Did I ever tell you that I started V1 of Instagram?!? Well, that isn’t entirely true. But I did create a website when I was a senior in high school, before Facebook, before Instagram, before Squarespace and Wordpress, before everyone had a cellphone. It was called Julzie.com. It was a self-coded website where I would post scanned and uploaded photos of my friends and me, with the ability for other people to comment on the photos. Were these photos that should have been posted online? No. Were these photos that showed underage kids with red Solo cups that were “totally” just filled with water? Definitely. Would these be photos that today, as a parent, I’d be mortified to see of my kids? Absolutely. (Side bar: Given some of the very serious stories in the news lately involving college students and inappropriate behavior, I want to be very clear that I’m talking about innocent teenage stupidity and memories here. I have not, do not and will not ever stand for inappropriate sexual behavior.)
But come on, we were all high schoolers once. House parties, crop tops, disposable cameras and Solo cups filled with “water.” Does Julzie.com still exist? No. Can it be dug up? Also, thankfully, no. But was it so popular that in my senior yearbook’s INs and OUTs, Julzie.com outranked MySpace.com. Yes. At least according to the popular vote of my senior class.
So there I was. An early adopter. An early content creator before “content creator” was even a thing. And I did absolutely nothing about it besides feel pretty cool.
There’s a saying about the difference between being ahead of the curve and simply being too early. Julzie.com was apparently the latter. I had accidentally stumbled into social media before I knew there was a media business to stumble into. And then I walked right back out.
Fast forward a few years. After college, I had just moved to NYC. Facebook existed, Instagram was on the rise, but blogging was HOT. My best friend and roommate worked in the fashion industry (DVF to be exact... and there is your ah-ha moment for why I seem to have a never-ending closet of DVF wrap dresses that I actually own, not rent). While she climbed the corporate fashion ladder and I did the same in hospitality, I would proudly follow her around NYC taking photos of her amazing outfits and looks everywhere we went. She turned those photos into a fashion blog. That blog took off and helped kick-start her career as a fashion influencer, a title she still proudly holds and has turned into the most special career. BTW you should follow her! Why? Well in her words, she is Carrie Bradshaw meets Marge Simpson! Not only is she an influencer but an entrepreneur who just launched the most innovative and creative accessory brand. BopBop, wearable identity for those obsessed with self-expression. But I digress…
You know what I didn’t think about then? While we were photographing HER on the streets of NYC, why weren’t we photographing OUR FOOD?
We were at every hot new NYC restaurant opening and eating at tables where I still don’t understand how we afforded the meal. I could have been a food influencer! Forget Julzie.com. This was my second chance! And I missed it. Again.
And before you say, “Julie, it’s never too late,” at this stage in life my dinners are usually at home with my family, hibachi, our favorite family-friendly fast casuals (Anthony’s Coal Fire, Freddy’s, Habit Burger, CPK, Chili’s and TGIFriday’s I’m looking at you!) and, of course, dinners at our own NYC Branded restaurants. But seriously, how many times can I post our own dishes before someone stages an intervention?
Ok Julie. We get it. You think you started Instagram. You were too early for that. Then you missed your opportunity to become a food blogger. What’s your point?
I was listening to my second favorite podcast this afternoon (The Hospitality Hangout is obviously first), How I Built This, with guest Ben Leventhal, the founder of Eater, Resy and now Blackbird Labs. (Don’t miss his episode when he was our guest on The Hospitality Hangout!!) But, on HIBT, he talked about how the name Eater was chosen because it was the simplest, least snooty way to describe a restaurant diner. When he created Eater, he didn’t proclaim himself a food critic. He didn’t want to write reviews because he respected the art of journalism and the critics (LOVE this). And he didn’t want to post food photos because everyone was already doing that. Well... everyone except me, apparently. Missed opportunity, remember?
I was an early Eater reader, and I still am today. It gave you the facts. It told you what was opening, what was closing, where people were going and what was happening in restaurants. Hearing Ben talk about this, I paused the episode and began to type this POV. First thing that I wrote down…Could an Eater even be created today? More importantly, in a world where everyone with a phone can create content, how do we know who actually has influence?
