#223: ChefPK – How this YouTuber makes merch people actually buy

Summary

Creator Science Podcast - Episode #223: ChefPK – How this YouTuber Makes Merch People Actually Buy

Host: Jay Clouse
Guest: ChefPK
Release Date: November 5, 2024

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Introduction

In Episode #223 of Creator Science, host Jay Clouse engages in an insightful conversation with ChefPK, a renowned cooking YouTuber whose anime-infused food channel has amassed an impressive 67 million views. This episode delves deep into ChefPK's unique approach to creating merchandise that resonates with his audience, exploring his journey, revenue strategies, product development, and the innovative "Cooking with Chaos" project.

ChefPK's Journey as a Creator

ChefPK reminisces about his transition from a traditional career in hotel management to the dynamic world of content creation. Reflecting on his early days, he shares:

"I was working in a restaurant, wasn't very happy with my career at the time... I felt like I needed to share more and just maybe be a part of something bigger."
[05:11]

This pivotal moment led him to merge his passions for food and anime, creating a niche channel that combines reaction videos to food scenes in anime with practical cooking tutorials. He emphasizes the importance of aligning content with personal interests to foster authentic engagement.

Building a Sustainable Revenue Model

ChefPK outlines his diversified revenue streams, providing a transparent breakdown:

"Based on last year's revenue, 50% AdSense, probably 40% book sales, and the other 10% other stuff."
[03:38]

He elaborates on his preference to minimize reliance on volatile income sources like AdSense, aiming to stabilize his earnings through book sales and Patreon support. This balance ensures financial sustainability despite the fluctuating nature of ad revenue.

Leveraging Patreon for Community Support

A significant portion of the discussion centers around Patreon, where ChefPK shares his experiences and strategies:

"Patreon can be very powerful. People know what Patreon means... it's exactly what you're going to tell people."
[12:25]

He distinguishes between different Patreon models, highlighting the value of allowing fans to support creators without the necessity of exclusive content. This approach fosters a more intimate and supportive community, enhancing overall engagement.

However, ChefPK candidly addresses the challenges of maintaining high engagement rates:

"Not a lot, to be honest... It's just their way of saying thank you for making the content and we want to continue to see this grow."
[12:48]

Despite lower interaction levels, he values the consistent support Patreon offers, viewing it as a testament to his community's dedication.

Transitioning from Content to Products

ChefPK discusses the evolution of his monetization strategy from traditional sponsorships to self-publishing and product creation. Faced with limitations in creative freedom through sponsors, he pivoted to selling books tailored to his anime-loving audience:

"At 100,000 subscribers, I launched my first book and we did about $40,000 in revenue... I was literally like crying in the bathroom, like, why did people buy this?"
[02:09]

This success validated his approach to understanding and catering to his audience's unique preferences, reinforcing the importance of niche-specific products.

Developing Unique Merchandise: Cooking with Chaos

The centerpiece of the episode is ChefPK's latest venture, "Cooking with Chaos," an innovative product inspired by Magic: The Gathering card designs. He details the inception and development process:

"The goal for this product is to target a very broad audience and to give you an idea of the audience that I'm targeting... it's a way of giving them something physical they'll show up for."
[34:29]

"Cooking with Chaos" aims to revolutionize traditional cookbooks by offering expandable, card-based recipes that enhance everyday cooking experiences. This product not only appeals to his existing fan base but also attracts a broader audience, including families and gamers.

Overcoming Challenges in Product Development

ChefPK candidly shares the hurdles he faced during the creation of "Cooking with Chaos":

"There are two things in business. You either have time or you have money. I do not have money... but I did have time."
[45:41]

He leveraged his family's printing business to prototype his unique cookbook format, emphasizing the importance of resourcefulness and tapping into existing networks. This approach minimized financial strain while allowing him to iterate and refine the product through dedicated time investment.

Strategies for Scaling and Diversification

Looking ahead, ChefPK outlines his ambitious plans to expand his product line and collaborate with other creators:

"Later on down the line, my goal is to get so big they can't ignore you and contact a company like Bandai... We're looking to make this a platform for other creators to develop their own themed card packs."
[41:15]

He envisions "Cooking with Chaos" as a scalable product that can be continually expanded with themed expansions, fostering partnerships with brands and creators to diversify his offerings and reach new markets.

Balancing Content Creation with Product Development

ChefPK reflects on managing his YouTube channel alongside his burgeoning product business:

"I've slowed down my release cadence in favor of more editing time, better video ideas... Unless you have a big team, it's okay to step back from publishing to work on something that is your pet project."
[48:34]

By prioritizing quality over quantity, he ensures that both his content and products maintain high standards, even if it means reducing the frequency of video uploads. This strategic balance enables sustained growth and innovation without overextending his resources.

Insights on Audience Engagement and Product Fit

A recurring theme in the conversation is the necessity of deeply understanding and engaging with one's audience. ChefPK advises creators to immerse themselves in their communities:

"Go where your audience go... If you're making anime content like me, I go to six conventions or more every year because that's where my people are."
[53:22]

By physically engaging with his audience at conventions, he gains firsthand insights into their preferences and needs, allowing him to develop products that genuinely resonate and meet their expectations.

Conclusion and Final Advice

Wrapping up the episode, ChefPK imparts valuable advice to fellow creators aiming to monetize their content through unique products:

"The best way to go about this is to be in the shoes of your audience... You have to relate to your audience because then you'll know what they want."
[53:05]

He underscores the importance of empathy, resourcefulness, and continuous engagement in building a successful merchandise line that complements and enhances one's content, rather than detracting from it.

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Key Takeaways

1. Diversified Revenue Streams: Relying solely on AdSense can be risky; integrating product sales and Patreon support can stabilize income.
2. Audience-Centric Products: Understanding and catering to your niche's unique preferences can lead to successful merchandise.
3. Innovative Product Development: Leveraging existing networks and resources can facilitate the creation of unique and scalable products.
4. Engagement Beyond Content: Actively participating in community events and engaging with the audience can provide critical insights for product development.
5. Balancing Act: Maintaining a balance between content creation and product development is crucial for sustained growth and quality.

