An Inclusive-Exclusive Club: YASSSletter’s Recipe for Building Community

YASSSletter is a gastronomic newsletter that offers readers tasty recipes, great photos, and information about holiday food traditions around the world.

Its creators are Ben Siman Tov, AKA BenGingi, and his wife Zikki, two young culinary professionals who also run a catering business together. While BenGingi is the face of the brand on social media and videos, he makes clear that they are a team. "Zikki is my partner in life and also in business."

We recently sat down with BenGingi and Zikki to discuss their approach to YASSSletter. The couple was able to seamlessly talk about content, business, and creation while they took turns cuddling their three-month-old baby and giving some attention to their dog as well.

Key takeaways:

• Developing a direct relationship with readers is key, and a newsletter helps you own your audience.

• Creating a community for your readers and followers can help power growth.

• Commitment to consistency is crucial for success.

• Don't be scared to start; something has to exist before it can evolve.

• Be authentic and honest with your readers.

• Monetization can come in many different forms - ads, sponsorships, brick-and-mortar business, etc.

Curious? Learn more from the source:

Let’s get into it.

A Direct Relationship

Like many successful creators, BenGingi said he started by sharing his passion on social media. "I started sharing recipes and entertaining videos about baking and cooking. I started being serious and very committed about two years ago. It took off right from the beginning, and I'm very grateful for it. I got my schtick pretty early, and since then, I've been developing my brand online. Until a couple of months ago, I'd been focusing mostly on Instagram and TikTok. I had a pretty average website — it was functional, people could make my recipes and see my content — but still, I made it myself, so it looked like a high school project."

“In the next year, I'm working on developing my YouTube channel and my Facebook audience. But I realize that, on social media, I'm not owning any of my audience. I have big dreams of developing projects, like launching a cookbook I'm writing right now, and many other projects I'm working on. I'm looking for direct contact and direct relationships with my community. I realized that's either a newsletter or a website, so I found a way to integrate the two of them together. And the newsletter is growing, thanks to that [integration]."

An Inclusive-Exclusive Club

Zikki is eager to share her excitement about how the newsletter has been received.

"Honestly, what I've noticed in our community is the excitement and the hype around it. People are excited to be part of this exclusive club, because when you're on Instagram and you have 400,000 followers and a million followers on TikTok, sometimes it can be unreachable for people."

"But now, whoever we run into, whether it's people on the street in our neighborhood or it's people in Israel, they say, 'Oh, I got your YASSSletter. I signed up for it.’ Even people you would never expect to be the demographic to follow us. Like a 25-year-old man who doesn't cook [might say], ‘I saw that recipe for the tuna melt. I'm super stoked, man. I can't wait to make it. It's my favorite sandwich from my childhood.' We're just blown away [by the response]. I feel like the reactions you used to get for Instagram are the reactions you’re now getting for a newsletter."

BenGingi agrees. "Yes, people are very excited about the newsletter in general. I feel like we created a kind of…." He pauses, trying to think of the word he wants to say in English, then settles for "an inclusive-exclusive club. Everyone is welcome to join the club, to join our newsletter, but at the same time, it's an exclusive club."

Why exclusive? "Because my recipes are available only for newsletter subscribers."

The new BenGingi website uses a plugin that only gives recipe access to people who are subscribed to the newsletter. "Basically, we block the whole website from people who are not subscribed to the newsletter. That's a really good hack, and it gave me the structure I needed for my business."

Structure and Commitment

BenGingi explains the structure, saying, "Before, as a content creator, I would wake up in the morning and decide what I want to bake today — something that will be delicious and grab attention. But now, I'm looking at the calendar, because I know the newsletter is coming every Thursday. I'm planning ahead a couple of months, building a strategy of recipes, what I'm going to shoot, when I'm going to shoot, and how and when it needs to be launched. It's giving a lot of stability for our business."

Zikki agrees. "Yeah, I think there's a really good consistency. It's gotten us very organized."

Bengigi goes on to say that he thinks commitment is one of the keys to success for a creator, and the newsletter format demands commitment. "[Whether] you have one subscriber or ten million subscribers, you are committed to it.

I have to show up every Thursday with the newsletter. People are waiting to get it every week for the recipes they will make with their family that weekend. So we are very committed."

Give and Keep Giving

Another of BenGingi’s recommendations for success is to keep giving. "Give, give, give, give, give. Forget about the take. I was creating content for about a year [on social media], waking up every morning to do videos, and earning zero dollars from it. But I believe that one day it'll bear fruit. So, keep working on the newsletter. One day, it'll lead to something. Most people are quitting, so you just need to continue what you're doing, and you will already be ten times better than others."

And for BenGingi, that giving includes advice as much as it does food. "I truly like recommending my friends to build newsletters — even if they have nothing to talk about and no business to promote. Work on it. One day, you will need it."

