An interview hosted by Bailey Richardson and Maggie Zhang with Sarah Leung, the eldest daughter of the Leung family who started the blog The Woks of Life. The family of four started the blog to stay connected while living oceans apart. We talked with Sarah about role modeling stories and conversations to spark a greater community.
“As the community grows and people come back, they start wanting to know more about us and where we're coming from. We wanted to make that really clear--the origin of all of these recipes and of our family.” - Sarah Leung
The Woks of Life has opened the door for many families to connect over the food and memories they love. The Leung family, Bill and Judy, and daughters Sarah and Kaitlin started the blog to document their favorite Chinese dishes and family memories in 2013.
Food has been a central part of their family's heritage. Sarah’s grandpa was a chef in the New York Catskills and Sarah’s dad, Bill, worked with him in the restaurants.
Today, their blog is recognized as an authority for Chinese cooking and has sparked a robust online community. They developed their beloved editorial lens by capturing sincere experiences and rich memories with food as Chinese Americans. We talk with Sarah of how her family found their voice and supercharged others to share theirs too.
Highlights, inspiration, & key learnings:
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✨Say hi to Maggie Zhang, “Get Together” correspondent.
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Note: This transcript is automatically generated and there may be some errors. Timestamps may vary slightly based on episode announcement & commercial placement.
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Bailey (00:01):
Welcome to our show about ordinary people, building extraordinary communities. I'm your host, Bailey Richardson. I'm a partner at people in company and a co author of get together how to build a community with your people. And I
Maggie (00:20):
Maggie Zhang podcast corresponded.
Bailey (00:23):
In each episode of our podcast, we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds, maybe thousands, more members today we're talking to Sarah lung about walks of life. A blog that her family started focused on Chinese cuisine that has evolved into more of a community. As a family of four. They created the blog to share their recipes and document their family's history through food with each other and with the world. Now their blog is recognized as the online authority of Chinese cooking and opens the doors for many more people to connect over food and family stories. Maggie, tell me, why were you excited to interview Sarah?
Maggie (01:11):
Well, I was excited to talk to Sarah because I love the walks of life, especially the fact that they share a lot of recipes that my parents cook at home. So it just really feels familiar as soon as you go onto the blog and it feels like they're also helping to preserve part of my own culture and heritage, because I feel like I always have this existential crisis where whenever I'm home and I eat my parents' meals, I feel like I need to somehow document it. And every single step they took to creating them, because the flavor is just so special. And I feel like walks of life just lightens that burden because they're doing part of that work. They're sharing their own recipes and it's really cool to see how much overlap there is.
Bailey (01:49):
Yeah. There's so many of my friends who have a grandparent or a parent who knows how to cook things that they love, but they never spent the time to document it. And it's the walks of life basically knocked that project out of the park. Like nailed it. What, what's one thing as like a community builder that you learned from our conversation with Sarah?
Maggie (02:11):
Yeah. So the cool part about walks of life is that it could've just been a food blog with just, you know, they post recipes, their audience reads it, but it's actually a community where everyone's really actively engaged with each other. And I think the reason that happened is because they role model the type of conversations they wanted their readers to have. So Sarah says they really made a point to share a really special family memory associated with each recipe they post. So it almost feels like a personal diary entry where they're reflecting on why they care, how they learned it. And then that gives people permission to share about their own personal lives or their relationships with a specific meal or dish. And Sarah put it really beautifully. She said the blog is like a culinary genealogy because it documents more than just food and cooking.
Maggie (02:57):
It's more about documenting generations and the stories connected with every dish. So that was a huge learning about just how to turn writing simple posts into something that people actually engage with. Another thing I learned is that I think it's cool how they respect everyone's personal experience with Chinese cuisine. I feel like it's very easy to categorize between the really whitewashed Americanized Chinese cuisine versus the authentic type of dinners that you'd eat at home. But for walks of life, they post both types of recipes because all the dishes have a certain heritage and they don't want to discount anyone's encounters with Chinese cuisine because everyone has their own gateway of discovering it. And by doing so, they don't validate any community member because they respect everyone's experiences. And I think that's why their audience is so diverse because they recognize everyone has different entry points and they want to accommodate all of that.
