Why Personality Is the New Competitive Advantage with Sam Vander Wielen

Disclaimer: This transcript was generated using AI.

Ann Morrissey: Welcome back to another episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. I’m Ann from the Food Blogger Pro team. In this week’s episode, Bjork is sitting down with Sam Vander Wielen to dig into the gap between the idea of entrepreneurship and what it actually takes to build a business. The conversation also opens up into something deeper, success, enoughness, and what actually creates fulfillment. Sam gets candid about major personal hardships, including brain surgery, caring for her father through leukemia, and losing both of her parents and how those experiences forced her to confront a hard truth. Business success and financial growth can solve a lot of problems, but not the personal ones. She and Bjork will talk about protecting your time, building with intention, and why leaning into story, personality, and authenticity matters more than ever in an AI-shaped world where purely informational content is easier to replace. And now without further ado, I’ll let Bjork take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Sam, welcome to the podcast.

Sam Vander Wielen: Hey, Bjork. Thanks for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, we’re going to be talking about business. We’re going to be talking about food blogs. You’ve had a food blog in your past. It’s not your main thing that you do right now, but you were once one of us. We’re going to be talking about all things legal, the legal considerations that you need to make. But before we jump into it, I want to talk a little bit about a book that you published. It’s a book about this idea of starting a business and happiness and thinking that a lot of times those two things will be correlated. Tell me a little bit about your book and the reason that you felt like this was a topic that you wanted to write about.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, because it feels like yesterday that I was sitting at the top of a skyscraper in Philadelphia where I’m from, literally watching birds fly around in the middle of the sky reading Pinch of Yum and being like – Love it. Great. Well, my life would be perfect if I could get out of this skyscraper and write some blog posts about what I ate yesterday. I’m like, that looks so easy and perfect and just no stress, as you know. And so I think that I had this idea, I had this kind of romanticized idea that corporate was evil and everything was my boss’s fault and it was like somebody, I don’t know, the universe’s fault so that I’d even become a lawyer to begin with and gone down this corporate path. And I really did think, okay, once I leave this, everything will just be fine. And so not only did I go out and try to start a food blog and get humbled very quickly and have my first experience in realizing what the difference is between wanting the outcome of something. I want to be a Pinch of Yum at the end, not what you guys did to build it along the way. Yeah,