Notable Quotes

• ChefPK on Transitioning Careers:

  "I felt like I needed to share more and just maybe be a part of something bigger."
  [05:11]

• On Patreon’s Role:

  "Patreon can be very powerful. People know what Patreon means... it's exactly what you're going to tell people."
  [12:25]

• Regarding Product Success:

  "I was literally like crying in the bathroom, like, why did people buy this?"
  [02:09]

• On Developing 'Cooking with Chaos':

  "The goal for this product is to target a very broad audience and to give you an idea of the audience that I'm targeting..."
  [34:29]

• Balancing Content and Projects:

  "I've slowed down my release cadence in favor of more editing time, better video ideas..."
  [48:34]

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This episode of Creator Science offers a comprehensive blueprint for creators aspiring to develop and sell merchandise that genuinely connects with their audience. Through ChefPK's candid narratives and strategic insights, listeners gain a nuanced understanding of the intricate balance between content creation and product development, underscored by the importance of audience engagement and resourcefulness.

Transcript

[Jay]

When you started your journey as a.

[Chef PK]

Creator, I bet you didn't think about.

[Jay]

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[Chef PK]

This is how it started. Sometimes when you work with sponsors, you don't have a lot of creative freedom. So instead of taking a ton of sponsors, we sell books.

That's Chef PK, a cooking YouTuber whose.

[Jay]

Anime food channel has done 67 million views.

[Chef PK]

But that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about physical products.

At 100,000 subscribers, I launched my first book and we did about 40,000 in revenue. And that was insane to me. I was literally like crying in the bathroom, like, why did people buy this?

In this episode, you'll learn how to brainstorm product ideas.

You have to look outside of your niche. This doesn't exist anywhere in the food space. So if you only look there, you're probably going to fail. Or you're just going to be slamming your head against the wall and be frustrated the entire time.

How to find product audience fit.

Oh, you have to understand your audience. No, no, go where your audience go. I go to six conventions or more every year. That's where my people are.

And how to bring an idea into reality.

These are tools that you can literally Google. Everything is available for us as creators.

Give me the full outline of the products that you sell at this point.

We have one cookbook now. I combined my first two into a master edition, so that's on the website. The second one is Quest for the Best, which was a huge Japan travel guide that we did that was all food based with some of, like, our favorite anime spots, because there's a bunch of anime cafes. This one also includes recipes. So it was kind of this I targeted. You probably know this because you're probably around my age, but like Fromers guides, where you would buy a Frommer's guide to go to Italy or whatever. And I want to try to replace them eventually with things like this, where it includes recipes and everything. And then a third one that we're working on right now, I have headbands, which are kitchen headbands. Just a few things that people can add to the. To their orders. And those are, realistically the three things that I have. I don't do aprons anymore. I don't do T shirts, really. I try to think of unique things that people might want. So just a couple of products have helped us basically survive the last couple of years. So instead of taking a ton of sponsors, we sell books.

If I think about a pie chart as like a percentage of these things, how would you break down the revenue that's coming into your business, what those sources are by like, percentage or rough percentage.

So based on last year's revenue, 50% Adsense, probably 40% book sales, slash website sales. And the other 20, I would say Patreon sponsors, that kind of thing. So I kind of just group those all together. I do treat Patreon as a sponsor. So when I talk about Patreon, it's a sponsor segment in my video. My goal is to get Adsense this this year, hopefully, if not for sure next year. We're targeting by this time next year to have adsense at like 25% of our overall income. I don't want Adsense to be that much of our income because it's so volatile. And you know this, you might have an AdSense month that does triple the previous month. And you're like, well, that just throws everything off. And, you know, you either save it or reinvest it or whatever the case is. But yes, I would say 50% AdSense, 40% Revenue, and then, I'm sorry, the other. And I added 10% somewhere. It's like 110. And then 10% other stuff.

[Jay]

You Did.

[Chef PK]

Yeah.

Other stuff. Other stuff includes affiliates too, I'm guessing.

Yeah. And I don't really do a lot of affiliates because I try not to sell people on any tools for the most part. So I don't do Amazon links or anything like that.

Just for context, I want to talk about when you started the channel and what your expectations were for the channel. Because on the surface, a channel at.

[Jay]

The intersection of anime and food is.

[Chef PK]

Not something that most people would probably guess would be as big as a channel you have built. So talk to me about the beginning of Chef bk.

This was a very vivid memory for me, or I guess is a very vivid memory for me. I was working in a restaurant, wasn't very happy with my career at the time. I had left a big career in hotel management, where you're just grinding every day looking at numbers. And it wasn't about the food anymore. Then I kind of moved away from that, went to smaller restaurants. But there still was something in me that felt like I needed to share more and just maybe be a part of something bigger. And I legitimately looked at my computer and said, what's something that I enjoy? Food. What's something that's popular? Anime. What am I good at? Cooking. And I just threw on my chef coat and I started reacting to food anime and kind of doing the Gordon Ramsay little bit of take on it and. And going that route, I quickly realized I didn't want to just talk, I wanted to act. And that's where I started really trying to make the recipes from those shows similar to a binging with Babish style. What I really started to dig into was as an anime fan, those food scenes pop up all the time. Whether or not it's after a big fight or a sports scene or an event or anything, there's always this moment of reprieve. And the best way that I can explain it is for a broader audience in Avengers, and I think the first Avengers, where they're having the battle for New York and all this crazy stuff is happening. But at the end, Robert Downey Jr. Just says, should we go get some shawarma? And that's what anime has. It's those scenes throughout different episodes and series. And little do people know that entire scene was filmed after everything, he wanted to include that scene because it's this moment of reprieve. And I started treating a lot of my videos that way, where you might have these really intense things happening, and then you get to sit down and eat or talk about the food. So for me, food and anime goes side, side by side versus these two things that I'm trying to mush together. Hopefully that explains it in a. I guess in the easiest way possible.

Did you think that YouTube was going to be a career? Were you looking at this as like, okay, I'm gonna just be a YouTuber and make a ton of money?