Maggie (03:52):
Yeah. And in the same way, it sets a really positive tone to right. You know, the sense of not only are we going to share stories with each other of our families, but also like, you're welcome here. We are welcoming. All right. Let's jump in. Cool, Sarah, thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. I'm Chinese. I've grown up with Chinese cooking all of my life, but I've never learned my own parents' recipes. I've never really had the time to document them or preserve them. And walks of life has always been such a great resource for me to just feel like I can relate when they make Chinese chives and eggs or their scallion pancakes, and know that I could also make them myself. How would you describe walks of life in your own words for those who don't know what it is? Sure.
Sarah (04:38):
And thank you for that. I think it's awesome to hear from a, you know, a fellow Chinese American millennial and hear their perspective on the blog. But yeah, so for those who don't know, the walks of life is a recipe blog that I run with my family. So that's my parents and my sister. And we started it in 2013 basically to record our own family recipes. And since then it has grown into kind of this amazing community in its own. Right. and what I hope is sort of an authority on, on Chinese cooking online
Maggie (05:20):
In English. Can you share a bit more about what motivated you to start publicly documenting your recipe? What was it like for you to get started?
Sarah (05:30):
Sure. My parents moved to China when my sister and I were still in college and that year we just found ourselves sort of on Skype calls and FaceTime, just asking our parents how to make all of the dishes that we grew up eating, growing up. We just didn't pay as much attention to those recipes that were sort of my parents' domain. My family loves food, we're obsessed with it. So I feel like they were in China, like when we would text each other throughout the day, or get on the phone and talk, like, we always talked about like, Oh, what did you have for dinner? What we realized was, or what my sister and I realized was that we were an eating Chinese food because we didn't know how to make it. And where we were in college, I didn't have great access to it. I went to college in Poughkeepsie, New York, so I didn't have access to authentic Chinese food unless I went into New York city. And so I would find myself asking my parents for those recipes and realizing that there was this huge sort of hole in my cooking repertoire.
Bailey (06:37):
One thing I, I, I didn't realize from a distance about walks of life is that your dad also grew up working in a Chinese restaurant in the United States. So like, when you say your family was into food, you guys really, really knew how to cook. Like, it seems like every member of your family had a depth of passion. That to me, isn't at least I'm white, but you know, it's, it's not standard that everybody in the family has this kind of passion for food, the way that you do it. How do you feel about your family's connection to cooking?
Sarah (07:12):
It is interesting. I think that, I think my sister and I have a passion for food and cooking because my parents had that passion and we grew up with it. Uand yeah, my dad grew up cooking in restaurants. His father was a Chinese chef working in restaurants in upstate New York. He actually worked in restaurants in the Catskills about places,uyou know, kind of cooking those like American Chinese takeout classes, like shrimp with lobster sauce and like other things like that for clientele in these actual like Borshbelt resorts. Uso like the clientele was actually majority Jewish, which is interesting.
Bailey (07:49):
I've never heard of that phrase that was like, yeah.
Sarah (07:53):
Yeah. That's so, so in the Catskills there's a certain area that's known as like the borscht belt, because there were these summer resorts up there that Jewish families would travel to in the summer usually from New York city. And there's always been this affinity between I think Jewish people and Chinese food.
Sarah (08:20):
Yeah, so my grandparents worked in those resorts and my grandfather was cooking sort of Chinese American food in restaurants up there. But to sort of go back to the original question you know, you, you guys asked about that affinity for cooking and yeah, like growing up my sister and I were, we would watch cooking shows with my dad. That was like our thing w w we would watch like Emeril live and like ReadySet cook, like these like old school shows on, on food network. Yeah. I think it was just growing up in that environment, constantly absorbing the language of food growing up is as part of it, basically, it was like that realization that we weren't, you know, eating the food of our childhood without our parents around. And then it was also I went through my first year of college or my last year of college.
