Vegan food blogger Nisha Vora has almost 1 million Instagram followers, 1.3 million YouTube subscribers, and a New York Times bestselling cookbook.
This is how she uses Kit to promote her book, launch and run her paid meal plan service, and build a deep connection with her audience, all in a way that allows her to take breaks from social media and spend more time doing what she loves most–making new recipes for her audience to try.
Having a source of revenue directly tied to the content I create that’s not dependent on an algorithm enables me to build a sustainable business in a way that feels really good.
Nisha’s Kit story
“I remember going to a diner in high school once and all of my friends ordered the french toast, except for me,” Nisha shares in one of her Instagram reels about a new vegan french toast recipe she developed.
“I ordered whole wheat toast, dry, of course, with a side of fruit. French toast was one of the many ‘bad foods’ I did not eat back then.
“It took over 15 years and going vegan to fully heal my relationship with food. Now I just wanna eat the most freaking delicious french toast ever to make up for lost time…fifteen-year-old Nisha, this is for you.”
Nisha started sharing vegan food content in 2016, casually posting the meals she was making as a hobby, something she desperately needed as a creative outlet when she worked full-time as a lawyer.
I never intended for it to be a business, but it started to take off, and I was pretty miserable as a lawyer, waking up with dread every single morning.
So I thought maybe I can turn this growing hobby into some sort of job.
She spent two and a half years creating on the side.
From the very beginning, I focused on creating the highest quality content I could in the time I had. Even though I wasn’t making any money, I knew that if I kept producing high-quality content, I’d find an audience and potentially a full-time career.
Nisha went full-time on her business, Rainbow Plant Life, in 2019.
It just felt right. I was really unhappy as a lawyer and as soon as I started working in food, I felt lit up from inside, and I knew I wanted to continue to do that.
Rainbow Plant Life became a thriving business centered on Nisha’s engaging content to teach people how to master vegan cooking. She shared her content on social media and decided to start an email list.
I wanted to connect with the people who enjoyed my content most without having to worry about satisfying an algorithm. Sometimes, I’ll create a recipe no one’s searching for. With a newsletter, I can still share that recipe with readers I know will love it.
Her audience on social media and YouTube kept growing, but in 2021, Nisha was struggling to build her email list.
We had some success here and there, but it was never really regular. It was kind of sporadic.
And even when we did add subscribers to our newsletter, we weren’t giving them the best experience. Instead of having a tailored welcome series, we were just sending them whatever email I had that week so they were thrown into the middle of it.
Nisha wanted to serve her audience better through email and make sure her subscribers received content tailored to their interests so that engaging with her brand never felt confusing or like a waste of time. She wanted them to feel truly welcomed and served.
She switched to Kit in 2021.
Nisha’s Kit strategies
1- Create tailored email sequences
“When we started using Kit,” Nisha shares, “we found it was much easier to create a welcome series and lead magnets and give new subscribers a tailored experience.”
This tailored experience helps subscribers get email content that’s helpful and relevant, something Nisha cares a lot about. This relevant content also keeps people from unsubscribing.
In her welcome series, every new subscriber gets sequenced emails where they get to know Nisha a little bit more and are introduced to the kinds of recipes they can expect from the newsletter going forward.
She also includes some of her most popular recipes in the welcome sequence, which, she says, works well to “turn people from subscribers into actual fans.”
“Additionally,” she says, “we would get new subscribers who come through opt-ins on specific recipes on our site, like an Instant Pot recipe, and we would know that those specific people wanted more Instant Pot recipes. So instead of bothering them with all the other stuff, we would just start sending them tailored instant pot recipes and doing a specific sequence that way.”
Take action: Want to learn more about how to create your own email sequences? Follow this guide.
2- Add opt-in forms to YouTube videos
Whenever Nisha creates a YouTube video with an educational component, she often creates a free resource subscribers can download by signing up for her email list via a Kit landing page.
“Recently,” she shares, “I did a video on different methods for cooking tofu, and instead of just having all of the information live in a video, requiring the user to pause at different timestamps to take notes, we created a really high-quality written PDF guide to go along with the video so that users can have all the information in one place, and they can print it out. There are also additional tips that I don’t talk about in the video.
“We’re able to get people to come to our email list by providing really high-quality content that people might pay for, but we give it away for free as long as they sign up for our email list.
“And since we started doing this, we’ve quadrupled our mailing list. We had 28,000 subscribers when we switched to Kit and recently broke 140,000.”
Take action: Learn how to create opt-in forms that work.