Absolutely not. I had no intention of leaving the food industry, but the food industry, in a way, left me during the pandemic. So During March of 2020, my wife and I were in Scotland on a vacation. We heard the news of the borders closing. We thought it was gonna be a zombie apocalypse. And we were in Amsterdam at the time. Came home within a week. The restaurant I was working for had to close their doors and only kept like a few things open for wholesale. So I was just unemployed. But I had had my YouTube channel up for about a year at that point, doing it on the side while working full time, and I just decided to go all in. We were very lucky though, that my wife is a first responder, so she was working the entire pandemic and we were okay in that regard. But I had a small Patreon. It was bringing in a little bit of money. My YouTube channel was making a few hundred dollars in AdSense. I ended up selling my car to get rid of the payment. I banked the money from that to just put in the bank to save. I had no intention of going full time on YouTube and I just ran with it when the opportunity presented it to me instead.

Can you talk about that Patreon? Because I think this is probably something a lot of people would relate to in your story here, where, like, I've been publishing on YouTube for some period of time. I'm getting a little bit of adsense. You have a Patreon. Do you remember anything about how many patrons you had or how much revenue that might have been bringing in at the time that you were kind of pushed into it full time by default?

I think the. At the height of my Patreon was maybe June of 2020, when everything was kind of taking a hit. And I think I was bringing in about 1500 bucks a month from Patreon. And I was offering different reaction content and maybe a few other things like that. Maybe it ended up being like one on ones I would offer to people if they wanted cooking advice. And it wasn't. It was a substantial amount of money for me at the time. And so I did try to put a lot into it. I ended up abandoning that later for other projects and Mostly because the direction of my channel changed. But I think that for me, my community was maybe 60,000 subscribers. And being able to pull in what is more than normal for YouTube, AdSense through a Patreon is very significant.

I would actually love to talk about this because we haven't talked about this in the channel at all. But I get a lot of people coming to me who are not in the education niche. They're predominantly monetizing with AdSense and maybe some brand deals. And they realize that, okay, memberships are an option. There's, of course, YouTube memberships, there's Patreon, there's building something completely third party to either of those things. What has your experience with Patreon been like? Because I think the fear for a lot of people is this is a lot of net new content or obligations that I have to follow through on. So I'm just curious to hear your experience.

So that's a great question. And I think a lot of people don't think about what the audience thinks about when it comes to Patreon. And I have a few friends who have very successful Patreons and they're very different. They couldn't be any more different. One of them, a buddy of mine, I won't call any names out, but he just asks, hey, if you want to keep the channel going, here's Patreon. You can donate here. You're not going to get early access or anything. It's just a way for me to sustain the volatility of AdSense or Twitch or anything. So people understand that and they go on this big wall of names and that's it, right? It's like one to five dollars a month. Then I know people who make Patreon content almost exclusively and kind of use YouTube as an advertising way for them, where they're making the majority of their income through teaching lessons, art, music, whatever it might be through Patreon. So it's almost a replacement for something like culinary school. There's just value there for those people to get. For me, it was more of understanding that people wanted to support what I did. And as a smaller creator, having a Patreon is actually very valuable because a lot of people will support smaller creators. They're like, oh, you're, you know, you're kind of just coming up. Here's a way for you to help go full time. And then after you go full time, some people either continue or you know what, you're good, let me remove my support and go support another smaller creator. And this happens over and over. I now look at Patreon as a way of engaging with the fan base more regularly. Where I was working on a video, we're almost done with it. It's taken me two and a half to almost three weeks to finish it, but every step along the way. Here's a preview. What's your feedback? What do you guys think? Should I include this? It's more intimate than just doing something on either memberships, right? Um, it's more intimate than doing something on Discord, which I do have Discord, but I. I feel like Patreon can be very powerful. People know what Patreon means. If you say, go support me on Patreon, they. Nowadays people understand what that means. They're not sideswiped by a Discord premium or anything like that. You know what it means. So it's exactly what you're going to tell people.

I would imagine that a lot of the engagement that comes to a Patreon is probably driven by you post an update that sends out an email to paid subscribers. They click a button in the email to engage with that update. Do you see a high engagement rate between the paid patrons you have and then actually coming to interact with the thing that you have posted?

Not a lot, to be honest. And I've seen this over many patrons, unless it's the ones that are almost exclusive, like their content lives there. Because a lot of people just want to show support, right? They maybe don't care to engage. Some people will just say, here, here's 20 bucks a month and I'll pop in every now and then. The engagement rate is actually very low. And what I've noticed personally is it's the same people engaging almost every post, right? And it's just. It's their way of saying thank you for making the content and we want to continue to see this grow.

[Jay]

After a quick break, we talk about.

[Chef PK]

How Chef PK figured out what to.

[Jay]

Sell to his audience. So stick around. We'll be right back. Hey, it's Jay. And whether you enjoyed episode number 71 with Steph Smith, an indie creator who formerly led trends at the Hustle, or you simply like to keep up with the future, you should check out the A16Z podcast hosted by Steph. The chart topping show from Andreessen Horowitz features some of the world's most influential people, movers who have a track record of being both early and right. Like Apple co founder Steve Wozniak or co founders Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz themselves. Not to mention folks you don't typically get to hear from from the very first CTO of the CIA or the chief security officers behind OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind. These guests tackle the most important trends in technology and business, from space to supply chains and beyond. If you want to understand the science and supply of GLP1s, they recently broke this down. If you're curious about the 3 billion record Social Security breach, they've got you covered. And if you're wondering if autonomous vehicles are still miles away, listen in to find out. So go ahead, eavesdrop on the future by following the A16Z podcast. Wherever you get podcasts, I am once again inviting you to join our membership for professional creators, the Laboratory. Of course I am biased, but Andrew is not. Andrew has been a member for about two years now and this was a testimonial he sent me unprompted.

[Chef PK]

Joining the Lab has been the single.

Best investment I have made in my business and in myself since I started doing this going solo 17 years ago.