Bjork Ostrom: It’s such a good point. And I often talk about, it’s really hard to articulate, but what you just talked about is some of the things that I try and explain to people, which is I think sometimes people get into a thing. It could be creating a blog, it could be building a social following. They get into it because they like the idea of the outcome, which is what it looks like. It looks like passive income and you press publish and you work with brands and sponsors and you don’t have to go to an office. All of that’s true. But I think for the people who reach a certain level of success in any industry, but in this world, if it’s content or a blog, a lot of times either I’ll say this, what they love is the day-to-day, the grind of the mechanics of creating a piece of content or figuring out how to record a video. Or sometimes they don’t even love it, but they’re just compelled to do it. I think there’s a certain group of people who Have this thing within them, which is for me, it’s like I need to stay on top of figuring out how to respond to emails and reviewing the books for the businesses. And it’s like, okay, that’s going to be, I don’t necessarily love that stuff, but I’m compelled to do it. And as a result of that, the downstream effects are the businesses look a certain way or act a certain way. Similarly in the content world that exists, what you just said is such a great example of that. At what point in the process did you realize I actually don’t like the process? I don’t like the day-to-day. I like the idea of the outcome, but not the actual grind for what it takes to do this?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, I think this is a really important conversation because I also want to paint the picture for people that I really love cooking and I cook all the time. And so I had that in my mind of like, oh, all I have to do is cook and then I can make a living for this. This seems pretty easy. But the moment that I realized was I went to go cook something I was going to make and I’d gotten one of these fancy lighting kits or something. And I looked at all these pieces in the box in the bag that it came in and I was like, I don’t want to set this up. I don’t want to learn how to do that. Or I look at Lindsay’s beautiful pictures and it’s like, I want my picture to look like that, but I realized I don’t want to learn how to make my pictures look like that, which I didn’t know how to do. And so it was that moment where I was like, oh, I just love cooking. I don’t want to document it. I don’t want to have to track everything. I don’t want to learn all the pieces. And I think you can tell a lot by how willing you are to get messy, to be bad at things, to be a beginner and not know all that stuff at the beginning, if that still sounds fun, that challenge sounds fun to you, I think it’s a good road to go down.Because ultimately I ended up learning like, okay, maybe I didn’t want to set up that lighting kit and learn how to take beautiful photographs, but I did love learning the backend of WordPress and I loved figuring out blogging and some social media stuff and SEO at the time. That all sounded really fun to me.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. What we find so often, and my encouragement to anybody listening who hasn’t done this, is to start. Start, but then be willing to pivot along the way into the thing that you are most drawn to and that is also valuable. I think it’s those two things that has to exist if you’re going to work on it within the context of business. A lot of times we’ll see people who get into blogging and they’re like, I actually don’t like photography, but I really like the analytics or I like development. Or in your case it’s like, I like working with WordPress. I’m still interested in online business, but the medium of food as the content isn’t super appealing. But along the way, because I started, I realized I actually do love or am really interested in this other thing. So it sounds like that was the case for you. And then you probably had a little bit of history with legal and were able to combine those into a new category. Is that what it looked like for you as you moved through out of food as the medium and into legal?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, it’s sort of like what you said earlier where I think I just started to come to this intersection of okay, I get to do these things that I’m finding really fun in building a business like writing and helping with the website and working on Canva or something like that. But where is that intersection between a really good idea that’s actually in demand and doesn’t have a whole lot of supply? So for me, that was creating a legal product. And so this whole time I was trying to build a little bit of a food blog and start a health coaching practice really to get away from my miserable corporate lawyer career. I was practicing as a lawyer. So unbeknownst to me, I was really developing and building that skill as a lawyer. And because I was watching you guys and everything that you were doing, at the same time, it was like I was aware of this world, a food blogging world and a coaching world and just a blogging world in general where I was like, oh, they don’t have all this legal stuff because the people I’m working with at the firm every single day, these kind of old school lawyers, they don’t know what you’re doing. They don’t understand. They don’t understand what Instagram is. They don’t understand Stan stores now or whatever. And so I didn’t realize at the time, but those things were really starting to intersect.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. It’s like there are tools and we were using the tools within the context of food and food sites and food creators, but you could use those anywhere. And what you found was a category where there wasn’t a ton of supply. There are other people doing it, but it wasn’t like a food site. And there probably was demand, especially as the creator economy started to grow. So you start to work on that. Give me the premise of the book. So the book name is When I Start My Business, I’ll Be happy. This isn’t hot off the press, but it’s within the last couple of years that you released this. What did you learn about yourself as you went through the process of starting your business, getting up speed, and eventually getting to this point where it was enough to replace your full-time income and then some there’s this tagline or this concept that’s buried within the title where it’s like, it’s not actually true that you start a business and then you’ll be happy. What did that look like for you as you worked through starting your business and getting it to a point where the business itself was successful and then you reflected back like, am I happy? What do I need to change or adjust because of that?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, so basically after I had started this fledgling food blog and then the coaching practice and that didn’t work either, I had this idea for the legal template business, helping people get their legal stuff in order who wanted to start online businesses or bloggers or anything. And like I was saying at the beginning, I really just thought, okay, this will be it. Everything will be smooth sailing. And basically as soon as I left the law firm and started this business, my business was pretty successful pretty quickly. I got very lucky. I was early on I think in the creator economy business, but basically my life blew up. I had brain surgery a month after I left the firm and started this business. And then within a year, literally as I started to get back on my feet and walking again, my dad got sick with leukemia. I became his caregiver. My dad passes away, and the same year my dad passes away, my mom is killed. And so it was just like one thing after the next, could not get back up again for a long time, which unfortunately I know you can relate to on the grief side. But I think that along the way I learned so many important lessons, not only logistically about my business, I made my business run a well-oiled machine because I essentially had to, my back was against a wall and I had to do that. But I also learned that it was not my business’s responsibility to make me happy. And that was one of the most freeing things that I experienced because I realized that I was chasing down this thing thinking, “Oh, when I reach a certain revenue number, subscriber number, follower, whatever numbers, everything will be great and I’ll feel great.” It didn’t feel great. And it never feels enough, not from a kind of piggy perspective, but it doesn’t feel like me. What do you mean piggy perspective? Yeah. It’s not like, “Oh, I need more. I need more. I’m greedy,” kind of thing. But more like it just does, I don’t know, it’s like eating a bunch of empty calories. That’s how I feel.You’re still hungry. It doesn’t satisfy that whatever that thing is you think it’s going to satisfy. And when you have all this serious heavy life stuff going on in the background, you’re like, “Oh yeah, this isn’t it. It’s not about subscribers or followers. I want to figure out how to actually be happy.”

