 I dreamed up the name of Taste of Cocoa. Who knew that little domain would be where it is 10 years later? My name is Jane Coe, and I'm a blogger at Taste of Cocoa. I am here at Plano, Texas to wind and dye my way throughout the city. Taste of Cocoa is a food and travel blog based out of Austin, Texas, and I feature the hottest restaurants and vegan getaways. I'm here at Frozen Rolls Curry. I think they're letting me into the kitchen. These are shaped like the state of Texas. I originally started at Taste of Cocoa as a recipe blog. Being a college student, I didn't really have a budget to eat out. So I was baking for two years, and I had a readership of zero. And I'm not sure why it kept going, but it was just, I think a project that I owned that didn't matter if I didn't produce content today or it didn't matter if it wasn't good enough, couldn't be measured up to someone else. It was never my goal to become a full-time blogger influencer, but it just grew to this point. And I'm like, wow, has it really been a decade when I started this website? People think that there's a huge team that is doing all these things, but it's just me. 100% of my job is helping. I'm servicing my audience. I'm servicing the local businesses, local restaurants, and many brands that might come to me with paid opportunities. Some weeks, I'll sprint at 150%. Runch at home today from old thousand, and I just got through shooting everything. So this probably took me like three hours now, and then I'm going to spend another hour editing everything. I kind of have this track record of identifying a gap in something and being able to fill it. So I had started Macarons by Jane. I bought Janecophotography.com. I then bought Coco's Guide to Austin.com, along with Coco's Guide to Austin to many other cities just to have them just in case for rainy day. I bought so many domains on GoDaddy. I'm like, what else have I done? I should just log into my account and see what else I bought. Babe, apparently it's going to help me today. There's this allure of chasing money because the easiest way to equate success is if you're making money. And it surprises me so much because I'm like, man, if you're doing it for money, there's so many other career paths that are much more guaranteed that make a lot more money. It took 10 years to get to the point where I am right now where I realize it's easy to be an influencer, but there's a social responsibility that comes with that. When there's a pandemic or crisis, are you going to step up and show the kind of impact you can have? So I launched Hired Creative. I launched Hunter for Hospitality. And then I launched the Coco app. When we received shelter in place, the city just kind of went into like a domino effect. March is when my revenue starts for the year. And all of that was gone within a day. All the restaurants across the city shut down. I woke up to hundreds of emails, business owners, restaurant owners, just like cries of help. I've built a lot of deep relationships with a lot of these restaurant owners. They've been in business for five or more years and I've been in business for five or more years. I've been supporting local businesses and local restaurants since day one. So the first thing I did was create a blog post that featured all the restaurants open for takeout, update that blog post every 10 minutes. It was overwhelming and exhausting. I wasn't even sure if I was even helping anyone. Being a solo entrepreneur, I am able to pivot and run so quickly because I don't have someone else I need a report to. If I wanna do it, I'm gonna do it and I'm gonna do it in the next 10 minutes. I didn't have a great grand marketing plan, like, okay, I'm gonna do this and this will happen and we'll raise this amount of money. Every hour felt like a day and every day felt like a week and I feel like I've been working on this for years, but it's really only been four weeks, which just feels crazy. Hire Creative has had over 250 creatives in Austin who have signed up and within the first week, we've gotten 10 people hired. Hunter Hospitality has been serving 100 meals a day to laid off service industry workers. We've served 4,000 meals and re-injected $15,000 back into the local restaurant economy here in Austin. The Cocoa app, it's been a great success and by great success, I mean the number of DMs that people asking me for where to order out has gone down significantly. I don't know if I've seen success yet, just because I feel like I keep sprinting towards the end of the rainbow and I haven't seen the end of the rainbow yet. I think the next five years and kind of what I've been slowly working on is being able to come in as a mentor and advisor or investor and being able to help other companies grow. Because at the end of the day, that's when I'm able to close my laptop and be like, wow, that was a productive day and now I can go to sleep and start the day over and be able to do more good for the community.