[Jay]

If you benefit from the conversations here on the podcast, you'd love the things we talk about in the Lab. In fact, some of the past guests of the show are members themselves. The Lab helps you keep a finger on the pulse of what's working and what's changing for creators right now. I could tell you about all the things that are included, like all of my courses, including Build a Beloved membership, podcasts like a YouTuber, the newsletter masterclass. You get a complimentary copy of Creator hq, our operating system built in notion. But the best thing is the people. Incredibly generous, incredibly kind, incredibly smart and accomplished people are in the Lab. I could go on and on about this, but just know there is nothing more important to me than continuing to make the Lab the absolute best community for professional creators. You can join the Basic tier now, which is an absolute bargain, or you can apply to join our standard or VIP tiers. Just visit creatorscience.comlab to learn more and get started. That's creatorscience.comlab. it's in the show Notes. I hope to see you there.

[Chef PK]

And now back to my conversation with Chef pk. How and when did things start to change? How did you start building a business model around this? Because this is the. This is the key insight that I think I want to share with people. A lot of people come in and they're not teaching something. They're making videos they love about topics that they're really interested in. They have a large audience, but they're thinking to themselves what do these people pay for? What would they buy? How do I actually get compensated for this?

[Jay]

So I'd love to hear about your.

[Chef PK]

Evolution because you've done a lot of really interesting experiments, and you've come around to some unique products that we'll talk about here in a second.

I try to take what I call the Mark Rober approach and give people their vegetables, you know, kind of thing, and make them hide the vegetables, whatever you would want to call it. I put up all my recipes on YouTube, so if I'm making something from a show, you can just follow along and you can more or less make that. I also sometimes put them on my website when, admittedly, I can remember, but people wanted physical copies of my recipes. And I didn't just want to make a cookbook. I figured I have dozens of cookbooks, whether or not it's from culinary school or other creators. So the cookbooks that I wanted to make had to really target my audience who love anime, Japanese content, manga, things like that. I figured. Let me just take my. It was about 20 of my most popular recipes at the time, and I put them into a book and I let people know, these are 20 or so recipes, and you could get these for free. You could have them for free, but if you want the printed copy, here it is. And it was. I actually have a form of it here where I wanted to make sure that it was something unique and different for them. So this is actually a prototype for the new book we're working on. But they're all. All of my books are the size of a Japanese comic book. So I had thought, how cool would it be if somebody could, like, slot this next to their other comics? And that proposition made people show up like, oh, that's really cool. Oh, you illustrated yourself. You. You have yourself drawn as these characters. So it's. There's a picture of the food and picture of me as the character, right? That brought people over. And at a hundred thousand subscribers, I launched my first book on Kickstarter. And we did about 40,000 in revenue on that book at a hundred thousand subs. And that was insane to me. I was literally like, crying in the bathroom. I was like, why did people buy this? Right? But what it showed me is that I made the right product for the audience and they enjoyed it. And since then, I've remastered the book. I've released a volume two and a master edition where I combined volume one and two for a total of about 50 recipes with pictures and everything. And last year, in 2023, we did about 35 to $36,000 in revenue on those books just on the website, passively, just by maybe mentioning them here and there. And they're the easiest thing. We have a giant pallet of them and we just ship about each day when we get orders. Right. So it's almost no effort just because we ordered extra. And now our newest book also did about 40,000 in revenue. Granted much higher subscriber base now, so that number is not as high. But we went for a different product this time, so that's okay to see. I really think if you could. If you have a way of giving somebody something physical, which these days, unfortunately is a very fleeting thing, if you have a way of giving them something physical, they'll show up for it, especially if you make it right for your audience.

So the book that you showed, you said is the same size as like a Japanese manga. And I imagine that's not the typical dimensions that a printer does. You probably had to find a specialized printer. You probably had to get this laid out in a way that you would like. They probably sent you samples. So one thing I'm trying to give people a sense of is when you're doing this unique, detail oriented approach to making a physical product, I want them to understand the time investment or the process or how you even figured out the process is probably the better way of going about it because you've never done this before. So how did you go about figuring out this process to get a tangible copy of the thing that was in your mind that is in itself a little bit unique from what is typically published?

So I, I guess this is hidden information, but my parents owned a printing company for 30 years. Whoa. So, okay, unlock. I just talked to them. Yeah. So for me, it was like, I literally called mom and dad and I said, hey, I want to print a cookbook. And they're like, okay, send us the files. Right? Very, very Middle Eastern family. They're like, just send us the files. And so I sent them. I hired somebody to do the layout. So I wrote up all the recipes and everything and I gave them a notion document with all the recipes and everything involved. The layout designer laid it out with Illustrator. Those files were combined with the illustrations. So I had an Illustrator and then a layout designer. And then all those went to my parents who do printing. But now they have a very small operation. They're retired. So my dad has machines in his garage. He's like, I just print books for fun, right? This is, this is not hard to do. I, I very Much have the advantage of knowing family that can do this. But you can do the same thing. Write out everything you want to do, pay a layout designer, whether or not it's on Fiverr or ask someone on Twitter, whatever it might be. And then if you have illustrations, do that. Send all the files to the layout designer, right? Once you have that, you can then find a local printer who can print you a single book. It will be expensive, but it's a good way to proof the concept. If you're going to pay 250 bucks or 300 bucks for a single book, it's better than sending it out and getting a bunch of books that are bad. So that's my process. I get everything together, compile it, send it to get a single print done. And then we as a company called ninjaprint, for those of you out there, you're like, oh, how do I make books? Ninjaprint, it's one of the most popular and one of the best that I've used. Printing houses, they don't publish books. They just print because of their process. They're not overly expensive, which is great. They go back and forth with you. And once you approve it, they print it, cut it, ship it, and it comes to you. When you had mentioned the layout is different and those, you know, whatever it was, when we found Ninja Print, they offer this as a standard size. So we took this as a standard size they offer and we molded the book to their dimensions, right. Made sure it fit in their layout. Everything is available for us as creators. We don't have to go and find the specialized printers or anything like that. These are tools that you can literally Google. So if you wanted to print a book, Jay, you could do it in the next week, right? It's, it's been that simple. Once you've learned the process a little.