Sarah (09:18):
And at the end of senior year, I didn't have a job lined up. I was like, Oh, okay. I don't really know what I'm going to do. And so starting a blog kind of just became this like creative outlet and this way to kind of forget that I had no idea what I was doing and didn't know what I wanted to do for work. So yeah, it just kind of started as that, I talked to my parents about it and they were like, yeah, go for it. Like, give it a try, like, we'll help you. We'll like provide the recipes or help provide some recipes to get you started. And from there it just kind of became organically this family project that all of us worked on.
Maggie (09:54):
Wow. So it wasn't like to suddenly like start posting all of this publicly and making it external.
Sarah (10:02):
Um I think it's, it's interesting. Like we would write as if we were speaking to an audience, but I think we, I don't know that we knew we had, like, we knew we didn't have an audience when you're starting out and you're, you're just like blogging. Like I had like toyed with blogging in the past, like I had my own like blogger blog and where I would just like write like basically diary entries and assumed that no one would ever read them, which is true because no one ever did. So my, our first posts were just things that we wanted to record for ourselves. So I was just using the blog as this way to sort of as a diary, in a sense. And, and I think that if you go back, I mean, those posts are all still there. So if you go back to like 2013, you'll see that the tone of those posts is a little bit more ad hoc. Like, I, I didn't like set out to like, write about a specific topic. I would just kind of use it as, as a journal in a way as the blog evolves.
Sarah (11:11):
And we realized, Oh, there are some people reading this. We started figuring out what people were interested in and what they wanted beyond recording our own family recipes. We would also, you know, say, Oh, okay, someone requested this particular recipe. Like, we've never actually thought about making that. Let's like look into it. And what's great about that is it bubbled up lots of memories and recipes for my parents that they had forgotten about. So they would, they, we would get a request for a certain dish and they'd be like, Oh my gosh. Yeah. Like I haven't had that since I was a kid. And my mom used to make that. And, you know, so they would remember the flavor, but, you know, we, it, wasn't a dish we, that had become sort of a regular rotation dish in our family. So that's been interesting to see is like how this growing community and like the input from the community members themselves has like led our family to sort of reconnect with our past as well, which is really cool.
Bailey (12:14):
One thing that immediately stood out to me when I visited the site was how many sort of like really charming spot on anecdotes you fit into your writing and how human it feels, both in terms of the photography, but just the way you address people, you know, you land on your about page and it says, you found us, we're a family of four sharing, you know, our recipes and you have a photo of yourselves all together. And,uit's it. I think a lot of people talk about making the internet feel more human, and a lot of people really struggle to actually do it in practice. So I appreciate you talking about the writing right off the bat. I'm curious, how much do you think the writing mattered in the success of the platform?
Sarah (13:07):
Yeah, I think that's an awesome question. A question that I don't get a lot actually, cause I, I think the focus is usually on the recipes and the testing and the cooking and less on the actual writing. But I think that my sister and I love to write we, I took creative writing classes in college and I was, it was my goal to make the walks of life entertaining as well as informative. And also just to use writing to sort of share more of our story and the context that these recipes sort of sit in. And yeah, I mean, I think that when you go to a recipe blog, different people have different motivations when they land on, on a recipe. Right. Some people just want to jump straight to the recipe and just like, look at the ingredients and get started.
Sarah (14:01):
And then others, like if you've gotten to know sort of the person behind those recipes, I think that's where the writing is more important, you know, as the community grows and people come back again and again, and, and you build that trust with your audience, that's when they kind of start wanting to know more about you and more about where you're coming from. And so we wanted to make that really clear, I think on the blog, like where we were coming from the sort of origin of all of these recipes and of our family. And, and that's why our tagline is this like culinary genealogy, because it's not just about food and cooking. It's also about sort of this continuity through generations and the, and the memories that are connected with every dish. And so that's why with every single recipe, we try to share some kind of like perspective or memory or story that goes with it that kind of brings it back to like, what does this dish actually mean to me?
