Episode 822: How Jess Smith Gained 30,000 Instagram Followers Using Trial Reels With Jess Smith

EBT 822 – How Jess Smith Gained 30,000 Instagram Followers Using Trial Reels

Megan Porta (00:01.136)
Hello Jess, welcome back to the podcast. How have you been?

Jess (00:05.162)
I’ve been great. It’s good to see you.

Megan Porta (00:06.972)
My gosh, it’s so good to see you again. And now you’re overseas and you’re enjoying that life with your family and it’s just been so much fun to see that adventure from Instagram. So thank you for sharing that with all of us.

Jess (00:19.082)
Yeah, you’re welcome. My gosh, yeah, it’s been a fun adventure. It’s fun it’s good inspiration to suddenly move to France. You have so many things to share, you know.

Megan Porta (00:24.553)
Absolutely so fun. Well, if people don’t know you, just give them a little rundown. Who are you? What do you do? What’s your blog? All of that.

Jess (00:34.274)
Yes, so I’m Jess Smith. I started food my food blog Inquiring Chef in 2010. And since then I have done that kind of on and off along with other things food related. so I worked for a meal planning company in the midst of it, and then the food blog has continued to grow. I wrote a cookbook in 2025, and then the food blog was doing so well that we decided to, as you mentioned, pick up our family of five and move to France, which has been a dream of ours.

and so yeah, so now I share all of my adventures in France on Instagram and I have learned so much in the course of that. So yeah, it’s been great, and it all was because of the food blog. It brought us here.

Megan Porta (01:17.863)
My gosh. Isn’t it great the amazing things our food blogs can bring us in our lives? And like it’s good to just stop sometimes and see that and remember instead of getting caught up in the hamster wheel like it’s so easy to do. So thank you for that reminder. Yeah. Yeah. We do.

Jess (01:32.512)
I know. And I feel like we do, we put our heads down and we work so you know, we work we’ve worked on these for years and then yeah, it’s so neat to be able to live this creative life and do this thing that we that we love. We all have common. Right.

Megan Porta (01:42.391)
I know, I know. Gosh, I love that. And I love that for you guys. So you have really dug into Instagram lately. I follow you and I just absolutely absolutely love your account. It’s fun to see your adventures, but it’s also fun to just to see how you’re growing and all the new things you’re trying. So when did you start really digging into Instagram and kind of like what prompted you to do that?

Jess (02:06.744)
I mean, Megan, the real truth is that I was like, I have to find a creative outlet and B a way to grow my business because we moved to France with five suitcases. So because we didn’t know how long we would be here. So we put everything in storage. I have none of my photography supplies. I have nothing I need to shoot recipe photos. Yeah. So that’s been a real shift. And it’s and

Megan Porta (02:25.602)
Wow.

Jess (02:31.68)
I knew that when it was happening. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bring that with me, but I just I felt like there would be something out there that I would want to explore. and that for me has become Instagram. And I just have last January, so we’re about 10 months in, we settled down in France, the kids were in school, I started really playing around with how I could produce different types of content, share more about my life instead of about food and recipes, though there’s still a lot of food in there. But it’s kind of been this evolution. And so

People who are following me now since last January are kind of watching this journey of me sort of figuring out what the next thing is and learning Instagram as I go. And honestly, it’s been really, really fun. It’s taken this thing that I dreaded and turned it into a creative outlet that I really love. So

Megan Porta (03:14.66)
Yeah, that okay, for me too, like a year ago I would have told you I absolutely hate, loathe, dread anything relating to social media. It was just such a burden for so many years. And I actually ignored my Instagram account for probably six years, just putting up the bare minimum, like one static post a week, something like that. And now it has just become, like you said, this great creative outlet.

I can’t imagine my life without it at this point. It’s just been so fun to dig into reels. So I’m kind of there with you, just really enjoying the adventure. And so I’m really excited to learn from you today because we’re gonna talk mostly about the way you’ve really leaned into trial reels, correct?

Jess (03:59.587)
Yes. So trial reels have been at the heart of what I have been doing. And I think that they have helped me in two ways. One is they really have helped me grow my account. So my account has grown by about 30,000 followers since last January. So in about 10 months. Yeah, and most of it has been trial reels. But I also think that they have helped me to branch out and be a little bit more brave on the platform, which has made it a lot more fun. I think as food content creators, we’re so

Megan Porta (04:13.04)
Amazing.