Bit, a lot of things I want to follow up on here. First, you mentioned that people were saying we want a cookbook. How were they saying that? I think the answer is probably fairly obvious. Like they're probably making some comments. But how, how often were they commenting this? How did you take it seriously? Because sometimes people say they want something, but then for you to go and do the work of making it and then making it available, a lot of people will end up not coming through and paying for it. It's still some risk on you. So at what point did you say, all right, the demand is high enough that I'm going to go ahead and start putting this into action?

It was about year two, so 20, 22, we had moved into a new home after the pandemic and everything kind of settled down. And that was when I really wanted to dig into my audience. And I had used a few tools. AI related, yes, I know that can be cringey to some, but it's a way for me to parse comments. And the tool that I used, I had asked, hey, how do you feel about a $300 chef knife? Because I was in the process of making my own chef knife where it was a very high dollar item. It had like little dice inlaid in the side. Because I'm a big Dungeons and Dragons fan, right? Like all this stuff. And I'd asked the AI hey, would you like one of these? And it had told me, based on comments from about a hundred videos of mine, that they don't think they could afford something like that based on their they go to school or whatever. So I dropped the idea and instead I wrote a book because I had thought this is the lowest barrier to entry for me to start a product. Instead, making a book with recipes that exist is not overly difficult. The most difficult thing is finding a publisher. So I know you say there's a lot of risk involved, but since I self published, I had full control over everything that happened and that allowed me to create the books in my way. And maybe we would have sold more if we had a publisher, but it would have been far more risky for me to use a publisher versus self publishing. And now with tools like Kickstarter. Honestly, I hate to say what's the point of having a traditional publisher? I only had to make as many books as people ordered, so there was almost no risk there. And I ended up ordering more because we got a discount, right? So I think there's too many creators are scared of making products if you put in the work and you. I hate the term bootstrapping, but it's literally that you can make the product much cheaper on your end. Not quality wise, cost wise without incurring the wrath of a publisher that said, oh, we didn't sell the copies. And then you feel bad about it and you're like, oh, I'm a failure. And I have friends who have thought this. Even if the publisher has sold 10,000 copies, they consider it a bad deal for them. And I'm sitting here thinking, Well, I sold 2,000 books and that's insane to self publish, especially for the price point. So that's how I look at it. Not a lot of risk involved.

We keep opening up new open loops that I really hope I can close all of these because I think you just mentioned a second ago, did you feed hundreds of comments from your YouTube.

[Jay]

Channel into an AI and then talk.

[Chef PK]

To it to basically represent your audience?

Yes. And tell me more about that.

How did you do that?

So I am under NDA because it is a company I'm invested in and we're working on this product. I'm happy to talk about that later. I can't really divulge too much publicly and I'm just being, I'm being honest, like I am under NDA with them. But it's a way for creators who are much smaller. Right. Normally if you have a giant team of 12 to 15 people, you might have someone who's dedicated to understanding the audience along with the creator. I try to understand my audience. I go to conventions, I say hi to them, they say, hey, Chef, what's up? And you know, we high five and whatever. But when you're getting an influx of hundreds of comments per video or thousands of comments per video, it's hard to look through all those. You know, you can only sit on the toilet for so long and look at comments. So instead we have tools available and I'm happy to talk about those later. But that's what, that's how a lot of my ideas come about.

Now, ostensibly, I could probably take a very manual heavy approach to copy and paste hundreds, thousands of comments into something like ChatGPT and say, Analyze this. For me, that's a really. Whether people do this in the future when they have access to a tool like this, or whether they do it in a really manual way, that's a really smart way to vet an idea.

[Jay]

On behalf of your audience.

[Chef PK]

Yeah, you maybe had a video about.

[Jay]

The launch of the book, but what.

[Chef PK]

I've noticed in some of your videos is you're doing a task and you say something like, and while I'm doing this, I want to tell you about my newest book, Quest for the Best, or whatever the product is. Can you talk about how you continue to like your strategy for talking about that book to continue to generate sales once you've done the big splashy announcement. Hey, this thing exists.

A big issue I have had is how to incorporate sponsors in my videos. And that has a lot to do with. Because like we mentioned at the top of this conversation, how do you. How does a sponsor sponsor you with anime and food? So for me, my goal has been to make my own products and sponsor myself because I use those products. I can't tell you how many times I'VE picked up my own book. And not to, to say it's the best book ever, but I use the recipes there from time to time and it can sit on my counter because it's so small. So I wanted, I'm like, oh, I just need this pizza dough recipe from my book. And I just flip through it. It's right there, right? People have that in cards or whatever the case is. I like talking about my products because I feel like it's unique enough for my audience to enjoy as well. But also there's not this like thing hanging over your head of, oh, well, can you send it to us? We need to look at it again. We want to make sure everything looks great. And I understand companies need conversions, but I have seen in, in my videos that a lot of the times and I ask sponsors for their conversion information and a lot of the times they don't give it to you, but I ask them for conversion confirmations. And sometimes it's 0 or 5 or whatever it is. And I actually feel bad, you know, if it's not just a brand awareness video. So then I start to think, well, why don't I just sponsor myself? And I learned this from one of the greatest of all times, Sarah Renee Clark, where she essentially sponsors herself with her products. And I have deep conversations with her about this. That's why I like just pulling out one of my products and using it and then talking about it. Oh, if you want to pick this up, it's on sale right now on my website, right. For a discounted amount for the next 24 hours. Because I can do that. I don't have to get the approval of a publisher. It's the best thing ever.

Yeah. And it probably gives you really good. Well, in product management, we used to call this dog fooding, eating your own dog food, where you do something yourself so that you understand the experience or sometimes the pain of somebody else that you want to do that thing in the future by being your own sponsor, you can try things out in ways of integrating your own product in or talking about a product to see. Okay, if and when I do take on another sponsor, I now have a couple of different tricks or styles or ways to integrate this that I know from data work better than just your standard integration or whatever it might be.

