Today we’d like to introduce you to Lisa Childs.
Hi Lisa, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’ve always had a great love for food. I remember watching Emeril Lagasse cooking up beautiful dishes to his live audience of doting fans on the Food Network as a child. When other kids my age were playing soccer and video games, I was in the kitchen experimenting with box cake mixes and making my own pie crusts.
As I moved on to college at Southern Utah University (Go T-Birds!), I found a job being a copywriter, editor, and overall brand manager for a local blogger/entrepreneur. At the time, I had no idea how all the moving parts of her business worked, but I really enjoyed all the different aspects that allowed me to do everything I loved and was learning at school. After I transferred to the University of Utah, I got two more jobs in social media, copywriting, analytics, news writing, video production, and technical writing.
After working in the corporate world for several years and having two kids, I decided it was time to quit my job and do something new. About a year before I quit my technical writing job, one of my friends in the nursing-working-moms Slack group told me all about the Instant Pot. We connected over a common love of cooking, eating, ethnic cuisine, and being working moms. She knew I would love using this crazy contraption.
Little did I know, that appliance would change the trajectory of my life! Like many others, my Instant Pot sat in the box for at least 2 weeks before I was brave enough to open it. This was in 2016, when electric pressure cookers were virtually unknown in the market, and traditional pressure cooking had scary and explosive connotations.
I started doing what I do best, which is experiment and research everything I could about how to use the Instant Pot. I started an Instagram account in 2016 with all my recipe experiments, and it took off! I remember opening the app a couple of weeks after I had started the account and there were 55 followers!! I was ecstatic!
I had no idea anyone that I didn’t know would want to follow me. At the time, there were hardly any recipes on the internet using the Instant Pot. I would make dinner and experiment with the timing and ingredients, then post what I was making for dinner after my new baby went to bed. Those flipagram videos made on my iPhone 4 were priceless!
The account snowballed and was a fun on-again, off-again hobby until I started to take it more seriously in 2018 when I left my job. I was just posting my recipes only on my Instagram account, which was hard to navigate and keep track of. In February of 2019, I started my website triedtestedandtrue.com and worked until 3am for a month straight to get new content on the site and get enough traffic to monetize. It was a grind, but I was able to get it done and keep working and growing. In December of 2019, I started my Youtube channel, which took off almost instantly. I had planned the launch strategically before Christmas (when I knew hundreds of thousands of people would be getting Instant Pots for the first time), but I couldn’t have ever dreamed what would happen.
Within days, I hit the monetization requirements and was getting hundreds of thousands of views. I had no idea what was “normal” in the Youtube ecosystem, so I enjoyed the traffic and didn’t capitalize on it as much as I could have. Because of how well my channel did so quickly, I was chosen as Youtube’s “Creator on the Rise” in February of 2020 and featured on the Explore page of Youtube for 24 hours. It was a huge honor!
In 2020, I was approached by a publisher owned by Simon and Schuster. I’ve had multiple books offers in the past, but they never made sense. When S&S came to me, I was incredibly honored and excited to work with them. It wasn’t my dream book or concept, but I was super excited to work with an incredible publisher and get my feet wet in publishing my own cookbook and I’m really proud of the finished product. I spent 14 weeks working 12-hour a day to create 175 recipes for one in the Instant Pot. It was published in July 2021, and has since sold ~20,000+ copies. Walking into Target and Barnes and Noble and seeing my book on the shelf was one of the proudest moments of my life!
I look back on the content I was making for the first couple of years and truly cringe; I really didn’t know what I was doing! Since then, I’ve gone to conferences, taken courses, learned all about the technical aspect of the internet, and improved my systems in much better ways. The thing is, there’s never a perfect time to start; you just have to do it.
Did I have the necessary skills, equipment, systems, and expertise at the time? Definitely not. My first photos were edited in the Photos app on my MacBook. I really didn’t know anything, but I still made it work. I wish I had started my site 10 years earlier when I was in college! But I’ve learned that the only thing we can do is begin and try and get better every single day.
I now manage a team of employees and contractors that work for me and help me in my mission to help everyone have fun and confidence in the kitchen.
I’m sure you wouldn’t say it’s been obstacle free, but so far would you say the journey has been a fairly smooth road?
