It’s no secret that the Coronavirus pandemic dramatically impacted countless industries. For Danielle Lemieux, an event planner by trade, business came to a complete stop. But thanks to Danielle’s favorite hobby, this moment provided an opportunity to pivot in a completely new direction.
When the pandemic hit Berlin, like so many cities around the world, all in-person events were cancelled indefinitely, which meant that Danielle’s event planning business was also shut down completely. Luckily, for the past few years, Danielle has been nurturing a love for a different activity entirely: baking sourdough bread. As the world was turned upside down, Danielle and her longtime partner, a professional videographer and editor, saw the chance to start a new project.
“When Coronavirus happened, I realized that I was suddenly going to have a lot more time on my hands and my partner and I thought that we could create a little YouTube series to share some information.”
And just like that, the idea for Bread in Captivity was born. Armed with her trusty sourdough starter, Crummy, Danielle filmed the first episode about all the basics of sourdough. After the episode was posted, however, Danielle started to hear from friends and family locally and around the world with questions about all things sourdough. She realized that there was potential to reach a wider audience with her baking expertise. But in order to maximize her reach, she’d need some help, which is where Fiverr came in.
“Through Fiverr I was able to connect with real experts in such a wide variety of fields. I needed a website so zurichexpat created a Squarespace that has all kinds of functionalities that I would have never been able to build into it. We had a Seller named trippiesteff create an animation of me, kneading dough. Another Seller, zimamedia, created an SEO strategy to help the site rank better on Google.” To finish it off, Danielle worked with themaritimer to subtitle the video and then had Seller patrickcharlie translate to German in order to connect with a wider audience.
With all the work that Danielle did to create the foundation for a high-performing YouTube series, she wanted to make sure there were still unique, personal touches. In the first episode of Bread in Captivity, Danielle’s partner Shawn captured her humming without realizing. Working with Seller uri_avi, Danielle was able to take the tune of her subconscious humming and turn it into a fully-orchestrated, upbeat musical soundtrack for future episodes.
Now, with all these enhancements in place, Bread in Captivity, has seen a 75% increase in views and an 85% increase in subscribers.
“My first advice to somebody who’s made the shift to online is to just get started. You’re not an expert in everything, so sometimes it’s better to delegate those tasks to other people. Creating this channel has been an amazing way for me to connect with bread lovers and bread bakers all over the world and the Sellers that I connected with on Fiverr helped me to grow that community even more.”