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. I listened to Morgan Hausel and have read a few of his books, Psychology of Money, and he has a podcast as well and talks a lot about this idea of… Because I think one of the reasons that people think about I’ll be happy when I start a business is, I think it’s usually twofold, the income financial piece and then the autonomy flexibility piece. And I think both of those are very true. You have autonomy, you have flexibility in a way that you didn’t, and you have the potential to earn in maybe a way that you didn’t before. There’s also a lot of inherent risk. We’ve lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in many different situations because of business decisions we’ve made. So there’s that risk as well. But what Morgan Housel talks about is this idea that what people often confuse about money is that they think that money solves all problems, but it does solve a lot of problems and the problems that it solves are money problems. But I think oftentimes in life, what you find is the majority of problems in life aren’t money problems. And I think for me, I always feel like it’s really important to preface that those are very real. If you feel those in your life, if you’re experiencing that we’ve had that, we’ve been in seasons where we feel that our refrigerator dies when Lindsay and I are first married and it’s like Lindsay has babysitting money so we buy a scratch and dent refrigerator. How are we going to figure out how to get a refrigerator? That’s a money problem that’s very real. If you have business success and you solve some of those money problems, those go away. But what I’ve found in my life, and I would love to hear your reflection on it is you can solve money problems, but man, the majority of life problems land outside of that. There are many more than we imagine beyond that. I think you feel the presure financially when you’re in it, but as soon as you solve those, you look around and say, “Oh, actually there’s a lot of problems in the world that having extra cash can’t solve.” What was that like for you as you started to experience that on your end?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. I mean, I was sitting in chemo rooms with my dad getting all these notifications about how many sales I’m making. And I’m like, okay, like you’re saying, on the one hand, that was great because that’s what allowed me to sit in that room and take him. It’s also what allowed me to financially support him when he got sick. So there was that ease of that pressure, but at the same time I’m like, “Oh, this is what everybody says that they want, but look, it doesn’t help me. I’m watching my dad disappear before my eyes.” So it didn’t resolve that. And I think it doesn’t resolve maybe some of the issues like fulfillments, I think maybe on a deeper level of just really feeling fulfilled. I feel more these days, I started a Substack where I’ve been writing some more just personal narrative essays where I’m talking a lot about building a life offline that I loved because I think that’s to me what the connection has been and that the building something online that’s been so visible and where I’ve shared things in the past to just being like, actually, it feels really good to keep things for myself and also to just live, I don’t know, what I would call real life in what’s around me. And that there’s just, I don’t know, there’s just only so much money can do for that. I also don’t think enough people in our industry, I mean, you’re completely right about, there’s obviously a lot of privilege in this conversation of there are basic foundational needs that everyone should have met, of course. And then if your business becomes very successful or whatever you’re doing becomes very successful, I think that there’s just also this point where you’re like, what is enough? I don’t think enough people actually stop to talk about enoughness and they just keep going because I think especially in America, we’re so used to just being like, everything has to be bigger, faster, stronger and more. But we don’t stop to say, am I actually happy? I have my basic needs met. I have that freedom I wanted and what am I really doing more for at this point?

Bjork Ostrom: This was a Morgan Housel interview and one of the things that he talked about was somebody who interviewed, it was like 500 multimillionaires or something. I don’t know the number, but it was hundreds, not thousands, but a decent amount. And he said this interviewer said out of all of those people, there were two that he looked at and said, “I would want to live their life.” And his point that he made within it was a lot of times the mechanism, the personality trait, the characteristics that got people to that point in their life is something that they can’t turn off. And so then they continue to do the thing that the symptom of it was they built a successful business or invested money really well or whatever it might be, but they couldn’t turn it off. And so they continued to grow and build and scale and it kind of enveloped them was the point that he was trying to make. And I think I’ve been thinking about it and what are the ramifications for me as I talk to other entrepreneurs? What conversation can we have Around this idea, exactly what you’re saying, what is enough and how can we be aware of our own tendencies? And we see it all the time with somebody who’s… And usually what happens, not always, but usually what happens is it’s somebody who has something about them. I want to grow. I want to scale. I am motivated by this. I’m driven by this. And then you have something in your life that switches or changes or causes reflection. You might have kids, you might have a parent who becomes sick, and then you’re forced to look in the mirror your own tendencies and examine how those might not be serving you, but it’s really hard to unwind those. And so I think it’s a super important conversation to have because inevitably, if you reach a certain point of success or if you are extremely motivated, you can reap the benefits of that, but then you have to make a decision at some point to say, “What do I need? What is enough? How do I be intentional? Scale back?” One other quick story, I saw this article about somebody who he had found this kind of product that worked well. It was like a lint roller. You and I have dogs and it was a long lint roller for dogs and cats and stuff and it did really well on Amazon and he was working two hours a week and making 150,000 a year. And what he was saying is that’s the thing that is truly beneficial for me is this autonomy and flexibility, but that feels like a really hard thing to do if one of your main things is to work hard and to show up and to continue to grow. So how did you unravel that with your business? And then I want to go back and talk a little bit about this idea of starting and how to start intentionally as well, but what did it look like for you to make some of those decisions to let off the gas a little bit?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, it’s hard because I think it takes a lot of practice. And as you’re building your business, you really do have to be clear on what you want your life to look like. And so for example, if you say freedom and flexibility are key for you, I’ve watched so many friends go ahead and then build businesses that are so dependent on them being on all these phone calls and meetings. And then they’re like, “Well, I don’t have so much freedom and flexibility anymore because I have to be tied to my desk or on camera. And I have the schedule basically as if they were at a nine to five.” So you can kind of box yourself out of that accidentally. So I know for me, it was really, really hard as I went along to just keep my eye on the prize and stay focused on… I’ve only ever sold two products, for example, since 2016, and one of them alone has generated more than $10 million in just that product. And so I have kept my head down because it was working and something in me just said why… Everybody as I was going along kept saying, “Oh, why don’t you sell something else? Why don’t you start offering coaching? Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you do that? ” I’m like, “Because these two things are working. And so why don’t I just pour more energy into these two things and just keep making them better?” Admittedly, I did think that their runway would run out at some point and people would stop wanting them, but they haven’t, so I’ve kept going. But it was tempting. Along the way, people would ask me like, “Hey, I’d pay you $5,000 to register my trademark, or I would pay you this to do that.” And I’m like, “Nope, I’m not offering any services because that is what will tie me down and that kills my freedom and flexibility, and that is worth something to me. ” I think it’s about people listening to remembering that money is not the only currency and that we operate in many different kinds of currencies, whether it’s time or energy, freedom, flexibility, whatever. And so you have to balance. You can only look at the dollar sign potential of something. If that’s going to be a negative, it’s going to be a deficit on your energy or your time. To me, after becoming stable financially, that was equally as valuable currency as actual money.