Sarah (15:12):
And why am I, why do I care about it? I think as we have done that, our readers have also responded in kind, you know, they, they share their memories with certain recipes in the comments. And then when we get recipe requests, often it's like, I'm requesting this recipe because, and then they give us like this awesome story about you know, their grandma who always made this particular dish at the holidays, but she would like, but she couldn't find sour cabbage because there wasn't like a, a Chinese grocery near them. So she used sauerkraut. And so like, can you make this really specific thing that I remember? And there's something really great about that. It's just like, I feel like if you don't put out those memories that go along with the recipe, you also don't, you don't extract those other memories from other people. Like I never would have known like, Oh, you could use sauerkraut for this particular dish. If you can't find sour cabbage, so somebody, you know, share that with us. And I think that that's that's what makes the writing powerful is just like it's sharing the stories and, and getting those stories back.
Bailey (16:22):
There's so often when we interview people who have sparked something more like a community than just maybe like an transactional audience where we see that people who start the community or kind of spark it in the beginning, have role modeled the conversations that other people will well down the line mimic. And there aren't that many better conversations to have, or more heartwarming conversations to have then like amazing food memories and family memories. You know, a lot of people want to have those. And so I can see by you having the insight to add that extra dimension into food, into recipe sharing, you've given other people permission to like, dream about their own lives and share about their own lives. So that makes total sense. And I think it's a really crucial, sounds like a really crucial insight to, to why so many people are drawn to you.
Sarah (17:16):
Yeah. I think that that was a really succinct and good description of the rambling thing.
Bailey (17:25):
[Inaudible] Sum it up. You know, I think yours has a lot of texture, so don't, don't, don't, don't worry about that at all.
Maggie (17:32):
I love that what you were saying before about people have different reasons for visiting walks of life and your site is designed that way, right? Like you even have the surprise me button at the top so that if people just want to learn a new recipe, they can, but you also have collections. You have a place where you can improve your skills, you have an ingredients glossary, like there's just so many different approaches and tying it back to what you're saying with your family. I love the ones where the recipes are labeled. Like Bill's pick Judy's pick and just like what personally people in your family love. And people can just follow that taste over time. It reminds me of the vlog brothers and how like John and Hank green, they are constantly recording video messages to each other because they're often not together in person. And they're very, very intimate messages about loneliness, mental health, just whatever's on there, or just like cool things they learn about whatever's on their mind. But it's cool because they're just sharing so much of themselves and it could be a private conversation and yet it's just very public and people can follow along. And I feel like for walks of life, people can see bits of themselves and your own family and just how much you're sharing. So how do you feel about that relationship? Like how do, how do you feel about your family being so publicly out there and having people like follow along that journey?
Sarah (18:53):
Yeah, I mean, so I've mentioned this on the prep call when you said that, or mentioned a blog brothers and John and Hank green, but I was like super flattered to hear that comparison because I watched their YouTube channel. And I think that they're great in the community that they have built is pretty much like, like a standard for it, you know, that everybody should reach for, in terms of community engagement and just like that really authentic that really authentic engagement. I think what's actually interesting about what they did and sort of drawing a parallel to how we started the blog is that it just really started, it started, they started blog brothers because they felt like they had lost touch with each other. They agreed to record these videos so that they could reconnect as brothers. And I feel like that's kind of why we started the walks of life is, is, you know, we were apart in different time zones.
Sarah (19:49):
So like, while my, my sister and I were going about our day, my parents were asleep. So there was this very tiny window in which we could talk to each other every day. It was like either in the morning or late at night, the blog just became this way to like stay connected across that incredible distance and to stay connected over something that we all agreed on and all enjoyed. And, and yeah, it was what was interesting was like, in the beginning, like we would like if my parents went on a vacation or something, like they went traveling in China they would write a blog post about it and then post pictures and my sister and I could see their trip. You know, we could like read about it and see it as if we were the same as any other audience member reading it.
Sarah (20:43):
And, and I really feel like that's, what was it just started as something to stay connected on a personal level just for our family and then just grew into this like huge other thing that kind of over time, like, as we realized that other people were experiencing similar had a similar experience of either like Chinese American kids, who, who also never learned how to cook from their parents or, or even like people who aren't Chinese, but had an interest in Chinese cooking and were interested in Chinese culture. So from there, it just, it, I guess it's like realizing that other people are experiencing the same thing you are and that now that you have this voice to share it, like, they also feel like they have a voice, they have a place where they can go and, and either see something that they can relate to, or, or share something of theirs that they want to share.