I wrote last week about how “phones eat first,” complete with a silly AI image of me standing on a table photographing my food. We are drowning in restaurant content. TikTok videos. Instagram Reels. Google photos. Yelp photos. Influencer reviews. “Hidden gems” that somehow have 4,000 people standing in line outside. One creator tells you it’s the best pasta they’ve ever eaten, another tells you it’s completely overrated, and a third is mostly concerned with whether the mozzarella pull lasted long enough for the video.
There is a real hospitality question underneath all of this. When does an influencer bring someone INTO a restaurant, and when do they inadvertently send someone away? And when you have the power to influence where someone spends their money, what responsibility comes with the content you create?
In my restaurant marketing days, I personally responded to every single dang review across Yelp, Google, Rewards Network, OpenTable and more. (Yext had just started, Marqii wasn’t around yet and Google’s amazing new features didn’t exist.) I actually LOVED seeing food photos in reviews for two reasons. First, they were a secret quality-control tool. Did the burger at our UWS location look the same as the burger at our UES location? Is that really a blown lightbulb in the background that the MOD didn’t catch? Is that ketchup…on pasta??? You could learn A LOT from a guest photo.
But then there was the other side. Guests would completely rearrange a dish because they thought it would make a better photo. They’d move ingredients, change the plating, add something, remove something, find better lighting and essentially art-direct a dish into something our chef never intended it to be. Then another customer would see that photo, come into the restaurant, order the dish and say, “Mine doesn’t look like the picture.” Except the picture wasn’t ours.
That distinction has only gotten blurrier. Today, a restaurant’s digital identity isn’t controlled by the restaurant. It’s controlled by thousands of people carrying phones. The restaurant can spend months developing a dish, testing the plating, hiring a photographer, creating beautiful brand imagery and telling its story exactly the way it wants it told. Then someone with 62 followers, bad lighting and a table next to the bathroom posts a photo, and THAT might be the image a potential customer sees before deciding whether or not to make a reservation.
On the flip side, that same person with 62 followers might post the perfect video at the perfect moment, send it to a friend, who sends it to another friend, and suddenly Saturday night is booked. That’s the funny thing about influence today... I’m not sure follower count is even the right way to measure it anymore. Sometimes the person who influences your decision most isn’t an “influencer” at all. It’s the person you trust. Which brings me back to Julzie.com.
For years, I’ve joked that I missed my opportunity (and now I’m sharing it with you). I was too early for social media. I was standing behind the camera while my best friend became an influencer. I spent my restaurant marketing days on the other side, watching guests, bloggers, reviewers and eventually influencers change how restaurants were discovered and perceived.
Fast forward to almost 7 years ago. Another medium was quietly starting to explode. And this time, I (and by I, I mean we/Branded) showed up at the right moment. Podcasting.
We weren’t the first podcasters. We weren’t so early that no one knew what the heck we were doing. And we didn’t arrive after everyone else had already figured it out. We were, somehow, right on time. And while I’m not the “talent” (although if you’ve listened to The Hospitality Hangout lately, you know I have become increasingly difficult to keep off the microphone), I am incredibly proud to be the producer.
And now we cue the full-circle moment and cheesy music.
The girl who built Julzie.com so her friends could see and comment on photos is now producing conversations for hundreds of thousands of people. The girl behind the camera taking outfit photos of an early fashion influencer now gets to sit across from some of the earliest food creators and ask how they built their audiences. The restaurant marketer obsessively checking guest photos on Yelp now gets to ask restaurant operators what happens when one TikTok, Reel, review or creator can change traffic overnight.
Maybe I wasn’t too early. Maybe I didn’t miss the opportunity. Maybe I was just watching the creator economy from a whole bunch of different seats before finally figuring out which seat was mine. (Pun intended!)
We spend so much time worrying that we’re too early, too late or that someone else already got there first. But being early only matters if you know what to do with it. Being late only matters if you decide there’s no room left. In my case, the “thing” I thought I missed out on was just preparing me for the next version of it.
So no, I never became a food influencer.
But the girl behind Julzie.com did eventually figure out how to create content for a living.
It just took her 25 years to realize she was doing it the whole time.
And yes, there are still Red Solo cups in the photos.
(Only now I’m old enough to admit they’re not filled with “water”).
