Lunar New Year

on stagnation, growth, and connecting with my roots

I’ve been feeling a little lost lately.

Stagnation

When I quit my full-time job, I gave myself a year to see if I could turn my food blog into my livelihood. After almost eight months, I still have no idea what I’m doing. The lucrative sponsorships I had anticipated have not rolled in. My Instagram account growth has basically plateaued since last summer.

There were moments where I reconsidered everything, questioning whether I had made the right move and debating a return to a stable tech job. But I have not lost hope. After several months of introspection, I realized that my content had stagnated because my creativity had stagnated.

You see, I started out on Instagram by posting ten to fifteen second reels overlayed with trending audio of aesthetic bars and hip restaurants. A year into posting this “aesthetic dining” content, I was feeling increasingly unfulfilled, even though it was responsible for most of my page’s success: my three top-performing reels total 41 seconds in duration, amassed over two million views, and gained me almost 5000 followers — nearly half of my following.

brooklynfoodlady

A post shared by @brooklynfoodlady

It was formulaic, but it worked. When I still had a full-time job, it was a great way to build an audience with minimal effort. However, after I quit and turned my full attention to my blog, the formula felt rote and boring.

I tried taking different approaches to my content: longer videos in which I narrated my restaurant experience, multi-episode series exploring different neighborhoods. Some of the content performed well, like this reel about a Georgian restaurant in the East Village, but for the most part the response was tepid and my account growth and engagement plateaued. This was particularly discouraging because I had just moved all my eggs to the content creation basket.

I needed to do something different.