Bjork Ostrom: Do you have some way that you quantify those? I know I’m looking at my desk here, see if I have it. Sahil Bloom has this book, Five Types of Wealth, and he talks about different types of wealth, similar idea to currency. The hard thing with our industry, whether it be financial or followers or traffic or keyword position rank, those are all very tangible. Connectedness with my daughters, strength of a relationship with my wife, number of dear friends, that’s really ambiguous. Do you have any way to have some checks and balances with yourself to say, “You know what? I need to audit my freedom and flexibility account because it’s getting low,” or is that more of a gut intuition?

Sam Vander Wielen: Okay, so the one practical way I do this is when I review my calendar every week, so usually on Sunday, I sit down, I look at my calendar for the week, and I see all these colored bubbles all over my Google Calendar. And sometimes I’m like, “Whoa, what happened here?” So that can be a good indication for me to step back and think, “I have a ton of meetings this week. First of all, are they something that I don’t technically need? Could it be an email or a Slack message or a loom instead?” So there’s some things like that. But even for me – It’s an audit. It’s a little bit of a time audit. That’s great. Yeah, a weekly audit, I think. And then I mean, there’s so much you can do maybe about that week if you see that that week is out of control. But I usually also try to reflect as well and be like, “How did I let it get this way? Should there be somebody else on the team who takes meetings before things get to me, for example? Am I overcommitting? I’ve talked to the team about only committing to X number of guest podcast interviews per month or I teach trainings inside people’s communities all the time, so we put a cap on that. ” So I think they were starting to create some rules around those things, trying to batch where I have all interviews or all meetings on a certain day of the week so that it’s like, okay, that day is not the favorite, but it’s a lot of outward energy that can get done on one day so that I’ve had to communicate to my team. I don’t like having little meetings sprinkled throughout the whole week because I want entire days blocked off where I can just do creative work. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: I recently did this. I haven’t been 100% on it, but I’ve been pretty good of trying to do Monday and Friday. Those are the ones for me where it’s like, “Hey, if I can go from a Sunday into a Monday knowing that I can just go heads down on stuff, it feels really good. And then Friday, if I know that I can close the week out to do a little bit of catch up on things, that also feels really good. The hard part for me has been defending those. One of the things that I’ve heard that’s been really helpful from a decision-making standpoint is, would you say yes if you were going to book that meeting today? And I think so often what we’re doing is when we’re scheduling a thing, we don’t feel it in the way that we do if it’s out two weeks. But if we were like, Hey, if that’s going to be later today, would you still want to do that? Would it still be something that you prioritize? We have to all the time do meetings that we might not want to do, but when we have our own business, you have some flexibility to be able to say, okay, is this important for me to be a part of? Is it not? Is it something that could drop and things would still get done okay? And that simple decision-making framework of if I were leaving for this conference tomorrow, would I be excited about it? If I were taking this meeting today, would I be excited about it? If not, maybe I want to sit with that a little bit and say, okay, maybe I don’t want to do it. I remember this story where Warren Buffet talked about, I don’t know if this is actually true, but we’ll tell it like it is. It’s one of those where it’s like you hear it from somebody and then you’re like, okay, Warren Buffett said this. We’ll never know. We’ll never know. But he was talking about his calendar as being his truest form of wealth where it’s like he had this empty calendar. And for him, that’s true. That’s not true for everybody. There’s a lot of people who really love meetings and so it’s very individual. But I think your point is a good one, which is you need to be aware of it and not let things drift because if they can, you can find yourself two years down the line in a position where you’re maybe doing work that you don’t love. And that’s the thing that we’ve often seen with creators who loved to create. And then three years later They’ve built a successful business from a numbers perspective, but they’re actually pretty unhappy in that. And so as a last piece on the book specifically, can you talk a bit about this idea of happiness as it relates to how should we be in relationship with our business, our happiness? What does that look like and how can our business help us achieve that as opposed to make it harder to achieve that happiness? Yeah. Before we continue, let’s take a moment to hear from our sponsors. Building a creator business isn’t getting any easier. Between AI constant platform changes and the pressure to keep growing, it can feel like you’re running just to keep up. That’s why we’re excited to partner with Raptive. Raptive works with thousands of the webs leading independent creators, including us, to help them earn more, grow smarter, and build sustainable businesses for the long term. They combine industry leading advertising with personalized guidance, data-driven insights, and a team that’s constantly helping creators adapt to changes in search AI in the broader digital landscape. They’re also leading the charge to protect creator content and advocate for a future where independent creators can continue to thrive. And now it’s easier than ever to join. If your site gets at least 25,000 monthly pay views, you can apply to become part of the Raptive creator community and get support that’s designed to grow with your business. To learn more or apply, visit raptive.com/fbp. Thanks again to Raptive for sponsoring this episode.