Jess (04:26.356)
used to having control of the entire narrative on our sites. We edit our photos, we make these beautiful pieces of content to share with the world. And Instagram is different. I mean, Instagram is it can be very polished, but it also can be a space where you are things are a little less polished. And I think as soon as I leaned into that, I started enjoying it more. And then I saw a lot of growth.

Megan Porta (04:47.268)
Yeah. Well that’s great. And then you follow the data, right? Where you’re seeing growth, you keep going. And then for anyone who doesn’t know what trial reels are or they don’t use them, will you just kind of describe what they are quickly?

Jess (04:50.796)
Okay.

Jess (04:57.826)
Yes, so I’m pretty sure everyone in your audience should have access to trial reels. And they’re getting talked about a lot, but I think many people like me at first kept hearing this term and was like unclear about how it could actually be put to tandem. Yeah, I we’ve all heard it. We’ve been Exactly, exactly. But I really trial reels are a way to test reels to non-followers only so they don’t show up in your feed.

Megan Porta (05:09.71)
Yeah. Like what is it? Okay, yeah. Yeah.

Jess (05:23.206)
And you can send out about the mark is up is constantly changing, but it’s around 10. You could test out 10 reels to your trial reels every day, and they will only be shown to non-followers and they could live forever behind the scenes in trial reels, or you can choose to then share them out to your followers where they should where they’ll show up on your feed. And people that see them on your feed will never know that they were trial reels.

Megan Porta (05:45.455)
Yeah. so when you’re it’s like publishing a regular reel, except there’s one little click that you tap that just says this is going to be a trial reel. And that’s literally all you have to do. So there’s no like you don’t have to publish it anywhere weird. It’s like right in the same dashboard.

Jess (05:55.937)
Exactly.

Jess (06:03.886)
And every now I have gotten in the habit of putting every single reel, even if I know it’s a reel. Like this week I’ve been promoting a course that I’m teaching on trial reels. And even the reels that I knew I would share to everybody because they’re about this course, I put them in trial reels first. Because sometimes you can see, even if you just share two versions, you can see, okay, this one just resonated more with people and got more traffic. And that’s the one I share to my feed. So they’re useful in so many different ways.

Like you said, the only difference is that you’re flipping a tiny switch at the bottom right before you post that says only send this to non. It says this is a trial reel, only send it to non-followers.

Megan Porta (06:41.232)
All right, I have a million questions. I don’t know where to start. So what let’s because I want to get into the nitty-gritty and ask you a few questions about how you go through the process. You mentioned your course that you’re doing. I just want you to mention that really quick and then we’ll revisit that at the end. But just in case anyone is really wanting to learn, you have something called the Reels Lab. Just talk about that really quick.

Jess (07:03.188)
Yes. So I just launched the Reels Lab. Over the summer, I put everything that I had learned into a guide, just a printable. And it just felt like it was something that needed to be more hands-on so that you could work through it as you go. Because the thing about trial reels, if you want them to help your account grow, you do need to have a system. I think what happens is a lot of us just kind of throw things up there. We’re using our same system that we use to post our other reels that isn’t helping our account grow. We’re not trying new things. And so that can just kind of keep us in this endless loop.

And they and they’re not effective in that way. So over the summer, I worked one-on-one with some other creators and I created this guide. And it was so inspiring, and it was great to work with all of these creators one-on-one. And then I discovered really what the biggest kind of pain points are for creators. And I put it all into a course called the Reels Lab. So the course is we’ll launch in cohorts. There’s a cohort launching this just coming up, but then we’ll launch another cohort probably in about a month so that.

And it’s self paced, but I just like to be available. You know me well enough to know I like to be able to be available as people are taking it. So

Megan Porta (08:06.052)
Yeah. Right. Okay, so cool. And we’ll talk about at the end, like where people can find more information on that. I have a question for you because I hear this all the time from people, even food creators who are have like tons of followers. just the fact that trial reels don’t work. So then there have been times throughout the year where I’ve just stopped doing them because I’ve heard this and then

I’m like, wait a second, when I’m doing trial reels, I’m actually growing my account like it flourishes. So I’m like, wait a second, it doesn’t seem to be true. So what is that all about? Why are people thinking that it doesn’t work? Does it work? Does it not work for some people?