Maggie (21:53):
What was the transition moment for you when you started to think like, Oh, this is more than a blog, actually it is a community. Did you have a moment like that? Or how did you end up, you know, thinking about it in those terms?
Sarah (22:07):
You know, I think it took a while to think about it that way. Because for the first year we had like, not many readers at all. It was like, it was like, my grandma would read it. Like sometimes if we sent links to our other like extended family members, they would read it. But like, for the most part, it was a very slow going process to build an audience. I don't think of like a particular turning point or like watershed moment, but I do think that probably like two years in, we realized like, okay, like people are actually reading this and are actually interested and are actually starting to request certain things from us. Like, Oh, I'd like to hear more about this. Or could you tell us how to like, like people started coming to us for advice and also sharing how they would change a recipe or you know, Oh, I, I tried to make this gluten-free and this is what I did. And then like another person chimed in and was like, Oh, that's great. I was actually going to ask that question, but like awesome that you did that. So I think that that like, sort of external as those external interactions were happening around our blog, that's how we realized like, okay, this is, this has become something a little bit bigger than like just us putting something out there that people were reading.
Maggie (23:34):
One thing, you mentioned how you were getting requests from people and people asking for advice, or how do you make this dish or that dish? I feel like sometimes people are a bit like they really try to draw a distinction about like, what's food, what's Americanized Chinese food, but it sounds like you have such a wide audience of diverse races, diverse cultural backgrounds. So what is it like for you to make decisions about what, what fits and what doesn't and how you respond to community members?
Sarah (23:58):
I think that's an awesome question. And I think that it's really about the different lenses you can put on, on Chinese American identity and then Chinese food by extension. I think that there is this sort of narrative that's like, Oh, okay. Chinese American takeout food is like whitewash version of, of Chinese food is not real Chinese. It's not authentic quote unquote, but in our family my grandpa cooked those dishes. You know, it wasn't like he was that, that's what they made at home, but he was a chef making those dishes in restaurants. He eventually opened his own Chinese restaurant and serve those dishes. And so there was this heritage there that we had, right. Alongside the sort of like home cooked dishes and like the things that your grandma would, your Chinese grandma would make. And so we don't, we didn't want to discount any particular type of Chinese cuisine because, you know, for a lot of people, Chinese American takeout food was their entry point into Chinese food.
Sarah (25:08):
And, and honestly like those did like beef with broccoli and like shrimp and lobster sauce. Like I'm, I love those dish. I love eating them. And while I know that their, their particular brand of like Chinese American food, like that doesn't make them any less sort of authentic or valid in their own. Right. and, you know, while it may not be authentically Chinese as an authentically mainland Chinese, it is authentic to someone's experience, you know, and I think that that's the way we try to look at Chinese food. And I think that that's why our audiences is surprisingly diverse considering how niche our topic is. People from lots of different backgrounds can find entry points into the blog because it's, it's something that's familiar to them. You know, it's like for those Chinese American millennials like us we recognize those dishes that our mom put on the table.
Sarah (26:13):
And then for somebody who lives in the Midwest, they recognize you know, the Chinese takeout dishes that they would would order. And then you also see these, like, I think that there's been this Renaissance in the last you know, 10, 15 years or so where mainland Chinese sort of authentic classic foods like soup dumplings or like, you know, she on famous foods in New York city has, has made that sort of Northern Chinese style of noodle, super popular.
Bailey (26:49):
Mouth is watering right now.
Sarah (26:51):
Yeah. Yeah. So like, I think that those, those things are becoming more known in, in sort of the wider public consciousness. And, and so that is another entry point that we cover and, and the sort of the glue to all of those different lenses is that our family has, in some way, been touched by all of those things as, as the blog keeps going and as we evolve and as we travel and cook and eat you know, our, the, the lenses on Chinese food only continue to grow.
Maggie (27:27):
It sounds like you approach the community and your audience of readers all with the same level of respect, you know, like respecting all the different relationships people can have with food and all the types of reasons they might, all the different pathways they might take to come to your blog and why they might really love it.