Sam Vander Wielen: I talk about in the book about how it’s a lot of pressure. It’s kind of like going on a first date or your early dates and expecting this new brand new relationship to fully cure everything in your life and be financially supportive at the same time, which is what we also do to our young businesses. So it’s a lot of pressure to put on a young business. And so I think the biggest shift or the way I got away from this was not expecting my business to make me happy and then making sure that I actually was doing things outside of my business to have fun or to express myself in a way that wasn’t being captured for social media or making sure I had moments. I wrote something the other day called everybody should try to be like a Scorpio because I’m a Scorpio and we like our secrets. We think we’re sly and we don’t want everybody to know everything about us. And so I think we need a little bit more of that in today’s world where we’re used to promoting everything that we do, but I found that helpful. And then therefore the

Bjork Ostrom: Business seeps into every area of your life, which is what I hear you saying a little bit as well is to have a line as well.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, because I’m sure for people listening that if you are trying to grow your blog or even your online creator presence, it’s so much based on you. It’s on your personality now versus when you guys started. It’s so much more forward on everybody wants to see what you’re doing and eating and all the things you’re up to and what you’re buying. And it’s just a lot. And I think if you don’t have that separation, it can be really hard for you as a business owner. I also think that the unintended benefit that I write about a lot in the book is that my mom used to say you have to be an interesting and interested person. And I think that getting out there and doing other things, although I don’t recommend you go out and do it for the content, it ultimately ends up helping you. I just wrote a newsletter. I have a weekly newsletter called Sam’s Sidebar, and I just wrote a newsletter about something that happened in my tennis class the other day. I found out that there was this high-performance tennis clinic on the weekends, and I really wanted to go. And I asked the tennis pro, and he said, “You’re not ready yet.” And I was like, “Oh no.” And I was so crushed. And I said to him, “What do I have to do to be able to be ready for it? What should I practice? What should I do? ” And I was just thinking about how more people should ask that about business, about how that’s the question, what to ask.

Bjork Ostrom: What did he say, by the way?

Sam Vander Wielen: Oh God, he told me I needed more match play. So I was like, I don’t want to do match play, I just want to take classes. And so therein lies the problem. Although I think that relates to business as well, we can stay behind the scenes and maybe not put ourselves out there more, which is what match play represents for me is I don’t want to ask somebody to go meet up that I don’t know and play a game with them. It feels very exposing and vulnerable. So I think that if more people ask this question in business instead of just being like, oh, the only reason Lindsay is so successful is because she started early and she has this other skill that I don’t have. And we could sit there and do that all day long or you could ask, how can my thing become their thing? What do I have to do? What steps do I take? So yeah, I think getting out and doing other things ends up making you a much better creator.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I love that. Let’s talk about that idea of starting a business. I think that I don’t know if you… Well, to what degree do you feel like you have interactions with creators, have a beat on what the sentiment is on your end and knowing that it’s not just food creators you work with, but from our end, there’s a lot of fear and there’s AI and the changing landscape and searches changing. And I think it’s a scary time for people who have been creating for a while, who have a creator business. Also scary if somebody’s thinking of starting a creator business. What have you seen on your end as you’ve interacted with people and what’s the sentiment out there with the creators that you connect with?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, I think that the general sentiment, I’ve noticed a big downshift in all of my friends or people who are in my inbox and everything who are in the coaching or services world, especially services that can be more easily replicated by AI. I don’t think it’s a replacement for them, but people are looking into that. People are at least trying that. What would an example be? Copywriting. Copywriting is probably one of the biggest because I think people are just using AI tools to be able to generate emails or copy for their website or whatever.

