From zero to 6 million views in 8 weeks 🚀

How we jump-started Parsnip's growth using social media

Hi, I’m Max! I recently joined the team at Parsnip to help drive growth and marketing for the business. I’m also a food content creator on social media¹, helping others to learn to cook and love their food! I’ve been cooking for as long as I can remember, helping my mum in the kitchen with meals for our family since I was just 3 years old. My dad was a chef his whole life, creating an initial inspiration in me that blossomed into a lifelong passion.

I’ve been creating content on social media for 5 years, sharing quick, tasty and healthy recipes. During that time, I’ve built a loyal community of over 3 million followers, achieved almost a billion views, worked with numerous global brands on marketing campaigns, and am just about to publish a cookbook that’s due to launch in 2026.

A few months ago, I took on the challenge of building Parsnip’s marketing from scratch.

Parsnip’s mission is to make cooking the fastest, easiest, healthiest and most joyful way to eat, every single day. Before I joined, though, we lacked a scalable growth plan or a clear content strategy, and hadn’t figured out how to reach our target audience in a repeatable way. It’s my job to change all of that!

Things are going quite well so far, and I’d like to share some strategies from building both my own social media channels as well as Parsnip’s, both from scratch. We can boil this approach down to three core ideas. First, craft the right strategy to execute. Second, experiment relentlessly with tactics. And finally, execute with consistency.

🎯 Step One: Craft the Right Strategy

Before creating anything, we needed to answer some critical questions:

• Who exactly are we trying to reach?

• Where do they spend their attention?

• What type of content will actually resonate with them?

The answer to the first question is something we had known for a while: beginner and intermediate home cooks. Because of how our society has undervalued cooking education over many decades, there are millions—literally—of people all over the world who want to cook at home regularly, but find it confusing, intimidating, or laborious. It’s why @mealswithmax resonates with so many people, and it’s why users are so willing to download and try Parsnip. It’s hard to overstate just how many people want to get better at cooking and want it to feel simple and achievable.

The second question was also clear: social media. As a creator, I constantly see the many ways that food content is widely shared and viewed on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. In fact, food-related products are probably more suited for social media distribution than almost anything else, so we have the best chance of meeting our users there. This broad consumption of food content also gives us a special advantage in creating viral or “hit” posts.

This sows the seeds of a powerful strategy: if we can create content on social media that speaks powerfully to our target audience and harnesses the potential virality of food content, we can gain new users repeatedly, scalably, and affordably. As our social channels grow over time, this user acquisition strategy will compound exponentially. Eventually, if we’re able to consistently create viral content and combine this with referral features within Parsnip itself, we’ll be able to reach product-led growth with close to 0 CAC and build our user base organically — without spending a penny on paid ads!

⚗️ Step Two: Experiment Relentlessly

From my experience with food-related social media content, I came in with a good general idea of what content would perform well and allow us to reach the audience we’re aiming for. But even with this head start, there are still many experiments ahead. It’s hard to predict exactly what kind of content your audience will respond to—you really can’t know until you try it. For better or worse, the performance of your content is determined by the algorithm via engagement metrics: likes, comments, shares, and watching videos all the way through. Posts with high engagement indicate that they’re resonating with a particular audience, and the platforms will push the content further (usually toward this audience) which increases the chance of it going viral and in turn reaching even more people.

There are many gimmicks to creating attention on social media, but we believe that the best ways to do so—that are also consistent with Parsnip’s brand—are to evoke positive emotion and provide value. Viewers appreciate feeling happy, inspired, curious, or a sense of belonging. For Parsnip, providing this value by sharing quick and easy recipes with useful cooking tips also previews the greater experience of the app itself. In the best case, our content is both entertaining and educational, “delicious and nutritious”, in a wholesome way. For beginner cooks, our content speaks to them in a way that invites them into the kitchen and inspires them to cook.

We experimented with a few core approaches at the start: face-to-camera videos talking about our mission, quick cooking tips, and recipe videos. We didn’t know what would perform best, but the feedback loop of social media would quickly tell us through metrics for reach, comments, and engagement. In my experience, it’s best to experiment with different content approaches for at least a few weeks to have a good understanding of what’s working and what isn’t, and avoid idiosyncratic results skewing the data.

After a few weeks of testing, the results were clear: Simple recipe videos and cooking tips massively outperformed everything else. They were shareable, easy to follow, and delivered genuine value quickly. Not only that, recipe content and cooking tips gave our audience an amuse bouche of Parsnip before downloading, and dovetails with in-app content that we’re producing anyway.

We decided to take these experiments a step further by combining both recipes and cooking tips together into the same videos—and saw our views and engagement increase even further. This result is consistent with the principle of providing value to users: a single value with a recipe and many useful cooking tips creates a ton of value for our audience, and the views on our posts backed that up. So, we took this approach and ran with it.