Absolutely not! It’s honestly a daily struggle of trial and error. I had a great start because I started out doing exclusively Instant Pot recipes, and no one was doing anything like it in 2016. I grew a very loyal and beautiful community on Instagram that helped me through my postpartum depression and various life events along the way. When it was smaller, I felt like I was making new real internet friends and everyone was so nice! As it grew, people started treating me and my account as a free Instant Pot support desk and making comments like I wasn’t a real person. I miss those days when I had a smaller following and I felt like I “knew” everyone so much better.
Because of the rise in popularity of Instant Pot (that was the highest trending thing in 2019), I rode a nice wave of interest. However, even then, I never “exploded” as some people do. I have never enjoyed super easy, enormous traffic to my site. I work every single day to get any traffic I do. I’m actually in a huge traffic lull right now, and we can’t figure out what is going on with Pinterest. I lose sleep all the time on the struggles I’m facing with work and I’ll never tell anyone any success I’ve experienced is without struggle or frustration.
Over the last two years, I’ve had to pivot and train my audience to trust me with different types of recipes and content. At the beginning of 2022, I decided to rebrand my accounts to start moving away from only Instant Pot content. I changed my Instagram account from @instantpot_cooking to my brand name, @tried_tested_true, and lost over 5,000 followers nearly overnight.
It’s not easy thinking that people only wanted one thing from me and didn’t find me or my content valuable in other ways. But it’s ok! I knew that some people wanted only Instant Pot specific recipes (which I still do a lot of!), and it only strengthened my audience into more loyal readers.
I think people have a very common misconception that content creation is easy. In my industry, things change almost daily and there’s more competition than in almost any other job. I’m fighting for the chance to hold someone’s attention for even a second before they scroll on to someone else. Creators like to blame the algorithm, but the changes are what help us get better. They’re daily challenges to see who can adapt and keep up with the ever-changing tastes and needs of every ecosystem on the internet.
It’s not as easy as making something, snapping a picture, and posting it online. The recipes and pictures are really the least complicated part of the entire thing, really. Of course, the bare minimum is that the content has an excellent quality, but there’s SEO keyword research, formatting, internal and external linking, backlinks, domain authority, page speed, and all sorts of other things we need to take care of first, before we can even get to posting any sort of content online.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I am an online creator. I own and publish a website with mainly food and recipe content. I am also a cookbook author and publish a Youtube channel.
My goal is to help home cooks have more fun and confidence in the kitchen, using the right methods and tools.
I’m most proud of the impact I get to make in people’s homes and families. On my worst days when I feel like nothing in my business is going right, I have a folder on my computer of messages and comments I’ve gotten from readers over the years telling me how much they adore and appreciate my recipes and content or how something I said or a product I recommended really helped improve their life. I love hearing stories about how my most beloved chicken noodle soup recipe has become a family favorite and helped their loved ones feel better when they were sick. I’ve had people hug me in tears saying I’ve helped them feed their families, start a new tradition, or help them in some way. Those moments and messages are what help me keep going every day!
I think what sets me apart is my real passion for food in real life. I’m very unglamorous and feel insecure in large groups. I rarely wear makeup and I only care about how good the food is! I try and keep it real and relatable. All this to say, there’s nothing really that “unique” about me. Everyone has influence, and everyone has in real life. People like people, and as long as I’m staying true to who I am, that’s really the best thing I can do to be unique. 🙂
Do you have recommendations for books, apps, blogs, etc?
I’m all about professional development! The tools we use on our team to keep us organized are Trello, Slack, Google Drive (SO many docs and sheets!), Canva, and Tailwind.
For food blogging, I enjoy listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast produced by Bjork Ostrom of Pinch of Yum. POY were some of the first people on the internet that published income reports for their food blog, and it really opened so many people’s eyes to what was possible with an online business. They are so generous with their knowledge and expertise in helping food bloggers and content creators.
The Youtube Formula is an excellent book by Derrel Eves. He is one of the top Youtube experts in the world and his course is also excellent.
The best resource in the world (for me) is people. Connecting with others in my industry has been the most invaluable resource. They know the struggles, changes, and things that are working or not working for them, and most content creators are so generous with their time and knowledge. I believe that building a community of like-minded people is truly the most important thing anyone can do in any field. Because so many people have been so helpful and generous to me, I try and help as many people as I can. I’m always learning and listening to what others are doing and we all help each other.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://triedtestedandtrue.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tried_tested_true/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/triedtestedandtrue/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/triedtestedandtrue
- Other: https://www.pinterest.com/instantpot_cooking/pins/
Image Credits
Lisa Childs