Jess (08:53.518)
I genuinely believe that it can work for everyone. I think it just has to be approached strategically, just like everything else that we do to grow our business. So, what I’m finding with trial reels is that you have to approach them with a little bit of a different mindset than the way you post the way you post all the other things that you put in your feed. So, people who are looking at content in our feed, they’re already our people. So we are posting trust content there. We’re building trust in an existing audience.

Trial reels are going out to people who have no clue who we are. So they, they’re not gonna, we know how fast people scroll. They’re not gonna take the time to learn the backstory that will give them the information they need to watch the video. And the same thing with food. You know, you can post a beautiful polished reel to your feed that shows how a recipe is made, and your followers will say, you know, I know this person, I know her recipes are great, I know I like her reels, I’ll stay through the end.

But if it’s being shown to a non-follower who has no idea who you are, it has to grab them a lot faster. So I think that key difference in how you approach them can really be the difference between effective growth and not seeing effective growth through trial reels.

Megan Porta (10:06.264)
Okay, so what is the appro is it just a matter of like nailing the hook and getting people in and then getting them to continue to watch, or how do you approach it differently?

Jess (10:15.31)
Yeah. So I do think there’s a couple of things. And these are these are things that we know about all of our reels, but they’re just so much more important with trial reels because again, you’re trying to grab someone out of the ether of the Instagram system. So yes, you need to have you do need to have a hook. You need to have a reel that moves much more quickly than you might be used to. So the trial reels that I see that work really well in the creators that I worked with and in my own account.

Megan Porta (10:27.384)
Yeah.

Jess (10:42.456)
They move fast, like all of the clips are under a second. There’s no lag time. And then they they move fast. Sorry, they move fast, they have a good hook, and they’re shorter. They’re shorter. So it’s not that a long reel couldn’t take off in trial reels, of course it could, but to the ones that have the most success overall are ones that move fast, they have a good hook, and they are shorter. And so what I’m seeing a lot, and what I teach in my course is that.

It’s really important to not just make one reel, put it in trial reels and see what happens. The way that they’re really effective is if you can make small changes to one reel, especially hook focusing on the hook and the length, and then post multiple versions to trial reels. And you can post them all at the same time and you can watch them run side by side. And actually it’s a really good experiment to see what it is that’s bringing new people into your account.

Megan Porta (11:33.988)
Yeah. And then how typically how many real trial reels per experiment do you run or does it just vary?

Jess (11:42.587)
It totally varies. So what I teach in my course is a system that uses five trial reels per idea, per concept. This is not a hard and fast rule. This is just kind of what I’ve seen work. So what I teach people to do is take one sort of pre-edited, very trimmed down reel, and it’s just video at that point. And then I put the we put it in their editing app and I have everyone use the edits app by Instagram because it already has the trending audio.

Megan Porta (11:49.434)
Okay.

Jess (12:09.986)
So once you have that in edits, you make five copies and you move around the key things that someone will see mostly at the beginning. So you change the hook for each of the five, and then you get you make them progressively shorter. So by the time you get to the end, you have ideally about a seven-second version of your reel. So then so in an ideal world, you’re posting five versions, you’re making them shorter as you go. The last one is seven seconds long, and in each of those five versions, there’s a few other variables that you’ve tested.

Megan Porta (12:26.512)
Okay.

Jess (12:38.232)
So it could be that you try voiceover for one, it could be that you try different music for each. The captions I don’t find matter as much, so I tend to just use the same caption across all of them. So all I’m really playing with is the video itself.

Megan Porta (12:49.69)
Okay. And then you see something that maybe rises above the rest and then do you turn that into a reel on your home feed or do you redo it and then publish it as a regular reel?

So you can do either one. I tend to just take the winning one. And if I feel like it represents my my brand, so it’s something that I want to become trust content to my existing audience, then I just hit share to everyone and it moves into my feed. And I love this too because it’s a great way to have sort of a backlog of content that you can share to your feed, you know, when you’re busy, you know, you don’t you don’t have time to make new content. So I love doing it that way. I have had clients who take the winning reel.

