A self-taught baker with unique recipes, Shivesh Bhatia talked to NewsX about his journey as a food blogger and how the field has expanded over time. When asked about the possibility of starting a shop instead of starting a channel and striving for that digital success. Shivesh said, “My goal was to always have a bakery of my own. When I was in college I thought that I would graduate and go off to Paris to a pastry school and study pastry. But the more that I started researching about it that would entail I being in the kitchen for a large part of my day. By that what being a digital content creator helped me do it enjoy a lot of different aspects that I like doing which could be baking, which is writing, meeting people, teaching people, hosting workshops, travelling, doing my styling, my photography, selfie-as a combination of all these things that I too much like doing I just kind of thought that it works out as a better option to me. Of course, I have not let go of my dream of having a bakery, so somewhere in the future I do see that happening as well you know everything in terms of digital content is on track. But for now, I’m happy being a content creator.”
Speaking about how he finds the difference between online content creation and bakery. Mr. Bhatia said, “ I think the entire business model changes completely because when you are working on a digital platform you don’t have to do packaging, transporting etc. The idea of it is completely different. For me, as a digital content creator, the idea is to always keep experimenting and do different recipes every single day. Once you have a bakery you will like to change menus once in 6 months. You do the same menu over and over again on an everyday basis.”
When asked whether he is experimenting with food for his future restaurant dream, he said, “ I don’t think of it in those terms honestly. I think of what is something that is in season right now and what is something that people could be searching for right now. A lot of things come from the things that I want to share with my audience but it’s also the other way around where I get a lot of feedback. I study insights and analytics and see exactly what the people want to consume.”
Talking about the content strategy and analytics Shivesh said, “ I am active in both Instagram and YouTube and they are both major platforms for me and when I say analytics it is understanding the audience, for example, before I started creating content I never baked an eggless cake as I nerve ate a cake without egg. When I started putting these recipes out there on all platforms people kept asking for a simple substitute for an egg which kind of indicated to me that a large part of my audience doesn’t consume egg make which is why I started experimenting.”
While asked about the reaction of the public throughout the journey, he said, “In the beginning, a large part of the recipe that I was putting out was only influenced by what I wanted to eat, what my friends wanted to eat and what my family wanted to eat and it took me some time to realize that at the end of the day I need to realize the internet. Being on the social media platform has allowed me to connect with them. This is why I kind of started taking into account all of these factors and of course I feel like I’ve been extremely lucky and I’m also very grateful for the engagement and feedback increase for the content.”
He added, “I think it is an ongoing journey. If you start looking at the numbers, it never ends. But I’ve been actively creating content on Instagram for about 5-6 years now and for me it’s been about a couple of years on YouTube.”
When asked how he decided that this is his profession or a full-time profession, Shivesh said “I think I was very lucky with the timing because I started on social media. I was in my second year of college at that time, if you’re doing something with the college you have extra pocket money and generate revenue. While I was still in college and by the time that I graduated I had a good amount of revenue coming in and I think that’s extremely important when you want to take a step of picking something which is not as mainstream as a full-time profession. So by the time that I graduated and I had to decide what I want to pursue as a profession I luckily had my passion. I have given it a year to see how it goes and it’s only been up till. I remember it was difficult for people to understand. Now that many people understand the digital medium and content creation as a full-time profession.”
Speaking about his way of perceiving success in a digital platform- be it blue ticks or revenue generation, Shivesh made it clear that, “both revenue and numbers are things which are not in your control and it keeps coming and keeps going there’s never like a speed graph line. What is in your control is to actually be consistent and that I think is the recipe for success so don’t get affected by the revenue that is coming in. Just keep putting it out there and I think that’s what helped me make them up for myself.”