Sarah (27:45):
I think that the multi-generational aspect of of the blog also opens it up to a wider audience. You know, I think that if our blog were to be just my sister and I, it would have a very different tone. It would be a little bit younger, a little bit like it wouldn't have that sort of weight of tradition quite as much as it does with my parents involved, they speak to their generation. And also an older, like the older generation of like their parents. You know, we, we get readers who write to us who are like in their seventies and eighties, which is I'm like, how did you find that? I'm not to say that like their seventies and eighties aren't on the internet, but like I just think it's awesome that people have, who didn't grow up in the digital age are engaging online or feel that they can engage with our community online. It really couldn't be what it is without my parents' involvement. And without that multi-generational aspect, I think,
Maggie (28:47):
Do you have any stories of community members who have really stood out to you or really warmed your heart or anything on your mind like that?
Sarah (28:55):
I mean, I think one of the most heartwarming stories that we have gotten, and we've gotten multiple stories like this is somebody who lives in sort of like a, a Chinese food desert, but they have like a Chinese exchange exchange student living with them. So it's like, Oh you know, we have a Chinese exchange student living with us here in Oklahoma. And we wanted to make them feel like they were at home. And so we went online looking for some Chinese recipes that we could share with them, and we found our, your blog and we made XYZ dish. And it just made that student so happy and made them feel like they were at home. And I think that whenever I read a story like that, I'm just like, it reminds me that our blog has like life outside of our own kitchen and our own sort of computers and devices, you know? And it's just incredible to see like how those stories and recipes that you put out in the world take on a life of their own and can affect other people's lives in these like really intimate ways that you never could have thought were possible.
Maggie (30:13):
This blog is kind of like artifacts for your own family and documenting the memories of your own family. But it's so clear it's impacting so many people recently, you transitioned to focusing full-time on growing this community. Can you tell us a little bit more about that.
Sarah (30:28):
For five and a half years? We all worked on the blog as a side project and the sort of design and the aesthetics that you guys were complimenting earlier in the podcast is a pretty recent development. Like our blog looked the same for like five and a half years really. And it didn't look particularly professional or enticing. Yeah, so I think that like, over those five and a half years, like, you know, the, the number of things or goals that we have for the blog, we're just like piling up that we couldn't really address because no one was working on it full-time. And so I started working on the blog full-time that has led to us being able to sort of finally execute on a lot of the goals that we have for the blog, like redesigning it, making it easier to navigate and understand like adding certain features, like metric measurements for everything, because, you know, we are an American family, but we have a lot of readers abroad and yeah, for me personally, working on it full-time has been amazing.
Sarah (31:43):
I really enjoy it. It's something that feels like it's, it's ours. It's every day when I get up to go to my, like my home office and like start working, it's like, this is my thing. Or like our thing, our family's thing that I get to work on every day. And I feel really lucky about that. I will say that my previous job was in digital marketing, so it was content marketing, digital marketing. So like, I, a lot of the things that I did at work and my previous job actually lended itself really well to to growing the blog. So, so that's kind of fortuitous.
Maggie (32:26):
I would imagine the blog probably also maybe helped you with your job. I don't know. I could be wrong about that, but yeah.
Sarah (32:32):
Yeah. I think I, I did feel that way. I was at a, this job, this particular job for like four and a half years and started there. It was a startup in New York city and I started there in content marketing. So I was constantly writing content, but I think that just like the training of working on the blog all the time and just very quickly producing content all the time, made it easier to do that at work as well. If you're trying to like monetize content or make content valuable, it has to be helpful to someone, right. You have to make it as helpful as possible. And, and that is the muscle that we sort of exercise all the time on the blog and that I would try to apply at work as well. So
Maggie (33:19):
You have such a good understanding of your audience because when I browse through the site, I feel like it can cater to people who are just beginning. It can cater to people who actually really understand Asian food and just want to develop a few more recipes. Like, do you have any, I guess, like feedback mechanisms or ways you're constantly learning from them besides when they reach out,
Sarah (33:39):
We've been doing this for seven years now. So I think that we've really had time to like tune in to what our reader, what our community wants. And part of that I think has been keeping like an open line of communication with those readers throughout the last seven years. So you know, we have a comment system which most blogs do, but our, on our blog, we answer every single comment or we strive to answer every single comment, which is, I think some bloggers at, at our level of traffic are like, that's crazy. How do you even, how do you do that? I think part of it is that it it's easier because we have four people. So the work is sort of distributed, answering comments is really important because it tells your readers that, Oh, if I comment and ask a question, they're gonna answer me, you know, like they're, they're going to expect an answer.