And not only that, what I think a lot of people don't realize is that sponsors sometimes just want that brand awareness, which is fine. But for me, the reason why I like doing my own self publishing, I started my own publishing company this year with two other partners. So we publish books as like a micro publisher. We target 500 to a thousand copies and do some bespoke stuff. The reason is, is because sometimes when you work with sponsors, you don't have a lot of creative freedom unless they're one of the big sponsors, and they don't care. They're paying, you know, MKBHD or Mr. Beast, and they're just going to do their thing. The biggest reason for starting the books under my own label is because I went through a bad experience with a book publisher. And this was years ago when I was. When I had a very small following. They wanted to pay me $10,000 as a upfront fee, and I had to use that to create recipes for their book. And it was an anime book based on something else. I won't call this book out, but it was a cookbook for anime, and I turned them down. And the biggest reason was, is I had asked them if I could make some of these recipes for my channel to show what's in the book. And they said, no, you're not allowed to do that. And I was like, okay, thank you. Bye bye. Because I can't show off the product. It's just here's a cover with 80 recipes of random things. Then it started to dawn on me. I just need to do this myself.

When we come back, we dive into Chef Piquet's newest product, Cooking with Chaos.

[Jay]

And how he got it made. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. If you know me, you know I'm obsessed with branding. A clear, unique brand is such a differentiator in an attention economy that's getting more competitive all the time. Your brand is in everything you do, including your domain name. But when creators start selling products, they often get stuck behind some long, awkward URL like courses.creatorscience.com it's hard to say, hard to remember, and ultimately it weakens your brand. And that's where store domains come into play. A dot com domain can be anything, but when you hear DudePerfect store, you know it's a store. I picked up my own store domain creatorscience Store, so I can quickly tell people where they can buy some of my most popular products. It's my name, my brand store, and I'm not alone. Dot store domains are used by more than 1.5 million sellers, including top creators like MrBeast, Colin and Samir and Zach King. It does not get more direct than your brand dot store. And it doesn't just sound cool, it actually helps you sell more. Here's the best part. Store Domains has a special offer for Creator Science listeners. To secure your branded store domain for just 99 cents for the first year, just visit Creators Store J and use coupon code J at checkout. That's Creators Store Jay and use coupon code jay again Jay to secure your very own store branded URL. This episode is sponsored by ces. CES is the proving ground for breakthrough technologies from leading brands and cutting edge startups. And now CES CES puts creators at the center of it all with an innovative new space in the Las Vegas Convention Center. The CES Creator Space, presented by Sony, is a hub designed specifically for content creators and storytellers. Located in the central hall lobby, the space will feature a stage sponsored by Pinterest hosting talks and panels with insights from creators as well as leaders at companies like Walmart, Wailer and TikTok. Topics will include brand partnerships, content rights and AI. Now here's the best part, so listen closely. Creators are eligible for complimentary registration and exclusive access by getting a media badge. I've actually done this in years past before they had this creator space, and it has always been a blast. You can be boots on the ground making content at the show with all the newest technology. You'll be able to access the CES creator space during the show January 7th through 10th, and even media days happening January 5th and 6th with the first looks at product announcements from global brands. To learn more and register, visit CES Tech. That's CES Tech to register for complimentary media credentials.

[Chef PK]

And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Chef pk. I feel like I've buried the lead a little bit here with the one of the new products that you're coming out with. Can you talk about Cooking with Chaos?

Yeah. So this is something that I've been working on for two years now, and we're finally in the beta stage of the product. And I call them alpha and beta stages because I'm a. I love video games. But also, this product is based on. I literally have magic cards right here. This product is based on magic the gatherings design. For those of you who have played so all these like fun cards and things like that. It involves colors and whatever the case is. The goal for this product is actually not to target my audience. The goal for this product is to target a very broad audience. Like very broad. And to give you an idea of the audience that I'm targeting, I took this. I don't have kids of my own, but I took this to my. My brothers, where they're in Idaho and they live in a big family community. And I showed it to their friends who all have kids, and they saw this product and they're like, can I order this now? That was their response, like, okay, I got my audience. This is the audience I wanted. And it's a product that will remove the need for cookbooks. And I hate saying that because I have my own books, Right. But I thought of ways of using cookbook information without using a cookbook, because the last time I opened up a cookbook, it was actually based on the science of cooking versus recipes, where, you know, you do these things to get these reactions, whatever it was. So this product that I created is based on what I hope is day to day living for a lot of people and to take the guesswork out of cooking. And I know I'm being vague because I'll just show it to you in a second, but my target audience was not my audience. I want to be able to put this on the shelves of Target, Walmart, show it off on Instagram had that very broad appeal. We're going for a price point that is almost an impulse buy. But I'm also making a product that can infinitely expand. So with cookbooks, I learned this from listening to a podcast with Josh Weissman, and he had talked about how much money they had made in revenue for their first cookbook. And the first book always does exceptionally well. Right. The second cookbook, even for me, did about 60% of the revenue of the previous. And that number does dwindle over time. Even if your. If your base gets bigger, right. If your subscribers or whatever gets bigger, that number does dwindle. So I was trying to think of ways of making a product people can add to over time, and that's kind of how I came up with this. The best part of this is this is how I actually cook. This product is how I cook at home. And I'll show you the. I guess the Alpha 0 version. It's this that I found earlier in my closet. This is how it started. So this is a recipe for just a generic beef steak. And then there's style, the flavors, the textures, whatever it is. And then on the back, there's the full recipe with the ingredients.

Okay.

