10 Years Ago Today
10 years ago today, I posted the very first PJP blog. And since that first day, there’s been thousands of posts documenting us at our very best…and occasionally, at our very worst. And also, since those earliest days, there’s been thousands and thousands of readers here. And notably, tens of you have stayed around for the entire endeavor.
So obviously most people want to know why a pie shop needs a blog. And to that I say, WHY DOESN’T IT? For starters, blogging reigned supreme in the fall of 2013. Those were the days of never ending content, back in the days of Young House Love and Pioneer Woman. (Young House Love now only does Instastories and Pioneer Woman has a staff of writers who post regularly. Come to think of it, not a single blog I read 10 years ago is still around. OH NO.). Jason and the kids sent me flowers today to commemorate the 10 year anniversary and after thinking about all those blogs that are no longer, I appreciate the gesture even more.
Let’s talk specifics:
How many posts are on the blog in the past 10 years? There’s no way to know. I started on WordPress and then we transitioned to Squarespace several years in, so while the archive is complete, it is hard to count. My best guess is around 3,000 or so.
Can I go back and read old posts? Yep, every single one. Five years ago, Jason tried to print them all off to see what it would look like and it was hundreds of pages. We were just curious what it would look like in paper format, but it was exceptionally more pages than I would have guessed. Apparently, I’ve never been short of words.
What is the most popular post? Believe it or not, I wrote once about shady business practices with our Ecolab dishwasher and hundreds of thousands of people have read it. Ecolab even flew their president to Columbia to meet with us and discuss the post (but they asked us to take the post down and I did not do so). To this day, we regularly receive emails about that post.
Ecolab is niche content, right? Yep. Commercial dishwashing can be a dramatic space to occupy. Finding an ally is a comfort.
Any other niche content? Literally all of it.
Have you thought about monetizing it? No, not really. Inserting ads is weird. People often ask to send us things for free if we mention it on the blog, but I can’t think of anything that I like enough to do that. Unless you run the lipstick division at Sephora or you want to ship over a pallet of Post-It Notes for us to use at Thanksgiving…those are the two things that might sway me.
Favorite posts? Thanksgiving posts are always my favorite. You can isolate those and see our progression as a small business. I always re-read them each year because you can’t figure out where you are going until you remember where you’ve been.
Any posts you regret? No, not really. We’ve admitted some embarrassing stuff and recounted some big failures, but that is the sort of content that is so hard to find on the Internet and so I don’t regret it. Entrepreneurship is two steps forward and one step back and content that ignores the step back is just the worst content. Anyone who says owning a small business is great all of the time isn’t telling the whole story.
Most surprising part of the blog? So many people read here that have never been to PJP. We have readers in all 50 states and even a few outside of the United States. Most are interested in entrepreneurship and not pie, which is good because rarely do I ever discuss pie. Imagine the disappointment if you showed up here for baking content?
What now? More of the same. Occasionally, there’s less to blog about because there’s less overall struggle in figuring out how to run this business. But then we have a day that just ridiculous and I have to document it for posterity. Plus, when PJP has a national headquarters and visitors can tour a small museum before exiting through the gift shop, we can just print out the archives and have exhibits for days.
