We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Makhaya Shea . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Makhaya below.
Makhaya , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
The whole idea of becoming a food blogger was a foreign concept to me until January 2021 during the peak of covid. I was a mother of two little people and we were stuck home all day long everyday with nowhere to go. If you’ve ever taken care of little people you’ll know that it’s amazing, but also ALOT mentally, especially being cooped up for weeks at a time! When I got married I fell in love with cooking, but it wasn’t until 2021 that I decided to do more with it. I would post my recipes to my instagram stories and many of my friends would encourage me to start a food page so others could see my recipes too! I loved the idea, and decided that it would be a great project for me to work on while my little ones napped and after they went to bed. A fire lit in me and I dove head first into learning everything I could about the food blogging world! I signed up for food photography courses, learned how to plate my meals beautifully, and started a food instagram page(@thrilledfoodie). The accomplishment I am most proud of though, is building my own blog from scratch. I had never done anything like it, but thanks to YouTube I was able to start from the ground up and watch my blog come to life! I did run into so many problems, but I learned as I went. In May of 2021 I launched my blog www.thrilledfoodie.com ! Since then I’ve worked towards building my web presence on google as well as grow my audiences on social media. I learned all about sourdough bread and I sell homemade loaves locally and ship my sourdough starter all over the United States! Being a mother is my number one priority, and my hope is to continue building this business so that I can have a steady stream of passive income while I stay home and raise my children. Eventually I would love to write my own cookbook as well to share my recipes with more of the world!
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
I’m a stay at home mom of three little people and it’s the most wonderful and challenging job in the world! I loved the idea of being able to make a passive income on the side as I raised my babies, so that is my goal with my food blog now. I’ve take a lot of different avenues since first starting out, and am now at a place where my food blog is just one of the pieces to this small business. I sell sourdough starter locally and ship dehydrated starter all over the United States. I also sell classic sourdough loaves and take and bake sourdough croissants. I run a food instagram where I am able to share my recipes, as well as motherhood content and I work with food companies through paid partnerships. and affiliate programs. I’m very proud of the recipes I create and love to share them with the world. I’m very hopeful to publish a cookbook/cookbooks of my own one day! I know there is a time and a season for all things and am very happy to work towards my food blog dreams while living my dream of being a stay at home mom!
Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?
In the beginning I started by posting my recipes to my personal Instagram page. Then a few of my friends encouraged me to start a separate food page to share with everyone. So I started my Thrilled Foodie Instagram account in February 2021. I would share my posts to my personal instagram page so that my audience there would head over to my page and give it a follow! From there I continued to try to stay consistent with posting. I learned about food photography and started to become pretty good at it…then reels came. What used to only need a picture with a caption, turned into needing to make everything video form. This was a hard adjustment for me because that takes A LOT more time and daylight and with my littles running around it was hard to keep baby hands out of the shots/videos! Since then I’ve been as consistent as possible with showing up on that platform(taking breaks while pregnant because food becomes a terrible thing for me during that time)! I’ve been super happy with the people I have gotten to meet virtually, and grateful for my little supportive corner of Instagram that share my recipes and utilize them on a daily basis!
How did you put together the initial capital you needed to start your business?
The nice thing about starting a food blog is that there isn’t much of an initial investment. You can really build it utilizing a lot of free tools and programs out there. The more you try to grow though, the more money you will need to spend. It’s sort of a long term investment(which I’m still in the middle of). As I’ve slowly grown and built web traffic to my blog and socials, I’ve spent more money to improve my website. I’ve been able to use the money from my sourdough bread profits to put towards making changes to my blog and taking more courses to improve my skills. Selling starter and baked goods at the farmers market and locally has been a great way to cover costs here and there that I spend on my blog! As my social media has grown I’ve been blessed with opportunities for paid partnerships and working with food companies to make some money to invest in my blog as well!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.thrilledfoodie.com
- Instagram: thrilledfoodie
Image Credits
All images take by me