And that's all of these side sauces. What it's. It was so generic, but I was just like, I. I need to get this out of my head. It was one of those brain worms, and I knew I needed to make it. So from there, we this is now in now what I call Alpha one, because beta is being worked on. And now we're. We're at this stage where we have all of them created. So that's so cool, right? So that's, you know, the pork chop, and it has the style, and these are still being worked on, so there's still Sharpie all over them. Then there's the recipe with the ingredients on the back. So the goal is for you to be able to just put this in your pocket and go to the grocery store and get what you need. But what I love about this is, like I said, this is how I cook. If I see. Okay, well, Jay, what are you making for dinner? Give me the protein you want to make for dinner tonight. Just. Just off the top of your head. Okay, you want to make chicken, right? So you. You don't need the protein cards, but maybe you want a sauce to put on it. So these are all just individual sauces that go with different things. Or maybe, you know, you. The wife wants to pick a side. So she can pick a side and you guys can make a full dinner based on this stuff. And this is how I cook. I'm like, you know what? I already have the protein picked out, but I want something to go alongside it. And so I'll just grab one of these. My wife and I were literally talking about this this morning. Oh, what should we make? And I'll just grab a card. We have chicken thighs in the fridge. Let's just make a side and a sauce. And that's how I like cooking. The best part is that these can be expanded on. So right now we have 47 cards here because we removed some that we didn't like. Now we're adding another 13 to make it 60 total. So you have 60 cards in the deck, which is the standard size for a tournament style Magic the Gathering deck. And not a lot of people will know that, but that's just what I want, right? As a product. It's something that people can put into a stocking stuffer they'll probably use, right, A couple times a year. That's my goal. Cause I don't even use cookbooks more than a couple times a year. You might use that more, but when I took this to my friends over in Idaho, they're like, oh, I would have my kids pick a card, and then I would pick a protein and we would make dinner together. I'm like, I didn't think of that. You thought of that, and that's a great idea. So this product is not targeted at my audience, but I know my audience will use it. So it's making a product that'll expand way beyond my own reach is the goal. And it's also a product that is not a cookbook. So for me, this is a way of making what's. What's the term? I'm not great with business. It's the. Not monthly recurring revenue, but it's where you're almost invested in the product, where you can say, oh, I bought. I bought that pack. Let me buy the expansion pack. It's 20 bucks. Ah, right.

[Jay]

Yeah.

[Chef PK]

It's not like, oh, do I need another cookbook? Probably not. But for 20 bucks, you can add 15 more cards, and that's kind of the goal. So how do I make it to where instead of selling one cookbook a year for $40, maybe we sell this plus an expansion pack for 60 over the course of a year, and then your check average goes up. Right. That's how I'm doing this. But I also thought it was just a super fun product to make.

That's so cool. It has me thinking about something we both learned from our mutual friend Patty Galloway. He talks about videos having this aperture of core casual, new. You have your core audience, and you have casual viewers, and you have a new audience. And what you're saying is these cards are not directed specifically at my core audience. I know they can reach casual fans, new audience. Have you thought about going in the opposite direction where there's some aspect of the cards that points back to the channel?

I'm glad you brought that up because. Absolutely. So with these, this is why I love this. And this is why, as soon as I finish this, I trademarked this. I like it. I needed this to be part of what I do. It's a very high effort product. To me, this was much harder than writing a cookbook because not only did I have to make these, I hired another chef to make them to see how they would taste and take the photos. And then my wife cooked every single card. So these aren't from me. If a card didn't make sense to my wife, who's a very average cook at best, we eliminated the card. That's why I'm like this. These might be for a foodie audience. Yes. But you have to have the lower common denominator of someone who just wants to make a meal. Right. So to kind of go back to narrowing it to my audience. My audience does like cooking, as proven by book sales. So with this pack, this is the. My really Jank cover. I had to do this for legal reasons to put trademark on it. But for this pack, it's the general pack. We're calling it the base set. Right. Later on down the line, my goal is to get so big they can't ignore you and contact a company like Bandai and say, hey, do you want to make a Dragon Ball Z food pack? Hey, do you want to make a one piece pack? Hey, do you want to make a Marvel pack? Those are absolutely in my thought process right now. Right. But not only that, to narrow it down to that scope, I want to work with other creators who might have a cooking audience that want to make their own packs because this won't necessarily compete with their cookbooks. It goes alongside their cookbooks. So I can contact a creator and say, hey, we'll do most of the work for you. We'll cook everything. We'll take photos. You just provide us with recipes. We'll make the cards with your aesthetic in mind and you can sell them as. And we'll just be the publisher. So there's a million different directions we can go. And I don't think we're limited to any one direction, which is really exciting.

I love this because this is. This is thinking so much bigger. A lot of people in your position would think like, what is the merch that I can make and put our brand on and sell just to make a little bit of revenue. But you're thinking, what is the physical product I can make that goes beyond even the channel itself and opens up all kinds of new revenue opportunities? It's you, you're building almost like a simultaneous product business alongside the YouTube channel. And not necessarily just saying, how do I monetize my YouTube channel? It's so awesome and such a big thinking thing. I can hear people watching this saying to themselves, I have no idea how to make cards. Or this seems really expensive. How do I bust through those limiting beliefs to take the first step in getting there? You mentioned you had parents who own a printing company, so maybe you have a short distance to someone else who's printed cards before and you can figure that out. But how do we actually make real these ideas that we've never done before?

You have to look outside of your niche, and you know this from doing video research. Other creators might, but you have to look outside of your niche even for. Especially for products. The person who gave me this idea was Sarah Renee Clark with her color cube. If you look at her product and look at mine, you're like, oh, my God. The similarities they're their brother and sister, right? For me, I started poking and prodding the Magic the gathering community because there's a ton of what we call proxy cards or proxy art. If you go to a magic convention, they have artists selling cards. Most of them get them made on one website, makeplayingcards.com. it's a very simple to use website. You upload your artwork front and back. They say, is this good? You say, yes. They have hundreds of standard sizes. They print it and ship it. I only got those ideas by looking at the art space and the magic the gathering space. If you were, if I were to just look at the food space. This doesn't exist anywhere in the food space. So if you only look there, you're probably going to fail or you're just going to be slamming your head against the wall and be frustrated the entire time.

Talk to me about the, the process or the expense of it. Was this expensive to prototype or really time consuming?