Bjork Ostrom: So people who would’ve previously come to you starting a business around copywriting, what you’re saying is you’ve seen a down tick in those types of businesses, which makes sense.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. I know a copywriter friend who literally just went out and got a nine-to-five job a week ago because it dried up. Well, she helps teach other copywriters how to get work online, but their work slowed down. So her work slowed down. It’s just a bad downstream effect. I would say a lot of other people who have been heavily impacted are in the information trade business. So anybody who had courses that were just purely informational where again, people just think that they can go to AI and use that to replace having places.

Bjork Ostrom: Sometimes they can.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, depending on it. Yeah. And so even travel pros, I attract a lot of travel people and they’re all telling me that their clients are just going to chat and saying, give me a three-day itinerary for Paris or whatever, and they don’t need them anymore. So I think people are freaked out. I was seeing a downturn in, I would say, in business overall from people. That’s what people were saying. I think you’re also on the flip side, I just got back from Kit’s Craft and Commerce conference. And on the flip side, what I noticed this year, because last year when I spoke there, it was like I spoke and then everybody else who spoke spoke about AI. So this year I was curious to see how it went. There was no mention of AI this year, which I thought was super interesting. And it was almost on the flip side that everybody was talking about irreplaceable habits or irreplaceable things, tangential things about us that can’t be replaced by AI. So I thought that was super interesting.

Bjork Ostrom: What would an example of that be?

Sam Vander Wielen: Authenticity, showing parts of your personality, human experiences. I mean, luckily for me, a lot of how I write is just very story-oriented. I write about grief. Things that I don’t think people… It’s not really a replacement to read that from AI versus someone’s shared human experience.

Bjork Ostrom: The example that I’ve heard in the travel world is 10 awesome restaurants in Charleston versus I went to Charleston and this was the place that brought tears to my eyes or something. Okay, that’s informational in that this was obviously a moving place, but it’s also talking about here’s the kind of human experience story of me going to Charleston. So it’s more story-driven versus top 10 rated restaurants from Charleston. Okay, great. Maybe helpful, but you can get that somewhere else pretty easily versus your own story integrated into it. Is that a little bit of what you’re getting at is AI can’t tell the story of Sam.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, hopefully. It can give information, but it can’t tell.