Megan Porta (13:20.407)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Jess (13:31.021)
And they go in and they take that winning reel and they look at their retention chart. So there’s a chart in Instagram that says how long people watched. They find where people dropped off and they remake the reel to address wherever people dropped off within it. And I think that’s a really good strategy too. So if you want to get really scientific and in the weeds about it, you really can just keep iterating until you find the winner, which we never had the ability to do before. We just posted a reel and if it did great, it did great. If not, then not, you know.

Megan Porta (13:52.825)
Right.

Megan Porta (13:59.461)
Yeah. Right. Yeah. And I can’t imagine that takes a whole lot of time. Like if you do the strategy you just talked about where you’re like, okay, we’re at the retention fall, just changing it up a little bit, it’s like a few minutes of work. So it’s not like this is a an hour long investment of time. And doing the trial reels, speaking of time investment, how long does that take you to do initially? And have you gotten it shorter?

Jess (14:25.72)
So I am now really fast with it. And that’s partly what I teach in the course because some of our fellow creators, I never was very good at making these beautiful reels with lots of effects and lots of different fonts and things. I never really did that. But some of our fellow creators make these gorgeous reels that take a long time. And I would say they should keep doing that. I mean, if that’s working for their account, those beautiful reels, I adore them. So

Megan Porta (14:27.983)
Nice.

Jess (14:51.406)
For me, I think that trial reels is something that you should be able to do in like 30 minutes a day. So, and you could take an old reel that did well or an old reel that didn’t do well that you already have the content for and you think it should do better and spend 30 minutes, pull that video in, make those quick changes, post them and move on with your life. And I think that’s also part of the value is since we don’t know what’s going to do well, we can learn and improve. It’s so nice to do them fast and then not feel like you’ve invested a half a day’s worth of time in a reel that may

not find new people for you.

Megan Porta (15:23.876)
And I think that’s one of the great things about trial reels is that you can experiment with put throwing a reel together very quickly and putting it up and just seeing what happens. Like you said, there are some people who just put so much time into it, which is great. Like if that works for your account and you have one of those really aesthetic, like beautiful, dreamy accounts, that’s awesome. Keep doing it. But also consider maybe doing a lesser time investment.

version and just see what happens. It might do really well, right?

Jess (15:56.035)
Yes. And if it’s converting followers, then you’re doing something right. It’s you know, they’ve and Megan, the thing is, I was like, I will never turn my phone around and talk to the camera. Like that’s just not me. But I think once I found trial reels, now I do it all the time. And I’ll be I I will literally be walking down the street and I’ll think of something and I will hold my camera up and record myself and I’ll just put it in trial reels. And then if I look back later and I’m like, that wasn’t for me. But then actually a lot of times they end up getting a lot of comments, people like the authenticity. And so now you see more and more of those in my feed because I think I’ve just adapted to that style and I don’t mind it anymore, you know.

Megan Porta (16:29.082)
Yeah, that’s amazing.

Megan Porta (16:33.552)
Right. It seems like less pressure when you know they’re going out to people who don’t know you. Like, might as well just put this out. Yeah, exactly. My son is now on Instagram. So gosh. Yeah, I have to be careful sometimes because he’ll be like, Mom, I saw blah, blah, blah. Did you think that would do well? I’m like, so now I have his critiquing. So yeah, like just putting it somewhere where the people you know can’t see it.

Jess (16:38.138)
It is your neighbor’s not gonna comment on it or child’s teacher. Yeah. No it

Jess (17:02.67)
Well yeah, because then by the time you share it, you’re like, Look, if you shared a trial reel that already got a ton of views, you’re like, I knew it would do well.

Megan Porta (17:07.63)
I know, see, yeah. So talk about those reels where you do just talk to the camera. What do you talk about? Like what are the most successful ones that you’ve done? What is kind of the subject, I guess?

Jess (17:20.576)
Megan, I just had a reel that got, I think, 25,000 views and a ton of engagement. And I talked about what I put in my purse. Yes. Which is not like the thing that I normally talk about. So you know, I think again, I think that’s the journey that I have come on with Instagram that has been really freeing is realizing that it’s okay to just talk to it like you’re talking to a friend. And you can build community in that way.

Megan Porta (17:28.217)
wow. So interesting. Yeah.