📈 Step Three: Execute Consistently

We launched new accounts on all major platforms—TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube — and started posting consistently. Currently, we post at least 4 videos per week onto each of our social media accounts: at least 16 videos per week in total. As our team and resources expand in the future, we’ll aim to increase this to at least 7 videos per platform, or 28 total videos per week. Eventually, our goal is to post twice per day, on each platform, with every single video providing quality content and value to the audience. By spreading out our content across different food interest areas, we’ll increase our reach; and by finding the content that resonates most with our ideal customer, we’ll be able to double down and bring more of them to Parsnip.

As we don’t have the resources to make that much content yet, our approach is to post as much as we’re able to without sacrificing quality. If we overstretched ourselves with 10 pieces of content per week, it would not only be unsustainable, but content quality will suffer and thus hinder our progress and growth. It’s better to create 4 pieces of content a week that we can maintain consistently, with each video of the same quality.

With this approach here’s what happened in just 8 weeks:

That’s 5,984,000 total views and 16,260 new followers — all from organic content, and without spending a penny on paid ads.

Our Facebook metrics last month.

Initially, TikTok was our top performing platform. Surprisingly, however, Facebook became our top performer over the past 4 weeks. TikTok is notorious for having great reach (and it’s known to boost new accounts), whereas Facebook usually takes a little more time to build credibility before the algorithm starts to push your posts. However, we were able drive over 1.7M views in November on Facebook alone.

This reiterates some great news for any company working on their social media strategy: it actually doesn’t matter how many followers you have! The algorithmic feedback loop on social media means that even new accounts can get hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of views in their first few posts! The reach of your content isn’t determined by your following—it’s determined by quality and the value you provide.

Facebook views as we posted videos over the month of October.

🚀 The Upshot for Parsnip

While it certainly feels great to get millions of views, it’s all meaningless if they don’t result in clickthroughs, new users, new paying customers, or other business goals. In our case, where our goal is to bring on new users, it’s far better to get 10,000 views from our target audience and that convert to 100 new users, than to get 100,000 views in a month from the wrong audience and that only bring in 10 new users. This is why it’s critical to create content that speaks to, and is valuable to, your ideal customer—not simply content that is made to go viral without any clear value or purpose. Hence, we regularly monitor which of our new users are attributable to social media views. If our content produces many views without attracting new users, we would need to adjust our content strategy and targeting.

For us, the growth wasn’t just vanity metrics: it translated into real traction. Before the marketing began, we were adding around 600 new users every 8 weeks. Since launching our new content strategy, we’ve added over 3,900 users in the same time frame: a 550% increase.

This kind of growth changed the energy in our team in a way we could feel. With so many new users coming in, we saw their pain points more clearly in our research, our product team felt the urgency, ideas flowed more freely, and everyone’s a little more fired up. We experienced how “momentum is the oxygen of a startup”. The influx of new users reminded us of the potential of Parsnip, created focus within our team, and sharpened how we prioritized new user experience and product improvements.

Weekly new installs over the last 6 months.

💰 A Nice Bonus: Monetisation

Recently, Facebook approved us for monetisation, meaning every video we post now generates revenue.

In the first month, we made $166. That might sound small, but it’s compounding. Based on performance, we’re already trending towards $300–$1,000/month from Facebook alone.

Once TikTok unlocks monetisation at 10,000 followers, that will create another small but steady stream. It’s still early, but these are meaningful signals that our content strategy is working, with every dollar from content being something we can reinvest into improving the product and user experience.

If you’re an early-stage startup, especially one with a product or mission that resonates with a large consumer audience, there are some clear advantages to this type of social media strategy. Even if you’re pre-launch or pre-revenue, one of the most impactful outcomes can be to build a community that can shape your product while it’s in development, with whom you can build trust, and finally launch your product to once it’s ready. Any revenue that’s generated by your content itself is just the cherry on top 🍒.

🧭 What’s Next

Our social media efforts strengthen our conviction about just how many people want to get better at cooking. In our next chapter, we’ll focus on deepening connection and scaling community, which means:

• Continuing our momentum on social media

• Experimenting with in-person events to meet our community face-to-face — especially to understand how to make Parsnip better for them

• Improving the app experience with video and AI-powered learning, so that engagement and retention can leverage our potential for growth

• Exploring creator and brand partnerships that align with our mission

We’ll continue to test and build in public, and share what we learn with you — not just about what grows Parsnip, but about how modern consumer apps can build trust with their audiences, and how to turn social media into a consistent GTM engine.

🌱 What We’ve Learned

1. Speed beats perfection. You don’t find what works by planning — you find it by testing.

2. Clarity wins. You don’t need a highly produced video to reach your audience, and in the world of vertical videos, viewers actually prefer content that’s more approachable.

3. Build on momentum. Double down once something starts working and focus your resources on it.

4. Monetisation follows community. Build trust first, revenue second.

We’re still early, but the direction is clear. When you create genuinely helpful content and show up consistently, growth follows!

Thanks for reading! We’ll keep sharing our journey—transparently—as we build Parsnip into the most fun way to learn to cook.

If you’re a creator, brand, or investor interested in what we’re doing, reach out — we’re always up for a chat.

1. @mealswithmax on Tiktok, Instagram, and Facebook!