Bjork Ostrom: There’s no way that it’s going to be able to recap what you did at your tennis lesson and what you learned from it.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, how it made me feel. I mean, even to go with that tennis example, for example, I’m so competitive and driven, not saying that that’s always a good thing, but I am like that when the tennis bro said that to me, I was like, “Everybody get out of my way. I’m going to figure out how to be able to do this. ” And then there was that part of me, I was like, “All right, calm down. You do this for fun. It’s okay. Do you really want to go take that class or now do you want to take it because he said you can’t?” And so maybe even talking about that, how we have to battle that within ourselves sometimes of, do you really want that thing? Do you really want a million subscribers on Instagram because wait till you see what your DMs are going to look like? Or do you want that because you think that means something about you? So I think that’s an example of how I will turn that into a story that I bet you people will be like, “Oh, I do that too,” versus like you said, top three coffee shops in Charleston or something.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So this idea from Kit, Craft and Commerce, what you’re saying is there was a lot of conversations around the future of creator businesses and that touch on, and this will be familiar for anybody who listens to the podcast, that touch on this idea of personality, authenticity, story. And the reason isn’t because, well, that’s what the vibes are now. It’s like that’s because if you are super deep into how-to information in the world of food, you’re going to have a really hard time because there’s probably going to be a better solution through Claude or ChatGPT around how to store ground beef if you want to freeze it. You could rank for that 10 years ago and you could make money from ads, but now there’s going to be an AI overview. People are going to go to chat, people are going to go to Claude. So if you want to create, if you want to create a business, if you want attention, it’s not going to be through informational stuff, it just can’t be. And so it has to be through story, it has to be through your human experience. And then from that, you make the decision, okay, where do we send people? What transaction do we want to have? Do we have a product? Is it ads? Is it affiliate? Is it sponsorship? So how about for those people who are starting up, they feel some fear, there’s this industry shift, but then there’s also the fear of just business itself. It’s kind of scary. There’s these things that I need to know, am I doing this right? This is more of the functional element of what you’re doing. What is your advice for people who are getting started around how to lay really solid foundation for their business so they can feel confident doing some of those other things and not have to worry about, am I going to get sued? What happens if I get sued? All of those things. So from a legal perspective, what are some of the things that people can be thinking about?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, so I think one of the most important things to know is that unfortunately here in America, we have a very litigious society and we have a legal system that allows people to get sued even for sharing free information or recipes, for example, online. And so a lot of times I will hear from people in your space who are like, “Well, I’m not making money from it yet. I’m just producing content and I just want to see if this works.” And there are still foundational legal things that you should do because technically speaking, you are still vulnerable. Although of course it’s low chances. We always have to tell you that it’s possible. So I mean more than anything, the first thing I recommend is just actually forming a business. And typically in our space, people are deciding between a sole proprietorship and an LLC, but a sole proprietorship actually doesn’t provide you with any legal protection at all. It’s like you have nothing. You have a business, you get to count business expenses, but legally speaking, you are completely vulnerable personally to anything that you post online. And so typically speaking, then people will go with an LLC. It’s much simpler than people think. The real benefit to having an LLC is that you personally are legally protected from the actions of your business or the content you’re posting online on behalf of your business. So even at bare bones, that’s the first best step. For all of you starting, hopefully you’re still starting a website. It’s still super valuable. Even if traffic is down, you can still get… I get crazy big traffic even if it’s less than what I used to get. It’s still many more people than I could meet in real life. In a day. Yeah, in a day, hopefully. Unless I was walking around New York City or something. But yeah, you would still have website policies. So if you’re starting a website or you have one, you definitely want a privacy policy. You may even want a website disclaimer. If you start to sell products or ebooks or recipe books or anything like that, guides of any sort, you can use a terms of use at checkout. But that’s really what I would do to start is just make sure you actually form your business so you’re personally protected, get whatever policy you need or a contract if you’re selling something.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. A lot of what I think is most beneficial is then you have that separation even just from I have a friend who’s a classic creative and it’s just like everything is in one account and I’m always like, oh no. It just drives me crazy. And I’m constantly being like, if you want, I could run the behind the scenes here for you. Not actually, I wouldn’t have time for it. But just having that separation is super helpful because then you can see, okay, did I make $1,000? And then if I did, that goes into my bank account, my business bank account, and then I had $500 of expenses. But in order to do that, it’s helpful to have that EIN setting up a separate business so that all of that can be separated. Do you have advice for one of the things that we’ve started to run into and we’ve started to see is in the world of AI, we’re getting a lot of these sites that can really easily spin up a site that either is scraping content or using very similar content. Do you have advice for people who are running into that and what the best proces would be?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, so everybody should know that just by you creating something on your website, for example, if you publish a recipe, you get inherent copyright rights in that. So you don’t technically have to register in order to have any rights. There is a federal registration process with the US Copyright Office where you can submit things that you’re putting on your website or guides that you create. I mean, definitely anything you create that’s paid, I would highly recommend investing in that. It’s pretty easy, quick, you can do it yourself and the filing fees are not as high as a trademark so that at least you would have some legal standing in order to go after them. You still have legal standing even without registration, but it’s a much bigger uphill battle without registration. Whereas when you have registered something, it’s kind of automatic. So it makes it much, much easier. So that’s one way to put yourself, I guess, in a position if you find somebody selling your stuff, which happens often. It’s happened to me, but because I had my stuff registered, it was just really easy to get taken down. There is an AI disclosure statement. My customers asked me to create something that they could have on their website that would say to AI that I do not give you permission to scrape my site or that for other people they can’t take information and put it into it for any purposes. The issue really becomes an enforcement. So it’s like you can have that, but how do I really even know? It’s kind of hard to find out about unless you stumble across or someone sends it to you. So there are those things that you could do, but like a lot of things in America, it comes down to, well, what are you going to do about it? Are you going to go after them? Are you going to sue them? Are you going to spend your money and your time doing this? So that’s a little difficult. I know on the back end of my site, I’ve done some tech things where I’ve made it so people can’t highlight, control, click, copy, paste, text. So there’s some things like that. I’m sure there’s a way to get around. Way around it. Yeah, yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s like anything, you’re making it. Same with loss on a door.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, just trying to make sure it’s just more

