May & June 2020 Recap

The First Chapter Of An Adventure

So, how am I doing? I have been building this website for the last month, and a lot is going on these days. Sometimes when a project consumes us, it’s hard to see the daily progress without being discouraged. This is why I decided to write these monthly posts to recap each month’s progress and achievements. This is my first recap of the first month “in business.” What did I learn and do during those last four weeks to bring me to where I am now?

From An Idea To An Actionable Plan

Today marks the first month of creating this website. A website that still doesn’t exist doesn’t have a name or a domain, no posts, or any followers even! So what is it at that point? Even though there’s nothing to show yet, this project is alive and kicking. Looking back a month, I have made a lot of progress behind the scenes. If a month ago, I only had an idea for an exciting new project; today, I have a plan of how to make this idea into reality. How did I come so far? Keep on reading to find out.

Pivoting In Times Of Uncertainty

Let’s go back to where it all began. 2020 – the year of the COVID. The beginning of 2020 was pretty great for me and my business. I was on the verge of accomplishing my goals and vision. 2019 was my best year-to-date, and 2020 should have been even better. Unfortunately, everything I was doing involved in social gatherings. My business came to a complete hold.

The time between March and mid-May has been very confusing for me. I went through all the stages of grief for my died-too-young business. Everyone has their ideas of what I am supposed to be doing with my company to stay afloat during this uncertain time. But none of it resonated with me. I started getting into an emotional-roller-coaster that ended up in an identity-crisis state.

I didn’t want to wait it out and struggle for another year (or a lot more). I also didn’t want to do what people around me were pushing for: turn my business into a virtual-cooking-classes or starting to cook and deliver meals. This is not what I signed up for with this business. I wasn’t sure what it was that I DID feel like pursuing.

Finally, I finished grieving the loss of my business the way it used to be and came to accept it. I was trying to re-imagine what would be the best way to tackle these changes during a time of uncertainty. I concluded that I needed a change of path.

New Opportunities Arise

At some point, I had a revelation. I came across a blog post about a family that was traveling year-round, writing a blog about it, and supporting themselves through the blog. Wait. What? For reals? Can people make a living from writing a blog? That sounded interesting. I had to read more. Culinary traveling is something that I’m deeply passionate about, but have I ever thought about making real money from writing about it? Not really. I never realized that being a professional blogger was a thing! I was struck by surprise and wonder. Could THIS be the thing for me?

The way I’m usually doing anything new is to start with the research. So I started reading about the profession of blogging. Who knew, it is a thing. Then I started writing what I thought would be the right niche for my blog. It wasn’t too hard since I do already have a food business with a niche and a vision. I needed to think about what to write so that someone would want to read. Then I wrote a few things that I could sell as virtual products on my blog. Wow. I had something I was excited about.

I wanted to share that idea with Omer, my spouse, but I was afraid of his reaction, and that if I told anyone about it, I would soon discover it wasn’t such a good idea after all. So I went and learned as much as possible about the subject. This was early May, and I was reading all the info that I could find about travel blogs, food blogs, and everything in-between. It was overwhelming. After about a week of learning, I’ve concluded that if done right, this might be a viable thing to pursue, and not some “get-rich-quick-scheme.”

To my surprise, people were very supportive of the concept. Omer was even more excited with the prospect of joining in and taking a more significant part in this business at some point. I felt like I had the A-ok, and it was time to start working on a plan.

The Process of Planning – Where do I Start?

If May was all about conceiving a concept, June was all about putting things into an actionable plan.

I wasn’t new to blogging. I have had a blog for three years that I abandoned somewhere in 2014, and 2 websites I built myself on WordPress. I am not new to the entrepreneurial world – I started two business, one in Israel, and one in San Francisco, of which I restarted once after Leanna was born and taking a business planning course.

I could have just started how most blogs start: picking out a name, getting a host, and choosing a theme and then just beginning to write my posts, figuring how to make it a business as I go. But wanting to do it the pro way, I decided to pause and calculate my steps before starting with the nitty-gritty.

The steps that I took before starting to write the content:

• I needed to “run the financials”: to see if any of it makes sense as a business, to figure out what rate I can expect of growth, what are the income channels in this field, and what are the different metrics that create the various streams of revenue. I used a Financial planner excel sheet from my business planning course. Now I needed to get some numbers to put in the projections. How did  I get those?
• I googled and looked up income reports for food and travel blogs. Luckily I’ve found a whole niche of “income-report” blog posts of bloggers that posted regularly from when they just started. Like this one from pinch of yum, for example. These were very helpful in that initial stage of figuring out how much money can be expected to be made each month according to traffic growth, in different monetizing channels.
• I put all my expected expenses each month (like software, supplies, website hosting, etc.), together with “sales projection” for the three more significant streams of income I’ve found in this field (ads, affiliates, products). I spread them across the year to reflect a conservative growth. I put it all in the spreadsheet, and it didn’t look so good. This was sort of a reality-check where you realize what it’s going to take to make a living off of something you envision.

• I went back and made some tweaks until it looked achievable and made sense financially. I’ve calculated it’ll take about six months to break even, and another six months of constant growth to be starting to make money to cover the initial investment of these first six months. This meant I had to plan at least 2-3 years into the future.

• I opened a new notebook on Notion to document everything that I was doing. I want my process to be accessible and organized so that looking things up later will not take up much of my time, and I knew having it all organized would be smart in the long run.
• I wanted to make a timeline of my goals for the next 2.5 years with everything I’ve learned. I began with a list of my goals for each quarter until the end of 2022. My metrics were: site traffic, followers count, passive income revenue per month, and milestones reached. Where did I get all the numbers for that? It was mostly estimated, trying to stay on the conservative side of things, taking into account all the numbers I see in the income reports for similar blogs.

