How Subscription Content Startup YesChef Acquires Customers
How Subscription Content Startup YesChef Acquires Customers
Case study analyzing the marketing channels YesChef uses (and should use) to grow.
This is Product-Channel Fit, a weekly deep dive into how consumer startups discover and scale new acquisition channels through real-world marketing case studies.
YesChef is a direct-to-consumer education company that teaches their subscribers how to cook by partnering with world class chefs.
It offers immersive video, hands-on lessons, and snackable content designed to bring home the world’s most delicious food.
Think of it as Masterclass for home gourmands.
Aside: YesChef borrows its name from the deferential refrain made popular by French kitchen staff (and played to perfection in the recent show The Bear)
YesChef is making a bet that the success of food blogs, the NYT Cooking, and the countless educational and competitive T.V, cooking shows has created a fertile environment of potential customers not just interested in cooking, but willing to commit to taking courses to improve their own skills.
YesChef’s Growth Outlook
There’s reason to believe they might be able to make it work.
They’ve already managed to secure big-name celebrity chefs to contribute to their platform, and each chef brings a particular speciality. Their accumulating content base should make it easier to acquire users over time.
However, the pressure new content will be under to help acquire users may conflict with the wants and desires of existing users, foreshadowing a potential churn problem.
Not only that, but heavy content plays like this usually provide more content for free to both find and convert future users. YesChef has instead opted for a pay-to-play with a money back guarantee model which feels a bit out of sync with current best practice.
Their early success making inroads with big-name industry figures is a huge strength that can be leveraged into countless acquisition opportunities. At the same time, they’re completely reliant on revenue from avid home cooks. This might leave them vulnerable to a much larger and diversified organization like the NYT Cooking who could potentially lend their big name to replicating their product and stealing customers away over time.
Based on YesChef’s unique opportunities, here are three growth channels they should start to (or continue to) pursue to find product-channel fit and unlock the next level of growth.
YesChef’s Channel Opportunities
Turning Celebrity Chefs Into Affiliates
Short of giving their Celebrity Chefs equity in the company, paying them a percentage of revenue they generate for YesChef is a sure-fire way to acquire customers in a de-risked and scalable way.
Instead of paying for ad spend or other paid marketing channels, YesChef could piggy-back on the trust their chef partner’s have with their audience while only paying them when a sale is attributed to them. In turn, this should motivate the chefs to promote YesChef regularly once they start to get paid for the revenue they help create.
This playbook echoes how Cameo used their celebrity partners to promote themselves while associating them with celebrities their fans love.
To make this work, YesChef should offer their celebrity partners as large a percentage of attributed sales as possible when their course first launches. This should incentivize lots of sharing & promoting in the beginning.
Then, to protect margins, gradually reduce the portion of revenue share paid to chefs the older their content becomes. Negotiate deals individually with each chef to hone in the structure, and then standardize it to scale to as many chefs as possible.
Leverage SEO to Tap Into High-Volume Recipe Search Terms
A massive amount of searches happen every day for foods and recipes, and the competition is often not very good. Here’s a recent reading for “Peperonata”, a keyword in Nancy Silverton’s YesChef course.
Over 18k monthly searches, and limited competition – prime opportunity for an SEO play.
YesChef’s multimedia approach (focusing on video with text transcriptions) and multiple channel publishing gives them a unique advantage to dominate the top of the search box, like they do with the more specific “Peperonata with Passata di Pomodoro” keyword.
People who search for recipes are likely also people who cook, and the way YesChef has set up their course structure gives them a unique opportunity to create dozens of pages that rank in search for each new chef they partner with.
Dynamically creating landing pages targeting keywords for each recipe (like “Roasted Tomato with Thyme”) and technique (like “Balancing Flavor Profiles”) in each chef’s course gives YesChef an opportunity to create a very strong organic search channel of their own.
The key balance to making this work is figuring out how much free content the pages must have to rank highly in search without giving so much away that they hurt their conversion rate to paid users, but this shouldn’t be of major concern.
Users likely won’t buy when they’re getting ready to cook, but they might later when they have already seen some of the value YesChef provides.
This strategy echoes Zillow and other online real estate listings services that frame their constantly updating real estate listings in templates landing pages built around key real estate search terms like “Apartments in [Zip Code]” or “Homes for Sale in [Neighborhood]”.
Building a Community for Retention & Referral
Subscription content sites face constant pressure to increase the velocity of content production to keep subscribers interested as they consume or tire of the content already provided. Incentivizing annual subscriptions is the classic way to content with this problem, on top of continual content investment.
Fortunately, the content doesn’t necessarily have to come from YesChef themselves – it can come from their existing customers. Building and facilitating a community space for home chefs on a tool like Circle could pay huge dividends.
First, it can provide social and skill-building opportunities for their subscribers, all through user-generated content. This should increase the stickiness of the product, giving users a more dynamic set of content to lose access to should they churn.
It can also help surface YesChef in search. By strategically making some portions of their community public, YesChef could capture a much larger volume of long-tail search that surfaces conversations happening in their community.
And we can’t forget about referral. Many communities leverage live webinars and other communal events to both provide value and encourage their users to invite their friends to take part, supercharging word of mouth referral within their user’s social networks.