We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Christina Barrueta a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Christina, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?

Going from a hobby to career wasn’t planned in the traditional sense, though I had always said being a writer would be my “dream job.” For over 25 years I worked in the medical field and writing about food and restaurants was something I did for fun. In the late 1990s, I lived in Boston and was active on a national food board called Chowhound, sharing where I ate, what I was drinking, and the people I met in the industry — never thinking of it as a business or even a side hustle. After moving to Phoenix in 2008, I met Ronni and Josh Moffatt, friends of family who lived here. They were launching a new magazine called AZ Vines & Wines and asked if I wanted to contribute restaurant reviews. I said yes, and my online hobby found a whole new life in print. I spent the next several years writing regular features and getting to know Arizona’s chefs, bartenders, winemakers, and restaurant owners, before the magazine was sold. In 2016, I launched my website, WriteonRubee.com, to continue to tell my stories.

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.

I’m a freelance writer for local outlets like PHOENIX magazine, A Taste of AZ, and Experience Scottsdale. On the national level, I’ve written for publications like Time Out and Men’s Health and am a contributing editor for The Tasting Panel and The SOMM Journal, where I have my own column spotlighting Arizona, called The Sonoran Scoop. I’ve also written three books: Arizona Wine: A History of Perseverance and Passion, Phoenix Cooks, and Phoenix Eats + Drinks, which just came out last fall. And WriteOnRubee.com is still going strong, along with the social channels where I share everything from restaurant openings and interviews to trip reports and what I’m growing in my garden.

I’ve been in this community for a long time, and I genuinely love it. I think one of the things that make WriteOnRubee unique is the relationships I’ve built, both with the community and the people whose careers I’ve seen grow and evolve, and I hope that shows up in how I write about them.

What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?

Launching a website was one of the milestones. Social media and freelance gigs grew alongside the site, but I never had a calculated strategy. I just wanted to share what I was already doing. From there, things scaled up: My website started winning awards, and through that I was contacted by publishers, which led to me writing my books.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I’m in a pretty unique situation where I never actually sat down to write a business plan and instead it evolved over the years into writing as a full-time career. I think what allowed my social media following to grow was consistency and relationships. Over the years, I’ve continued documenting my hobbies, the community doing the work, and on telling their stories. My Instagram is pretty much the same as it has been from day one back in 2016: Just documenting people, places, travel, food, and drink, though with my latest articles thrown in the mix now too.

More than anything, I’m grateful my followers are interested what I post, because it gives a voice to the people and places I share. For advice, I would say: be yourself, be consistent, and focus on things that matter to you beyond the metrics.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://writeonrubee.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writeonrubee/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/writeonrubee/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christina-barrueta-6861b234/

Image Credits

Headshot is Joanie Simon