• I knew I had a lot to learn in many fields of the business, so I started listening to podcasts. “Food Blogger Pro” podcast was so helpful for me at the time. I was bingeing 3-4 episodes a day: while doing my morning workout, while folding laundry, while doing dishes and while cooking. I had so much cleaning to do since our cleaner couldn’t come to help during this time of the pandemic! Somewhere in there, I started writing a list of resources from the podcast that might be useful in the future.

• I started making more lists: a list of things I have to learn, a list of tasks, and a list of tools I might be using. I also created a list of business-name ideas and of people who might help me out.
• My business plan needed some key definitions: my niche, my audience, my vision, my products/services, other potential streams of income. I wrote down all these.

How do our life objectives fit into this plan?

I went back to my list of goals for the business. How do I get from where I am right now to each of these landmarks? I wanted to reverse engineer my way up to it. One important thing I had to consider at that point is how to integrate our personal life goals to be built into this plan. So I sat down one evening with Omer, and we wrote down our life objectives for the next 2-3 years. These are some examples:

• Being a food and travel blog made it clear that we’d want to travel as part of our lifestyle for more extended periods (1-3 months at a time).
• After six years in San Francisco, we started feeling like we might be ready to move on.
• We always wanted to live in New York for at least 1-2 years, so this might be the right timing for that.
• Being so far away from my family for six years now, made me realize I want to pay a more extended visit to Tel Aviv before we’re making any significant move.
• Having a preschool age daughter means we want to provide childcare and a stable environment for her to flourish and for us to be able to work full time.
• Create flexible working conditions for both of us to give ourselves a chance to progress professionally.
• Get a US citizenship in the next few years (which requires a certain amount of time in the country each year).
• Our cat has to have an arrangement which can be tricky since he’s just been diagnosed with an illness and needs much more attention and care than before.

This was a lot of work, and very emotional work to be doing! It surfaced everything that we hoped for and needed, and we realized that some of our objectives contradict or interfere with each other. So we prioritized the list and were surprised to find out that many items on the list were not as important as we thought they might be. Can we make it all work together?

After prioritizing this list, we had to think of the most practical way to fit in San Francisco, New York, Tel Aviv, and traveling in the next 3-4 years to best fit with all our objectives. That’s complicated! So we came up with three potential plans with specific timelines (dates and all), and we compared each one with our objectives, checking each requirement that’s filled with accordance with this plan. It looked something like this:

Since the future post-pandemic is still unclear, we had to take into account some wiggle room in our plan and realized we can’t commit to any specific dates yet, but we can put our plan into a time frame and go from there. It looked something like that:

Stay in San Francisco for about six more months until November-December 2020 →

2-3 months in Tel Aviv until February-March 2021 →

Travel for 1-2 months until March-April 2021→

Move to New York in the spring of 2021 for 1.5-2 years →

Figure out which city would work best as a “base” to live and travel out of.

Putting it all together to create a plan:

Now that we set our personal and business goals for the next three years, I was motivated to start working on a detailed plan to make this happen. Imagining our dream-life coming together bit by bit was a fantastic feeling, after months of being all mopey and sad.
The next thing was creating a list of tasks in all the categories that I needed to do in the next 10-16 weeks to achieve the first quarter’s goals. I appointed each task with a specific week that I’ll be working on it.

I created a new Notion page with a weekly schedule so that I will have specific daily tasks organized and easy to get in motion. I put the first week’s worth of tasks into days of the week. At that point, I thought – great, now I only have to work my way up through this list of things to do and then check after 1/3/6/12 months if I’m reaching my projected goals.

I was wrong. Omer had mentioned that now that I have a plan, I should talk to as many people in different relevant fields of expertise to run this plan by them and see what they think. Ouch. He had a valid point. I’m such an introvert that the whole concept made me nervous and anxious. But I reached out and called six friends and family members and practiced my pitch and idea along with a plan to make it happen.

I got a lot of positive reactions, but it also made me doubt my plan in some aspects and left me feeling confused and out of focus. I had to remind myself that it’s a good thing because I can improve my plan and the tools I need to get to where I want to be. So I made some changes to implement those. I also added everyone I talked with to my “board of advisors list,” which can come in handy when I need some feedback, have any questions, or need a fresh perspective on a subject.

So to recap, this is what I accomplished this June:

• Defined my business vision, target audience, niche and monetizing channels
• Defined my goals for each quarter in the next 2.5 years
• Created a rough estimate of a financial plan
• Made a concrete plan of action for the next 12-16 weeks
• Set up my work environment (with Notion) and a routine to be productive
• Started to build a new Pinterest account using the Tailwind scheduler
• Created a list of resources, tools, the board of advisors, more than 60 blog posts ideas
• Learned the basics of SEO and keyword search, researched keywords for all my blog posts ideas to prioritize which three posts I should start with
• Started recording my time with clockify.me to track where my hours are invested in
• Started writing my first three blog posts
• Learned the basics of video editing and edited my first recipe video

Not bad for the first month of work. I also decided to try and write these monthly recap posts like this one. It’s a lot of extra work to put it all together, but I think it’ll be worth it to both track my progress and have another asset going forward.

What’s Next?

The next month will be all about finding the name for the website, doing some branding guidelines, getting the website up and running, and getting some content in there.

Wow, that was long, so thank you for bearing with me for this one, and hopefully, the next one will be easier to digest 😉
Did you go through a similar process before starting a new project? Did it help you reach your goals? Let me know what you think in the comments section below.