This Cookbook Author Made $1M Cooking $20 Dinners. Writers, Steal Her Playbook
On money, identity, and the fear of going all in and quitting the job. "17 more years, for what?"
There’s a question I get in my inbox more than any other, and it usually arrives late at night, phrased about six different ways:
Do I go all in or do I keep my job?
Tomorrow I’m going live with someone who is standing exactly on that line. And she’s not standing there as a hopeful beginner. She’s standing there as a published cookbook author with a YouTube channel that has already out-earned her salary.
Her name is Jen Chapin.
You’re invited!
Monday, July 13, 9:00 AM ET / 6:00 AM PT / 3:00 PM Berlin / 2:00 PM London
“This cookbook author made $1M cooking $20 dinners on YouTube - writers, steal her playbook”
Jen and I are inviting you to join our live chat!
Who’s Jen Chapin
Table of contents for you:
You’re invited!
Who’s Jen Chapin
Why I want you in the LIVE chat with Jen Chapin
Jen Chapin is 43, needs to work for 17 more years and wonders: for what?!
The psychological horror of the creator dashboard
Go full-time and quit your job?
What we’ll cover in our LIVE Chat on Monday, July 13
Hang out with Jen and me: Food & Drink
Jen has been a nurse for 21 years. Master’s in nursing administration. Her day job is hospital consulting, which means heavy travel, sometimes three weeks out of the month.
And since 2017, she has also been building a YouTube channel about budget cooking. Real food, real grocery prices, real families. She started it for the least glamorous and most correct reason in the world:
“I started my channel because I could not find any other working moms on YouTube.”
“It was kind of one of those things where I thought, well, if there’s like a gap in the market, why don’t I just create, like, why don’t I just do it?”
That’s the whole business, right there. She wanted something. It didn’t exist. She built it.
Since then: a published cookbook. A line of physical meal planners she created herself, she bought a commercial laser printer and a binding machine and set them up in her home office. Her husband, an engineer, came home to a printing press in the house and said:
“How much money did you spend on all this?”
And she said:
“You don’t want to know.”
Then her daughter helped her tape and box the orders, and the stacks went out the door.
She hates the phrase “side hustle,” by the way. She’s right to. This is a media company.
Why I want you in the LIVE chat with Jen Chapin
I sat down with Jen for a 1:1 coaching session recently, because Jen wants her Dinner Done Club
to be a bestseller and because she’s now bringing everything to Substack.
She’s a rising Substack rockstar in the category Food & Drink
with an already-massive head start: a loyal YouTube audience that has watched her for years on her channel welcoming 141,000 (!) subscriber with “let’s make dinner”:
On her channel she’s showing you something genuinely useful and genuinely rare: how, for a few bucks, you can feed a family of always-hungry kids without Door Dash quietly eating your paycheck.
“You can waste so much money eating out and Door Dash and pizza delivery and all that stuff... I love giving people a road map — like, okay, you got 50 bucks, this is what you can make for the week.”
Jen Chapin is 43, needs to work for 17 more years and wonders: for what?!
As a little intro, I watched Jen’s hour-long coaching session with Mandy Kuo, a career coach, on YouTube. It’s called “Should I Go Full Time?” and I couldn’t stop nodding.
Because Jen said out loud the thing most of us only think:
“I’ve made a lot of money online before. Like I know I can do it. And so I kind of just want to explore like... what’s my issue? If I know I can make money and not have a traditional job, why is that so hard for me to imagine myself doing that?”
That’s the pain point. Not “can I make money online.” She already has.
The block is the identity.
“I’ve always like done the thing that I was supposed to do... I got out of high school and I went to college and then I graduated and then I got married and then I had kids and then I got a house.”
“I’m 43 this year and that means I have to work for 17 more years and I’m like…17 more years for what?”
