those things like paid ads, partnerships with other creators and things like that.

Shen Chen: Yeah. The next part of our journey is we are going to try to tell the story of who’s creating these pieces and making,

Bjork Ostrom: Documenting those and you have video capabilities to do that. Oh cool. That’s great. So this will be my last question for you. For anybody who, well the question would be this, what would be the one product within the JOC goods product catalog right now that you’d point people to that you think is a really cool one or that people should check out? And then we’ll link to that in the show notes as well.

Shen Chen: The best selling product on the site is actually our stainless steel prep trays. People absolutely love it. We’ve sold quite a lot. I think today we’ve had almost 4,000 orders for JOC Goods since we started launched in September and we’re pretty happy with where it stands being a half a year old store and so far the best feedback we have received is people absolutely love our prep trays. You can use it to marinate, to store, and especially when you make a katsu when you have the age which

Bjork Ostrom: We had growing up, that was one of things my dad would make.

Shen Chen: Yeah, it comes through prep trays. Perfect. Because you can dip in the egg, the flour and deep fry, and instead of using plate, making a mess everywhere. It kind of keeps your kitchen really clean.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. Awesome. That’s great. Shen really appreciate you coming on sharing your story. It’s been great for me to get, you know, you and Nami as well through the years. We’ll have to get her on some time. I know that she’s shy, doesn’t want to come on the podcast. She has her desk in the background and kind of hides away when you come on, but that’ll maybe be one our goals for the next year as we’ll. See if we can get her on as well.

Shen Chen: When you see her, try to convince her in person.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, exactly. We’ll be meeting up at a conference and so that will be my side quest for that conference is to convince her to come on. So thanks for coming on. Really appreciate it and excited to watch you continue to build all the things that you guys have created.

Shen Chen: Thank you for having me on. It’s always been a pleasure talking to you and Lindsay and I want to thank you guys for all the leadership you’ve shown in the industry.

Bjork Ostrom: Thanks.

Shen Chen: It’s really inspirational for us to continue to see how you guys grow and try to copy as much as we can.

Bjork Ostrom: Well appreciate it and I’m sure we’ll continue to create hopefully each of us for another decade moving forward here. So thanks for coming on, Shen.

Emily Walker: Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast because we are kicking off a brand new month. I am popping in to fill you in on what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, we would love to have you head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership. To learn more about everything we offer within the membership and get to get signed up to start the month, we have a brand new coaching call that will be going live on Thursday, May 8th with David from the blog, the Savory Kitchen. You can catch the video replay on the site or the audio replay in our members-only podcast, Food Blogger Pro On the Go. Next up, we will be hosting a public webinar with Yoast on Thursday, May 15th. This webinar will be all about AI strategies for SEO success and Bjork will be joined by Carolyn Shelby, Principal SEO at Yoast. If you’ve been wondering how you can incorporate AI into your content creation workflow or worried that AI will diminish the value of your brand, this is the perfect webinar for you. Again, that will be on Thursday, May 15th at 1:00 PM Eastern, 12:00 PM Central, or 10:00 AM Pacific Time. Head to the link in show notes to register for free. We would love to see you there. Last up, we have a course update that will be going live on May 29th. We are giving our Blog Monetization 101 course, a big old facelift and can’t wait for you to see the new and improved course. It’s going to be a great month and we’ll see you back here next week for a brand new podcast episode. Thanks again for tuning in.