Bjork Ostrom: Inconvenient, not impossible.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, exactly. For your average user, I figure they can’t do it. So I think there are little things like that, but it’s difficult. Also, I’m hearing from people a lot who are getting AI cloned that are seeing their face in ads and in social media content without their consent. And what’s really wild to me as somebody who’s been doing this for a long time now too, is that the people who this is happening to aren’t the biggest people. You’re not seeing Oprah in this. I’m seeing everyday creators get stolen in this way. So that’s pretty crazy. Taylor Swift just filed for a trademark for her voice saying, “Hey guys, it’s Taylor.” So that’s interesting because that is not a trademarkable thing. So the reason I’m assuming that she’s doing that from a legal perspective is because it will get denied and then she will fight it. She will appeal and it will push this issue that says that nowadays we need to be able to trademark our name and our literal image. Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Insofar as our voice. Yeah. I’ve seen a couple instances of podcasters, we haven’t run into this, who their voice will be used on the background of, it’s not even necessarily NAD, but it’s just like, oh, that’s very obvious that it’s Jason Calikanis from this week in startups voicing this random product feature or whatever it might be because you have hours and hours of footage or audio and you feed it into ElevenLabs and out comes that voice saying whatever words you feed into the script, which is really wild. When you think of your business, I’d be interested just to hear your thoughts and reflections. How do you think of AI impacting your business? And are there things that you’re doing to think about, hey, the next year or two years, three years? Or is it a little bit more like, “Hey, this is working. I’m going to be intentional to not borrow worry around a potential future. And when the time comes, if things do shift, then I’ll accommodate it. ” Where does that land for you right now?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, so when I started my business in 2016, I would hear from people every day saying, “Hey, I Googled a free legal contract or a free privacy policy. Why should I get it from you? ” And so now 10 years later, I just see the same question, but like, “Hey, I tried ChatGPT.” The interesting thing from my perspective is that in that both of those cases, they’re still reaching out to me and they’re asking me. So I would always say, “If you got this thing, then why are you asking me? ” And then they would say, “Well, because I don’t know that I fully trust it.” So the trust has just shifted from a Google search or a friend’s contract or whatever to being this. I’m sure AI will get even more advanced with being able to create legal stuff. I mean, if I were people like a non-lawyer, then I would still be worried. I wouldn’t AI my seatbelt or my helmet or any other thing that was really responsible for my safety because I probably just wouldn’t trust it, but that’s me. And so I think this is a good example probably how in business you have to do two things. One is that you have to trust that if you do good work, your people will find you. The people who want your stuff, the people who still go to Pinch of Yum every day and look at the recipes, your ride or dies are still there and they’re coming back. And so I think it’s important to remember that if you’re putting that out there, they will come. And I think the second thing is that as you go along, whether it’s in your nine to five or in business, I hope that you build confidence that you can’t necessarily control every single thing and what might happen with AI and all of that. I have the confidence not that everything’s going to be fine or that I’m so much better than AI. I have the confidence that I will figure it out because I’ve figured out everything up until this point. That’s great. And so maybe I don’t know that People keep asking me, “Don’t you think AI will destroy your business?” And I’m like, “If it does, I feel like I would be able to not figure out how to overcome AI, but do something else that produces

Bjork Ostrom: Value in the world.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah, exactly. So it does, to your point, feel like I’m just paying worry for something that I can’t really control. There are also a lot of people who don’t love AI, so there’s that whole thing. I do think that sometimes a bit of this is acting like it’s so faita complete and that we’re like, “This is coming for you whether you like it or not. ” And it’s, yeah, sure, in the world. But there are a lot of people who are also like, “Hey, I don’t want to do that. ” I think it’s a big reason why so many analog things are trending right now and people are really looking into things. I have records sitting

Bjork Ostrom: On my desk.

Sam Vander Wielen: Exactly. Yeah. They want to grab onto stuff. So I think I’m kind of curious too to see where things balance out and ride that wave a little bit and see where we come out on the other side.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. You even see a little bit of that right now where you had this token maxing phase where everybody was trying to use as much AI as possible. Now these businesses coming and being like, “Hey, actually, we got to scale this back. This is getting super expensive. It’s actually more expensive for AI to do some of the things.” And so it’ll be interesting to see where it all settles. Sam, you have a lot of things going on. You have your podcast, you have your book, and then you have your products as well. Can you point people to all of those if they want to follow along with your podcast, read your book, or check out any of the products that you mentioned?

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah. Well, since you like listening to podcasts, you can come listen to mine on your terms. I post new episodes every Monday. I have a free weekly newsletter called Sam Sidebar, which we’ll make sure you have the link for where I talk about how to build your online business. And of course you can get my book when I start my business. I’ll be happy anywhere books are sold.

Bjork Ostrom: Cool. And then products, do you want to give a shout-out to those that you’d mentioned?

Sam Vander Wielen: Oh, well, of course, if you need legal templates, if you want to learn how to either start an online business legally or you just need a downloadable contract or website policy, it’s all available on my site at samvanderwielen.com. And I guess I should also say that I’m on Instagram @samvanderwielen.

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome. I think we checked it all off there. We got them all.

Sam Vander Wielen: Yeah.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you. Sam, thanks so much for coming on. Really appreciate it.

Sam Vander Wielen: Thanks for having me.

Ann Morrissey: Hey there. Ann again from the Food Blogger Pro team. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would greatly appreciate it if you could share it with your community and leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Join us next week for our next episode as Bjork interviews Liane Walker from Foodie Digital. We’ll see you back here soon and in the meantime, we hope you have a wonderful week.