Tim Laielli, 1.4 Million Followers, and Next Level Chef. Does He Call Himself a Chef? Ep. 222

Tim Laielli will not call himself a chef. He is clear about it every time someone assumes otherwise, including his own father, who is one. Eighteen months after posting his first cooking video, Tim was on set cooking against professional chefs for Gordon Ramsay on Next Level Chef.He built Bare Food Tim, over a million followers, without ever working a line, and he explains exactly why. His father worked two jobs his whole childhood and told him constantly not to follow him into restaurants. Tim listened, then found a way to work with food anyway.Three things worth hearing straight from him. Why he thinks most chefs make content for other chefs instead of the person actually watching, which is usually a tired parent looking for dinner ideas, not a technique lesson. The real numbers behind brand deal income, and why capping sponsored content around 10 to 20 percent is the difference between monetizing and losing your audience's trust. And the two paths he tells struggling restaurants to choose between when they want to go viral, an oversized showstopper dish or full personality driven content, because trying to do both at once usually does neither well.Andre Natera and Tim Laielli also get into the friction between chefs and content creators, why lighting matters more than the camera you shoot on, which dishes reliably perform online and which never do, and the moment Tim realized the platform had started driving him instead of the other way around.It ends where every episode ends, with the Mount Rushmore.GuestBare Food Tim on Instagram : https://www.instagram.com/barefoodtim/LinksLead Like a Chef App: https://studio.com/apps/andre/leadlikeachefGet the Books: https://chefspsa.com/booksShop Chef's PSA Merch: https://shop.chefspsa.com/Get Episodes Early on Substack: https://chefspsa.substack.com/Follow Chef's PSA on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chefspsa/