3- Send emails to drive traffic and revenue
“Now that we have a robust email list of people interested in opening our emails,” Nisha says, “it drives traffic to our website as well. And our blog is monetized so we make money that way too.
“It’s really nice to have a source of revenue tied directly to the content I create–it’s not dependent on an algorithm. That’s enabled me to create a sustainable business in a way that feels really good to me.”
“Last year, I took a four or five-month break from Instagram entirely. I know that sounds kind of crazy for a content creator to do, but I was able to still have my business do well.
“In fact, my traffic went up during that time, and part of that was because we had this robust email list of folks regularly going to our blog and making the recipes, even if I wasn’t on social media.”
Take action: See how professional creators use email and social media together for maximum impact on their business.
4- Create a digital product subscribers actually want
Once Nisha saw that income could come directly from email and her own content versus branded sponsorships or via an algorithm, she wanted to experiment with a paid digital product to market directly to her newsletter subscribers. (Spoiler alert: her experiment worked.)
It has definitely been a game changer in terms of our revenue.
In January 2024, Nisha launched a unique paid newsletter that delivers tailored vegan meal plans to subscribers every week. It’s called Meal Plans by Rainbow Plant Life, and it’s generated five figures a month so far.
Nisha says one of the main reasons this digital product has been so successful is because of the research she did before creating and launching the product, sending a survey to her list to better understand their current struggles and challenges as it relates to vegan cooking.
By leaving things open-ended and carefully reading responses, Nisha discovered a lot of her subscribers were struggling with creating weeknight meals, especially when it came to figuring out what to cook, making a grocery list, and figuring out what to prep ahead of time.
To help with those struggles, Nisha created the meal plan service alongside a community.
Paying subscribers get a new meal plan every week (Nisha knows who is a paying member by using Kit tags).
And when Nisha sends emails to new potential customers about the service, she can cite the pain points her subscribers told her in the survey.
It’s been very successful and it’s been really nice to have a revenue source that’s not tied to ads or to sponsorships.
I personally don’t love doing sponsorships very much unless it’s really aligned with my brand and with what I believe in, and I just don’t want to hawk product after product. So having a revenue source that’s not dependent on that at all is pretty great.
Take action: Curious what kind of digital product makes the most sense for your business? Read this list of digital product ideas.
5- Segment to sell without being salesy
To launch the meal plan, Nisha talked about it in a YouTube video.
The video had a call to action where people could sign up if they were interested in learning more about the meal plan subscription via a Kit landing page.
I was able to target the people who said, “Yes, I’m interested,” and then it did not feel salesy when I was talking to them about it, saying, “Hey, this is coming out soon. Here’s where you can learn more information. Here’s our landing page.”
And with my general email list, I didn’t have to ask them to buy things over and over. I emailed them once or twice about it and was still able to preserve that trust with them.
The first launch was successful, and the meal plan subscription service now accounts for 45% of her total revenue.
Nisha also used email to launch her latest book, Big Vegan Flavor.
About six months before it came out, I announced the book on Instagram. That had a nice little bump in terms of the pre-order numbers, but it wasn’t until I sent an email to my list using Kit that we started to see some real movement.
I think the book made it to number two on all cookbooks on Amazon and pretty high up on the all books list, which has never really been that important to me, but to see that our newsletter was able to drive that kind of success for the cookbook was pretty impressive.
At the time of her launch, her book was a #1 Amazon bestseller. Not too long after the book came out, it became a New York Times bestseller.
Take action: Learn how to create your email segmentation strategy.
Nisha’s Kit subscribers
But bestseller status isn’t why Nisha does this work.
It was a dream come true to see her own cookbook on shelves, especially as a kid who grew up watching the Food Network every day after school, but the real dream come true is the community this business has created around her. In a YouTube video where she unboxes the book for the first time, she says:
Thank you to all of you in the Rainbow Plant Life community because no publisher would let me write a 600-page love letter to vegan cooking if it weren’t for your support.
She then starts crying a little and continues:
The fact that you watch my videos, make my recipes, and leave reviews and leave comments, that’s what makes something like this happen, so thank you.
The Rainbow Plant Life community is the real reason Nisha does this–for the joy of knowing she’s helping other people feel confident in the kitchen.
She no longer feels the dread she used to feel when she was a lawyer, and today, her business feels more like how she felt when she hosted dinner parties as a teenager.
I would make these really big feasts for my family and friends and we would sit there and eat until we couldn’t breathe and have so much fun.
If you found this case study helpful, please support Nisha by trying one of her many delicious recipes at rainbowplantlife.com or checking out her cookbook, Big Vegan Flavor.
