We were lucky to catch up with AJ DeDiego recently and have shared our conversation below.

AJ, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Risking taking is a huge part of most people’s story but too often society overlooks those risks and only focuses on where you are today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – it could be a big risk or a small one – but walk us through the backstory.

This whole idea of starting a small business is basically built off of risk taking. Years ago when I decided to start a YouTube channel since I didn’t like my degree, that was a risk. Recently as I’ve tried to wean myself off of my regular job and only work for myself, that’s a constant risk. Putting myself out there on social media in videos and photos, that’s a risk. Everything I’ve done and achieved to this point is because of the risks I’ve had to take. Every time I take a leap of faith, there was some sort of risk taking involved. You can’t expect to start build something from the ground up and not encounter a number of risks, some big, some small, but regardless, the risks are definitely there. I got to a point where I knew I wasn’t happy with my life. I didn’t like what I was doing, and I didn’t like what it would’ve looked like long-term. I feel like so many people settle for less in their lives because they think their dreams aren’t within reach for whatever reasons. One of those reasons is the risks that are involved with pursuing your dreams. People are scared to step outside their comfort zones or take risks to get where they really want to be, and I can’t say I blame them. The world is a very tough place now, between how expensive life has become and how harsh people can be on social media for no reason at all. Putting yourself out there and trying to pursue your passions is almost like putting yourself up for battle against the rest of the world and proving you can still come out on top, after you’ve fought your battles of course.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My business consists of two main parts: my recipe videos on social media and my dessert mixes that I sell on my website. My whole brand started as a YouTube channel in 2017 when I knew I wanted to pursue a career with food.

Baking has been my biggest passion since I was a teenager. The kitchen became my safe space, and creating food pulled me out of some dark mental places when I was younger. It was what gave me excitement and pride, and it was what I always thought about.

After I started my YouTube channel, I found myself constantly thinking about recipes and what to film next. Creating videos, whether they are for YouTube or any other social media platform, may sound like a simple concept, but there is an absurd amount of work that goes into it. It’s basically a full time job on its own between the planning and recipe writing/testing, filming, editing, and posting. When you do all of that yourself, you find yourself with little time to do much else unless you start sleeping less. All that in mind, it can be a pretty discouraging process as now there are more and more food personalities across social media to “compete” with. Making money off social media isn’t as easy as people think it is. Nailing down high paying sponsorships is increasingly difficult today since there are so many of us out there trying to shine. It’s a volatile industry, but once you find your niche and figure out how to make it work consistently, it’s pretty great.

One issue I faced in the process of all this is that my channel and sponsorships weren’t big or lucrative enough to live off of, so I knew I had to launch an actual business and branch out a bit. That being said, whatever I decided to launch, I wanted it to be relative and authentic to me and what I do, so I tested out some holiday dessert mixes a couple years ago to see what my market would be like, and to my surprise, it went extremely well. I decided to file my LLC and open up a a store on my website to sell mixes and ship them nationwide. While it’s still a work in progress, I’m extremely proud of it because it is something I haven’t seen anyone else do, which is very important in todays world because people love things they can’t get anywhere else.

How did you build your audience on social media?

Social media may look easy, but there is a lot to know about it, especially if you’re on the business side of it. It’s one thing to have a personal channel and post selfies and gain followers because people like the way you look, but when you try to sell things, it’s way harder.

My initial following on Instagram came to be from selfies. Before I started my business venture, my page was personal and gained quite a following, so I had to face the risk of losing a lot of that when my page became baking related. I deleted a lot of my old pictures that weren’t relevant to what I was trying to achieve, and to this day my following has sat still because it keeps teetering between gaining new followers that care about my current content, and old followers that are leaving because they only want to see me shirtless. That’s a shallow and harsh part of social media that people don’t warn you about. The second you start to get serious about your life and reflect it on your page, people leave and no longer care. I still to this day get inappropriate comments and messages and it still gets on my nerves, because now I wish you would just look at my page and realize that I’m not here for that, nor is that coming back. Granted, I do get a lot of really sweet messages from followers who have been here the whole time and still support what I do, but negative comments always hurt a little bit.

In the end though, in order to build a solid following that will support what you do, consistency and originality is everything. Posting daily/every other day is pretty important because of the dreaded algorithms on social media. Your page has to have consistent content on it to be picked up, and you have to be active enough to keep gaining and be considered for paid posts. At first, it’s really tough because people have to discover your page and get to know you, so it can take a while, but the more authentic and original you are with your content, the better. When things are forced, people can tell. I had to learn this on my own, and finally I’m happy with what I’m putting out there.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

Much like what I said before with having to basically switch my following over to a whole new category, risking the loss of followers and the comments that came from that because my content wasn’t the same was something I eventually had to find a way to get past. People are harsher and harsher on social media these days, a lot of the time for no reason at all. I’ve come across plenty of negative comments in the past where people said I should just go back to my old content because people didn’t care about the new content, and that was tough to read.

Every day, people will try to knock you down, and it’s up to you to keep standing tall and ignore the hate. I’m not saying it’s easy to read harsh comments, but once you accept the fact that those people will always be out there, you can at least learn how to take it less personally.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.bakeitwithaj.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ajdediego
• Youtube: Bake it with AJ
• Other: Twitter: Bake it with AJ