For more of this advice, see the newsletter here and consider subscribing:

Just Do It

Zikki has another piece of advice for creators. "I would say, just start. I think a lot of people are held back because they think, 'Well, it's not perfect. I need to have it perfectly executed. It needs to be excellent.' And the reality is that our newsletter is so drastically different [now] from the first one we did. The logo has changed four times. The branding of the newsletter has changed, the font has changed."

But through working on the newsletter as it evolved, she says a structure has developed. "We have a formula now. It's come to a point where we wake up on Monday morning and we know we're doing Chinese New Year. So we know we need the history, the origin of Chinese New Year. Ben's going to do three recipes. We need to photograph those recipes. We need to video that recipe to be promoted on his Instagram."

Developing a formula — a recipe for the newsletter creation — has helped the whole project come together. "When we first started, we were shooting arrows into the dark. We knew we wanted a gastronomic newsletter that would be educational, something a bit more sophisticated than a cookie recipe for your kids. We wanted something that would have value and teach people, and it took a long time to evolve. So, don't be scared to start, because it has to exist before it can evolve."

BenGingi agrees with her. "Yes, start. It doesn't need to be perfect. I remember that my uncle, who is my guru in social media and digital marketing, told me a couple of years ago to start sharing my stuff on social media. I told him I didn't even have social media, but he said, ‘just start. You will develop your language.’ And I did."

Don’t Be Scared To Be an Expert

Besides putting off getting started, BenGingi thinks there's another internal force that blocks many creators from success. "Don't be scared to be an expert," he advises, "even if you're not an expert."

"Sometimes people are scared to talk about a topic because they're not the biggest expert in the field. But you don't need to be the biggest expert in the field. You need to be modest and share what you know. I started sharing my knowledge about baking after two or three years. Am I an expert? No."

"Now you're an expert!" Zikki chimes in.

"But I shared my journey, and people appreciated that. A recipe is not necessarily a foolproof formula that I'm giving people. I don't need to make the best brioche in the world. I'm showing you the brioche that I made, and you can follow along."

Zikki agrees with this point. “The reason your platform succeeded so much is that you’re showing people how to think outside the box. You’re not making regular baked goods. You’re going deep into a world of customs, hunting down the most ambiguous bread there is, and perfecting that recipe. Maybe that [bread] wouldn’t have circulated in certain groups or demographics.”

A Recipe for Content Strategy

BenGingi and Zikki are in tight agreement about their content strategy, which is to offer an educational gastronomic newsletter as a love letter to their followers.

Reader polls help them understand who they're writing for, which they say is primarily an audience of “awesome home cooks.” They use that knowledge to choose the correct language, avoiding professional jargon, for instance, while assuming a certain level of familiarity with cooking terms.

Zikki explains that the couple has a solid handle on delivering content that makes their audience happy. "I think we understand what our audience wants, which is three recipes, a little bit of history, a little bit of what's going on in our personal life, some really high-end pictures, and a great opening graphic."

The content calendar is also based on a recipe of sorts. "We're following all the holidays of the year. So all our content is based on giving people as much information as possible around global holidays, and I love that concept of 'baking the world.'"

Growth and Monetization

So far, the YASSSletter formula is performing well. The newsletter is seeing excellent growth in its first few months. Bengingi says, "We started taking our newsletter seriously at the end of July. Then we had 1,200 subscribers, and today we have 25,000.

But, besides the cookbook currently in the works, BenGingi and Zikki have no immediate plans to monetize their audience directly. Instead, they treat the newsletter as a way to communicate with the audience for their brick-and-mortar business and build community.

"We do workshops, and we own a catering company," says BenGingi. "People assume that monetization is only digital and direct. We're a catering business called Ben & Zikki. We're doing private events, we're catering, we're doing weddings, we're doing private workshops, corporate events, whatever you want.”

Zikki agrees, pointing out that "Our ratio on what we give to what we take from the newsletter is very drastic. Like for every ten newsletters we send, we'll send one saying, 'Hey guys, we have a couple of available spots for events in March.' We don't put it in every newsletter. So we're not exhausting our audience. Like Ben said, the focus of the newsletter is to give, give, give, give."

BenGingi chimes in. "I always say I'll monetize it when I hit a million subscribers. The reason I’m saying that is because I believe that in my niche, it's kind of unrealistic. But it's still something to look forward to, to say 'when I have a million, that's it. I'm monetizing it."

BenGingi goes on to say, "When you think all the time about how to monetize, how to make money from it, you are, first of all, not organic and not genuine about the content you create. It's not fun."

The couple doesn't have specific plans for the newsletter other than to keep producing it as a love letter for their followers. But they say they are going into 2023 much more organized and ready to see where their brand leads them.

You can subscribe to the YASSSletter for free, or check out recent global recipes like Buffalo chicken pita pizza or Hummus.