Jess (17:50.003)
And it just involves making yourself, you know, you have to feel a little bit vulnerable and you also have to throw things up that like don’t necessarily feel like they’re going to do well like that. I mean, I think there was just like a personal connection. I do a lot of content about life in France and how it’s different than the life in the US. And those always get pretty good engagement too. but I also now post things about like meals that we’re eating and

Megan Porta (18:04.016)
Mm.

Jess (18:19.406)
a cooking store in Paris. There’s that 200 year old cooking store that did really well for me. So I’m still kind of trying to follow the path of food content and cooking content, but I’m straying from that a lot too. And that seems to be doing okay.

Megan Porta (18:30.404)
Yeah.

Okay. So in trial reels you are experimenting with content outside of food. Are you converting those into your regular feed too? And if so, how do they do?

Jess (18:45.568)
In the beginning, I wasn’t. So in the beginning, my trial reel reels, trial reels were all sort of repurposing old recipe content, which has been great. And I still am doing some of that in trial reels that don’t show up in my feed. Because for those of us who have tried to make recipe videos, it’s so time-consuming. And I have a backlog of videos that I’m realizing I can go in and repurpose, move things around and make them into new trial reels. So I’ve been trying to do that as well. So

Yeah, a lot of a lot at the beginning what was happening in trial reels was just recipe content. But now I’m kind of sharing almost everything to my feed. If it does well in trial reels, it ends up on my feed. And I think it’s kind of helped to transform my account to be more personal, more of a lifestyle kind of personal account. Yeah.

Megan Porta (19:32.721)
Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, because that’s really refreshing. For a while it was like very recently too. You need to find a super hyper focused, crazy specific niche, and then you need to stick with that. But I think I don’t think that’s necessarily true. I love that you’re veering off a little bit and that some other reels are working well for you. That’s really refreshing.

Jess (19:59.865)
Again, I just sent just today, I sent an email out that said, why I’ll never tell you to niche down. And I think in some ways I’m reacting to the food blogger space where we have been told that for years and years and years. And it makes sense, of course. If people know what you’re creating, it’s easy for them to find you and know what to expect. And of course, with search, niching down makes sense. I’m not sure it’s as important on social media where you can present yourself as a whole person.

Megan Porta (20:20.228)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jess (20:29.644)
with a variety of interests and not that there’s anything wrong with saying I’m a specific creator that creates this very specific thing, but I think you also can create a mix of content and people can understand that and people can follow the through line of that.

Megan Porta (20:45.774)
Yeah. No, I like to hear that. Maybe having I mean, we all kind of have a backbone why, you know, like who we are as a blogger and kind of what we do, what we create. So using that, but then like you said, be becoming or not becoming, but like showing your humanity too. Because I think people really appreciate that on social media right now. So just, Jess is a person. She has a family. They moved to France, you know, all of those things are

only helping you and they make you more interesting. So just embracing the other human moments in your life, I think, right? Yeah.

Jess (21:21.506)
Yes, yeah. I really think that’s true. And I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s directly related to sort of like I mean, we’re entering a world where there’s so much more AI. there’s so it’s hard to know what content is a real person sometimes. And I think on social media, if you are showing up as a real person, it lends this authenticity to everything that you’re doing that can be really valuable.

Megan Porta (21:37.391)
Yeah.

Megan Porta (21:47.429)
Yeah, absolutely. I know we’re seeing that more and more in every platform. Just blogging. People are going back to telling stories about their food and YouTube. It’s so important because people can see you actually creating and you’re not a robot. So yeah, that kind of aligns with all of the other things. I was gonna ask you about editing. So you use edits. I love edits. I feel like Instagram offered us this way to edit our video, so we might as well use it. And it’s great. I

Megan Porta (22:17.326)
I have no complaints about edits. I know pe some people are like, I don’t like it, but I love it. So you recommend that as a starting point?

Jess (22:26.059)
I do. And I do tell people if they the one thing that I hear from a lot of people is that they want a desktop version. I guess Instagram is talking about maybe having a desktop version at some point. I have strangely moved completely away from desktop editing. And I’ve done all the I did CapCut and InShot and VN and I feel like I’ve experimented a bunch, but I think edits is a really good tool. And again, I just I think simplicity can really help. So I think with the edits app,

It’s very easy to use the simplest tools. It’s easy to find fonts you like and save them and just find you keep using the ones that really feel like you. And it makes it so easy to just post directly to Instagram. So you’re taking out all of these pain points that happen when you’re editing in a different platform.

