I can’t quite settle on what I want to listen to this week, and every time I nix like twelve artists in a row, I fall back on this little vibe from Kota The Friend. He’s been rapping and producing in Brooklyn since 2015, and this newest track is an extraordinarily laid back description of the dogged work he’s put in to build his performing career. “Always screaming independent cause y’all do not get it / I compete with label artists, look at my percentage / Stay a hundred cause you are are what you eat, and where I’m from you only eat what you kill.” Honor the grind, listen here.
Substack is thriving. You’re on it right now! Not to mention, they’re raising money, recruiting all kinds of writers, and starting to offer stuff like health insurance.
All of which is to say, it’s a good time to be in the business of monetizing independent media, which I suppose is why a company named (🤢) Foody just launched to help recipe developers charge for their work. Their platform is basically a big, aggregate food blog where readers can pay by the recipe, a model that only really works if people know who you are and care that it’s YOUR chicken cacciatore — again, same as the media game. The major difference from Substack is that readers can pay Ă la carte instead of subscribing long-term to one individual.
I will say, we need this. Content is laborious to produce, and people are too used to getting it for free. But also, this is not the world’s first crack at monetizing recipes: recall the 2019 Techcrunch headline, “ckbk pulls a ‘Spotify for recipes’ out of the beta oven.” And given that others have tried and failed, I can’t say I’m terribly optimistic about the platform from a “wife-and-husband” founding team “coming from investment banking and real estate development, respectively,” who’ve managed to raise $1.5 M for the company because they’re friends with the guy who founded Patreon. In lieu of industry experience, they seem to be banking on a few big names — Serena Williams also invested, and there’s a handful of celebrity chefs on the platform. If only Jeffrey Katzenberg were somehow involved…
If you want to make money making food, take a tip from Reese’s, which just marketed a giant, $45 peanut butter cup as a “Thanksgiving pie” and sold it out in three hours. When you, too, are willing to sell out, this here’s your recipe for success.
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