Today we’d like to introduce you to Josh Cortis.
Josh, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I started The Meal Prep Manual (TMPM) in the back half of 2016. The birth of TMPM was kind of a shot in the dark. I had graduated college in 2015 and didn’t have any idea what I wanted to do with my life. Everything that I did academically in college was to build towards attending graduate school because I thought that was the next logical step in the progression. After graduation, I enrolled in a PhD program knowing that wasn’t what I truly wanted to do with my life but I didn’t know where else to go because I had no other plans.
In the months leading up to the start of the school year, I was desperately trying to find other opportunities that would make sense for me to pursue. I was reading every book I could find on starting businesses and self-help. Early in 2016, I read the book The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss and it changed my thinking forever. It made me realize that you can start a business out of anything and entrepreneurship is a real possibility. It cemented the idea in my head that I wanted to determine and control the direction of my life and to not do what society tells recent grads they should do.
I started writing down ten business ideas a day in hopes that something would be feasible. I had always had a knack for cooking and throughout college did a lot of the meal preparation for my friends. One of the first ideas I had jotted down was to write a cookbook. For months I kept that idea in the pages of my idea journal because I thought it wasn’t big enough to create a real business around it.
The day before I was supposed to start grad school in August I called the admissions office and told them I wouldn’t be coming. The Professor whose lab I was supposed to be working in called me and told me I was making a huge mistake, giving up an opportunity that not many people get, and that I would never be successful with my undergrad Exercise Science degree. I have never and will never forget that conversation. That same day was the day I started writing my first cookbook, The Meal Prep Manual.
Today, I have moved TMPM HQ to Austin, Texas and the digital cookbook that was once an unsightly PowerPoint presentation is now one of the largest meal prep websites on the internet, with more than 50,000 registered members and even more daily visitors.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
Like any business owner, there have been plenty of speed bumps along the way. I am big on risk mitigation in all parts of my life so I have tried to build my business in a way that can keep problems to small impact. Because of this, I’m sure I haven’t had as many memorable challenges as some other business owners but I could still name a thousand things that have gone wrong.
A big mistake when I first started was I stupidly thought that once I finished writing my first cookbook, the work was finished and it would be smooth sailing from there. Obviously, that was a dumb thought. TMPM didn’t grow for the first 18 months or so because I wasn’t giving it the time and attention it needed.
The biggest speed bumps that occurred happened when I moved the recipes from a digital cookbook to a subscription service online. I couldn’t afford paying a developer to design the website I wanted so I had to bootstrap it and do it all myself. A few hours before the site went live and I had planned a huge sale, a red banner popped up on every page of my website saying “This website is not secure and cannot be trusted”. A great start to things when I was expecting thousands of people to visit in mere hours to put their credit card information on my site and sign up for a membership. Luckily I was able to get it remedied in time for the launch but the problems only subsided for a few hours. The first day the new website was live, it crashed every couple of hours and I spent all day on the phone with my web host. Knowing what I know now, this could have been prevented had I just sacked up and paid a bit more money for a better web host.
At the beginning of 2021, the 2nd year the new website had been in production, a huge percentage of people who had signed up last year had been double charged because I didn’t write clear enough instructions on how to renew the membership. I had to go through transaction by transaction to find the duplicate charges, match them to a customer, refund them, and send an email to notify what went wrong. It cost me hundreds of work hours.
As you know, we’re big fans of The Meal Prep Manual. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about the brand?
The Meal Prep Manual (TMPM) is a platform dedicated to helping people achieve mastery in the world of meal prep and improve their lives through diet and exercise. TMPM is one of the biggest meal prep websites on the entirety of the internet and is the best when it comes to tasty, approachable, and proven recipes. www.mealprepmanual.com is one of the only food blogs/recipe websites online where you can search and filter through a recipe index by the number of calories or macronutrients. TMPM believes in common sense nutrition and leaning on science backed strategies to help everyday people improve their body composition.
What I am most proud of brand-wise is the community that we have built within TMPM. We have hundreds of thousands of people across all platforms and within those people are some who have completely transformed their lives through meal prepping and exercising. Some of our community members have lost more than 100 pounds and hundreds of others have lost a significant amount and kept it off with our sustainable approach to eating. Some of our members use meal prep to improve their performance for athletic pursuits. We can have an answer for everyone and I am proud of that.
TMPM has a subscription service called The MPM Club which gives you exclusive access to my entire backlog of recipes for meal prep, freezer-friendly snacks, and macro-friendly desserts. It is $7 per month or $50 per year and is designed to help you save money, save time, and make eating well easier.
Can you talk to us about how you think about risk?
I think about risk from a mitigation standpoint first and foremost. I think that with great risk you can drastically raise the ceiling on what your potential could be but also lower the floor. I try to find a happy medium where my floor is never low enough to be catastrophic but my ceiling is also restricted because of this. As I have grown in my business and casted a wider safety net, I have found myself capable of taking more risks and this is something I plan to explore in 2022. Taking risks is fun albeit terrifying.
Pricing:
- Monthly Subscriptions to The MPM Club – $7/month
- Annual Subscriptions to The MPM Club – $50/year
Contact Info:
- Email: josh@mealprepmanual.com
- Website: www.mealprepmanual.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/themealprepmanual/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCT0tsC9JF5pLZX4dXqe1_ag
- Other: https://www.tiktok.com/@themealprepmanual