There are two things in business. You either have time or you have money. I do not have money because I do reinvest heavily in my channel with bigger video ideas or spending time, whatever it might be. But I did have time. And so this took me two years to make. But I could have probably done it much faster. The hard part was iterating on that idea and making sure it was what I wanted. Because we wanted to have people have this in hand and have it be as close to perfect as we can get it. So instead of spending the money, we spent the time. And this was anything from, I would just be at a rest. And I'm a. I love eating right. All of us love going out, whatever it might be with the. The cards are in my head at all times of the day now. So when I go to a restaurant, even if it's going to like a shawarma restaurant or getting a burger and they have an interesting sauce, I write that idea down. I'm like, oh, this sauce was really interesting. Can we make a card about it? Right? Can I, can I deconstruct this? I literally would eat, bite the burger, take notes on my phone, bite the burger, take notes on my phone. Unfortunately, your life does revolve around your pet project, but otherwise, yes, you could hire someone to help you make all of these things. It's just going to cost you a ton of money. Now that's not to say I didn't spend money because as soon as I had enough to reinvest, I hired a full time chef who she had made all of the cards for me to verify, right? My stuff. And so I paid her for her services, I paid her her rate. Then we did it again where my wife did everything. We bought all the groceries again, we made everything again. Not to say I didn't spend money, but imagine if you had to make a product like this with a full team from whatever it would cost you tens of thousands of dollars just to get to, I think the index card part of it, right? Not even where I'm at now, but it's taken a while. So unfortunately, I hate to say I think too many of us as creators look short term too often, right? I don't make a ton of money off my YouTube channel. I'm a. I'm what I call a middle class creator, right? I can pay my bills, I save a little bit of money. I could reinvest here and there, but I'm not like, we have one car, right? We don't. We don't spend a ton of money anywhere unless it's for business or travel. But then I do reinvest that money where I can in hopes that in a couple of years these ideas pay off in dividends. Not that I need all the money in the world. I'm like, if the product makes. If I sell a million of these, that's $37 million. And somebody pointed that out to me and I thought, that's way too much damn money. What am I going to do with that? I was like, maybe a million is too many, right? But the goal is not the money. The goal is to get people to cook. And so that's how we look at things right now.

How are you balancing this giant project with ongoing publishing on YouTube?

It's been difficult, especially with travel. I'm traveling quite a bit this year, and by the time this comes out, you probably have been traveled. But I tried to do things in batches. And so whether or not it's filming, I know batch filming is actually pretty difficult for cooking content, but I've actually slowed down my release cadence in favor of more editing time, better video ideas, things that are a little more unique than what I've done previously. And so I can then take. Even though I take a hit on adsense a little bit, I'm still okay enough to where I can reinvest the time into something like this because I believe the ROI on this. Even, even if it's not making millions of dollars a year on AdSense, it's very satisfying to release a fun product that people will use. So I went from doing One video a week to every other week I release a video. Right. And as of time of publishing this talk that we're having, I'm probably going like three weeks for an upload. But I'm hoping that those videos do really well because it not only helps me make more product, but it gives me time to do those things. Unless you have a big team, which a lot of creators who watch this probably don't. It's just myself and my wife helps me a little bit with a few things. I. I have an editor that helps me every now and then, but I film, I edit, I go on location, my wife holds the camera for me in certain circumstances. But if you don't have the resources, it's okay to step back from publishing, in my opinion, to then work on something that is your pet project.

There's a cooking analogy here somewhere about letting the video simmer a little bit.

Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And again. And to kind of get like super data nerd on you. I've noticed on my channel, my videos don't really start to gain traction until day 21 anyways, so why am I releasing a video every week? I'd like to let it go just for a little bit, and then when channel kind of comes down a little, then release another one. Feed the algorithm a bit. While I'm working on stuff like this.

When talking about the cards, a couple times you've used the pronoun we. So I was going to ask you, who is we? Or is this like a royal we situation?

I say we a lot because there are other people involved in a lot of the things that I do, and I don't take credit for everything that I do. So whether or not it's my wife who has helped me, the designer who's done the layout for these, I don't think that I could have done any of this on my own. Even though I have done a lot of it on my own. It's never. I have made this. I don't think that way in a lot of ways because I grew up in a kitchen. If I said, oh, yeah, I made all this stuff, you'd be like, no, you didn't. The cooks did. What are you talking about?

You mentioned a grand ambition to get these cards onto shelves at Target or Walmart. That's probably something you've never done before. So with that goal in mind, how are you thinking through how you're going to bring that to fruition? Because that goal is another example of something someone might say. I have no idea how to do that and talk themselves out of moving forward.

So, again, I've never done this before. I've never done a retail store or anything, But I do know other creators who have. And for me, it's just a simple ask. Hey, can I take 20 minutes of your time, 30 minutes of your time, and just ask you about how you did this? I have friends who have products in stores and. Or, I'm sorry, professional friends, I would say. So how do I do it? Is there anyone else I can lean on before I start just looking for myself? In our world, it's good to talk to people in a friendly way. It doesn't always have to be business, right? It doesn't always have to be business. I talk to people all the time, but I'm also very extroverted. Like, I talk to everyone all the time anyways. But it's always fascinating to say, hey, I have this project coming up and do you have any advice? It's not a bad thing to lean on people, especially if you're not. I hate the word competing with each other. But if you're not competing with each other, then they get excited for you.

Totally.

Like, oh, yeah, absolutely. Here's all my information. Do whatever, you know, whatever it might be. I've never done any of this before, but in 2019, I also never published a YouTube video before, and here we are. So you can't dismiss self teaching at all. You have to teach yourself these things.

Someone watching this who now has their mind blown and they're thinking, wow, there are more opportunities for monetizing my channel or my business than I thought. What last advice would you give them to think outside the box in terms of what product they might be able to create.

The best way to go about this is to be in the shoes of your audience. And I know we always talk about, oh, you have to understand your audience. No, no. Go where your audience go. If you're a knitting channel, why aren't you going to craft fairs? If you make content on medieval times, why aren't you going to ren fairs? If you like to publish books, why aren't you going to giant book conventions? If you're making anime content like me, I go to six conventions or more every year because that's where my people are. You have to do those things. You have to relate to your audience because then you'll know what they want because you are them. And that's the only way to do it. You can't just make a product, throw it at the wall, and hope for the best. You have to understand your audience. And that's why I brought this to my friends who have kids, because that's my audience. I wanted to be there and understand what they were doing.