Megan Porta (23:12.24)
Totally. And like you said earlier, the trending music is built in. It’s just so handy to have everything there in one place. Like I was using InShot and InShot, my goodness, like the fonts were really limited. The music was horrible. So you would have to like export it and then do extra things to get it on Instagram. Like, why am I doing this? Gosh. Yeah.

Jess (23:36.73)
Yes, that was me too. I was like, I am making all these extra steps for myself when it’s right here. Yeah. I’ve been really happy with that. It’s a

Megan Porta (23:42.575)
Yeah. And yeah, same. And you can also I just what I do, I don’t know what you do with like other platforms, but I just remove the music and then I’ll use the same edit and just download it to my phone and then upload it to YouTube shorts. And then they’re really picky about music. So I’ll use different music there and then also kind of the same thing on TikTok. And it’s such an easy process. It takes me a few minutes to do this. Like

Okay, get it on Instagram, delete the music from edits, download, upload to TikTok, upload to YouTube shorts, and bam, it’s all done.

Jess (24:19.821)
That’s exactly what I do too. And I in my sort of recommended Trial Reels process, I always have at least one voiceover, which I know people feel different, you know, people don’t love voiceover, but I do think it’s another thing that if you practice, you can do it quite quick. And then I always immediately download the version that I made that has voiceover. And that’s the one we shared other platforms, so I don’t have to mess with them usually. And then the voiceover is running and the Trial Reels alongside other variations, but then my let then we can immediately like

Megan Porta (24:29.242)
Yeah.

Megan Porta (24:40.752)
that’s a good idea.

Right.

Jess (24:49.039)
upload everything to TikTok and YouTube and Facebook and yeah.

Megan Porta (24:52.324)
Yeah, perfect. Do you have any suggestions about editing, like I don’t know, simplifying editing, key points, things to make it quick or smooth?

Jess (25:04.355)
The best thing I did was I sat down one night and like watching TV and I just picked the fonts that I and I saved them. So in Edits app, you can go through and you can choose a few fonts and you can click on a save button and they go into a save file. So that every time you’re in there editing, instead of scrolling through all the fonts, you can just click what’s saved and you can reuse those. And I did the same thing with sounds and with text effects. So if I ever want to use an effect, I just limit myself to the ones that are already saved in the app.

Megan Porta (25:22.512)
Mm.

Jess (25:34.483)
instead of searching for a bunch of different options.

Megan Porta (25:36.996)
Yeah. Yeah, that makes it easy. And then for fonts, is there a font that you feel like does better for your account or does do you feel like fonts really make a difference?

Jess (25:49.009)
I don’t think they make a huge difference, but I do think that they’re very visually appealing. So I do spend, I do experiment with fonts and I do a mix of, so I have saved one script font and then two fonts that are really, really easy to read. Because I think it’s important when people first start your video that they can read, whether you have a hook or you have the title of the recipe or you have the explanation of where you are. I think it’s really important that they can read that right away.

Megan Porta (25:53.144)
Yeah. Mm-hmm.

Jess (26:17.113)
But then I do like having some other, you know, sometimes when I’m editing I’ll add other fonts that have a little more personality to them. I think that’s a key thing though. You have to readable, you know.

Megan Porta (26:25.486)
Right. The edits app. Yeah, that makes sense. Because if someone can’t read it, they’re probably gonna be like, Well, can’t read that. Yeah. Like, here’s my pet peeve. my I’m 51, so my eyes like are not the greatest at anymore. And I don’t always have glasses on. so when I’m looking at Instagram, if there’s a font that’s super tiny, I’m like, dude, there is no chance I am like

Jess (26:34.338)
Right.

Megan Porta (26:54.996)
literally zero chance I could ever read that. So I just scroll past it. Like I know it’s kind of the thing, like to make it really small. So people I don’t know if that’s in hopes of getting people to keep watching and read it. Like maybe I’ll catch it the next time it comes around. I don’t know. But for me it’s a point of frustration. So I always try to make it a at least big enough so that people can see what’s what’s happening.