She even took a career-values quiz and found that safety, stability and purpose ranked highest for her. Lowest? Creativity and freedom. Which is a fascinating thing to discover about yourself when you have spent seven years building a creative business in your evenings.
And then the fear underneath the fear …the one I hear constantly:
“If I do need or want to return... let’s say I’m gone from the workforce proper for 5 years and then I want to come back. How is that going to look to a recruiter?... which I realize at some level is like an irrational fear.”
She knows it’s irrational. It still runs the show. That’s how these things work.
The psychological horror of the creator dashboard
Jen also described the specific psychological horror of the creator dashboard better than anyone I’ve heard:
“If I sit down every morning and log into my YouTube dashboard and the last video I posted yesterday is like..you’re 10 out of 10... YouTube’s like, you suck, you better post another video, the views are down 17%.”
“When I log into work in the morning... no one’s telling me like, you were 17% less productive yesterday.”
And on the guilt of not publishing:
"I really do feel this sense of guilt when I'm not publishing. Like I know that's probably pretty messed up too."
If you have ever refreshed your Substack stats before you’ve had coffee, you already know she’s talking about you.
Go full-time and quit your job?
I’ll be transparent about my own seat at this table, because I don’t think you should take “go all in!” advice from anyone who won’t show their hand.
I run this newsletter part-time which I’m pretty proud of as I’m #14 #International as a non-native. I also have a job as a marketing and brand manager.
My husband Patrick God has a full-time job , he’s a software developer, and he builds the .NET Web Academy, StackBuddy, his Substack and his YouTube channel on top of it.
Two kids. Two corporate jobs.
Neither of us has quit, and here’s the part people don’t expect: we like our jobs. We’re not plotting our escape at 11pm. We’re building something alongside the thing we already care about.
Which is why I’m not going to sell you a dream, and Jen is not going to sell you one either. We’re going to talk about the math, the health insurance, the identity, the notice period, and the fear.
But I’ll say the other half too, because it’s the half that changed my mind:
Roughly 1 in 4 Americans now has a side hustle, earning an average of about $1,242 a month.
In my opinion that’s no longer a quirky hobby number! That’s a car payment, a mortgage cushion, a runway.
And in a year where AI has made a lot of very competent people feel suddenly replaceable, the thing you build on the side stops being a hustle and starts being an asset. An audience is an asset. A product line is an asset. A newsletter list is an asset. Nobody can restructure you out of those.
It even helps the boring version of your life: showing up in an interview as someone who built and shipped something outside the corporate bubble is not a red flag anymore. It’s the whole point.
So the question tomorrow isn’t really quit or stay. It’s what are you building that belongs to you and how big does it have to get before “quit or stay” is even your decision to make?
What I did tell Jen is this: Substack could be a huge driver for her. Bigger than she thinks. She has the audience, the product, the recipes, the voice and she loves writing, even though she has “never considered myself a writer.”
What we’ll cover in our LIVE Chat on Monday, July 13
How Jen built a real income ($1M) from cooking content
How to use video (on Substack) to grow your online business
How to write a script for your videos
Turning a video YouTube audience into a text-based Substack that pays
Full-time vs. keeping the job: the honest ledger, insurance, 401k, identity, and the “can I ever go back?” fear
….and of course: Making peace with the dashboard and the budget meal-plan system: what $50 a week actually buys and how she maps it
Hang out with Jen and me: Food & Drink
Still on the hunt for actionable tips and insights in regard to making videos on the internet, using video content, being successful in the food and drinks category and go all-in on the internet? Inside the Club membership we gonna talk about exactly this with Jen:
Monday, July 13, 9:00 AM ET / 6:00 AM PT / 3:00 PM Berlin / 2:00 PM London /
👉 Join the live stream
Bring your questions. Bring the one you’re embarrassed to ask.
Because the through-line of Jen’s whole story is a phrase she lives by, and one I want tattooed on every writer in this community:
“Done is better than perfect.”
See you tomorrow!
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