Sarah (34:35):
And so that makes them more likely to engage in the first place. And so, you know, by keeping that line of communication open and then also receiving constant feedback on everything we're doing, I think that that's that's, what's great about the internet and, and this format in general is like, I press publish on a post and within like two minutes, I can have like somebody who's like, Oh, like asking a question, let's say, and then I'm like, Oh, we didn't put that in the post. And that's a really good piece of information to put in there. So I can kind of edit on the fly and just like add that. And so when somebody hits the same posts, like an hour later, that little piece of information is in there for them. So like we're constantly improving and updating our content as people give us feedback.
Sarah (35:27):
And so I think that that's really how that's really how it's kind of evolved over time is like, our content is never, like, what we've been doing recently is like posts from 2013. What's kind of crazy is that those posts from 2013 are like the core sort of those core recipes that we wanted to show that we started the blog to share, but they're so old that people don't really look at them. So what we've been doing is going back to those really old ones and refreshing them, re photographing them, retesting them, making tweaks to the recipes themselves, because, you know, I think we've all learned a thing or two about cooking in the last seven years by doing this. And so just keeping the blog, that's like a living breathing thing that is constantly improving, I think is, is sort of key to giving readers what they want.
Maggie (36:24):
So it's really cool that walks of life is, and always has been a virtual online community since 2013. If you have any advice for those who want to build thriving online communities, just what, what stands out to you from what you've learned,
Sarah (36:40):
Maybe this is like, sounds like cliche, but like being true to your own voice and your own perspective on whatever subject you're looking to talk about or explore. You know, I think that before we started the walks of life there was this sort of dichotomy between, or like two camps of like authentic Chinese food and then like not super authentic Chinese food and, and whatever. And like somebody looking for a Chinese recipe is an, either one of those camps. And for us that didn't really make a lot of sense. And we decided to be inclusive of all of those things. We were kind of wondering like, Oh, if we put a beef with broccoli recipe out there, does that mean that people are gonna think that we aren't credible on these other, like more traditional Chinese dishes? And that was, those were conversations that we were having, but we ultimately decided, you know, like this is what's feels true to our family and our perspective and that's what we're going to do.
Sarah (37:42):
And so I think that, you know, as long as you are true to that, people are going to be able to relate to you as you truly are, if that makes sense, sticking to your guns on your perspective on something. And then also just like engaging with the audience on a personal level, if you can, however you can do it, whether it's like in comments or through a much more personal tone in your copy. I, I think that that also makes people feel like they are part of something or that, that they're included, makes them want to engage more. And I also feel like providing a way for your community members to interact independently of you making the comment section a super vibrant, like active part of your blog. It encourages that sort of engagement that can happen sort of independent of, of you or of like the community admin, so to speak. Is there anything else you want to add or mention? I feel like, you know, we're always sort of in the mode of like working and don't often take the time to sort of step back and reflect on our community and, and how it started. So it's been great to sort of step back in time a little bit with you guys. Thank you so much.
Bailey (39:12):
If you want to learn more about walks of life, just head to their blog@thewalksoflife.com and a big thank you to our team, to Katie O'Connell for marketing. This episode goes on a combined for engineering it and Greg David for his design work to find out more about the work Kevin Kai, and I do as people in company coaching organizations, to get clearer strategically on who their most important communities are and tactically, how to build a community with those people, head to our website, people and.company. Also, if you want to start your own community or supercharge one, you're already a part of the handbook for you visit get together book.com to grab your coffee. It's full of stories and learnings from conversations with community leaders like this one was Sarah. Oh, and last thing, if you're still with us and you haven't yet reviewed the podcast, we'd really appreciate it. If you did that. And also if you haven't put subscribe to do that too, it helps get these stories out to more people. Thank you for your time and we'll catch you next time. Thank you.