Jess (27:18.197)
Yes, I totally agree. I don’t know. I feel like that is a strategy. Like you’re gonna have to really focus and so you’re gonna stay there trying to read that tiny I hate it too. I’m forty five. I don’t wanna mess around that. I think too you do have to sometimes put a contrast, you know, put white behind your text because if there’s too much activity behind it, it is important that people can read it. But there’s some strategy to like smaller fonts and letting them run through the through the entire I know, I but I I hear you.

Megan Porta (27:23.844)
Yeah.

Yeah

Megan Porta (27:34.181)
Yeah.

Right.

Megan Porta (27:41.602)
Right. I get it. I I get what people are probably thinking, but it’s yeah.

Jess (27:46.916)
But yeah, but that’s something too that I like to test. So like that’s a perfect thing to test in trial reels. So if you have a recipe video, I love to do one where I just say what the recipe is. Like that’s what the title is. And then the next one I might say, this is the one recipe everyone asks me for when they come over, you know, so that you’re doing something more traditionally hook, hooky.

Megan Porta (28:08.59)
Right. Hooky. Yeah. is there anything else that we need to know about trial reels? Anything we haven’t covered? Any juicy stuff you have for us?

Jess (28:20.173)
I just would encourage people to give another shot. I think early when there was a lot of buzz around them, a lot of people tried them and then they just it didn’t work right away and so they kind of moved away from them. But like I said, I’m just I’m hearing from creators at every stage in their Instagram journey that are seeing the seeing growth through trial reels. So yeah, I’d say give another try.

Megan Porta (28:43.832)
Yeah, they are definitely worth it. When I’m using them consistently, I notice it in my account. It’s like, I’m getting more followers, more engagement and all the things. and then when I’m not, just because of time or whatever, then I I notice that too. I’m like, things are really stagnant right now. So I think there is something to that and all of the experimenting you can do, like what you were saying, Jess, about put your face in the camera. You nobody’s gonna know you anyway, so you might as well and

Jess (29:12.495)
Try it.

Megan Porta (29:13.336)
Maybe talk about something just not completely off the wall, but something that lights you up that’s not related exactly to your whatever, vegan French fry niche or wh whatever it is. and just see what happens. But it’s a grounds for experimentation, which I love. Like what better way to experiment than trial reels, right?

Jess (29:25.515)
Right.

Jess (29:35.277)
Yes, one hundred percent. And just keep showing up. But I agree. It’s not that we all have to go on and bear our soul to the Instagram universe, but showing up is is I think it really helps. People can see that you’re a real person and they relate to that. So

Megan Porta (29:51.488)
I so appreciate you being here and just sharing your experience and I know like we’ve mentioned you’ve grown your account pretty hugely in the past ten months. So thank you for just being generous and giving us all the goods that you know.

Jess (30:06.605)
You’re so welcome. I love talking about it anytime. People can feel free to DM me. I love talking trial reels, so.

Megan Porta (30:12.738)
Amazing. Okay, so tell us where we can find information if people are like, okay, Jess is amazing. I want to learn more from her. I want to do the Reels Lab. Where do they sign up for this or get on the wait list?

Jess (30:22.423)
Yes. Please come do the Reels Lab. It is I am so excited. we have a really good group that will go through the course the first time and then I think we will open the doors again probably after this first round. So there is a wait list and I would love to have you join us for the next one. So you can find the wait list on my Instagram page. I’m at inquiring chef all over at all the things.

Megan Porta (30:45.402)
Amazing. And then go follow Jess too on Instagram. It’s so fun. You’re just, you can tell you’re having the time of your life over there in France and you’re having fun creating Instagram content. It is, it’s one of my favorite accounts right now. It’s so great. So thank you for the inspiration there too. Yeah. All right. Well, everyone, go check out Jess and all her places, especially Instagram. Try the trial reels. Let her let me know how it goes. I’m super excited to hear too.

Jess (31:01.529)
Thanks, Megan. It’s been fun. It’s been really fun.

Megan Porta (31:15.393)
And thank you again, Jess, for being here so much. And thanks for listening, Food Vloggers. I will see you next time.

Jess (31:17.849)
Sure. Thanks, Megan.