Y1, Y2, Y3 of Chip Paper on Substack -- Did It Go To Plan?

We had a different goal for each of the three years of writing here, do you want to know how each year differed?

We were really ready to throw in the towel in early 2022. Like REALLY ready.

Actually, not just the towel, the whole bloody hot press, linen closet, storage unit, whatever it is to you and wherever your towels live, we were ready to rip it out. All we had built around GastroGays. The entirety of the work we had put in over a decade, we had now reached the end of the road, tired, unfulfilled and really ready to stop giving content creation and writing our full focus and go back to paying jobs... It just felt like it was never going to amount to anything, no matter how many years and endless effort we had put into it…

We had lost the drive and the desire.

From where we are writing today (in mid-late 2024) that experience from 2022 is still painful and a little raw. Apologies for jumping between then and now but that frustration and that feeling of hopelessness was really the spark that lit the flame of this Substack, so before we update you from our current position on the last three years let’s continue briefly where we started, in order to set the scene…

Hello! Welcome to another long-read on Chip Paper, from Patrick Hanlon and Russell Alford. This is second in the series of a deep-dive into the back room and inner workings of this particular Substack (part one on the idea behind the name here). Chip Paper is our space where we share long-form food writing features, deep dives, snappy travel guides and recipes, all punctuated by hand-drawn illustrations. We started as bloggers, built our brand on Instagram and are now freelance food and travel writers and the restaurant critics for The Sunday Times Ireland. You can also find us over at gastrogays.com.

2022 and we just had our debut cookbook published the previous year, had somehow navigated the entirety of the pandemic being self-employed (miraculously still as a couple, too) and were soon to celebrate a decade in content creation and food writing. Quelle succès!… but why did it all feel so shit?

When digital content creation and food writing in (mostly) the online sphere is your job you soon realise the goalposts keep changing. You pay your dues, do things by the book with integrity and honesty, put in the hard yards, time, effort, energy… but yet you never quuuuuite get there. Someone is always leapfrogging over you, commercial partners come and go, hot and cold, things don’t pan out for you the way they seem to, seamlessly, for others, and - ultimately - you look back over the expanse of the void you’ve dutifully filled for a decade and think “was that even worth it? Was I just wasting my time?”

Look, ten years in, you start to develop the keen ability to feel the wind change - and a sense of panic was setting in as opportunities seemed to seize up. Our content wasn’t landing like it used to. The brand work we put endless effort into was feeling like a failure as a result of poor engagement. Even our organic content was missing the mark, performing like inauthentic content when it really wasn’t. Imagine less than a year after kick-ass Kickstarter success for your debut book - part of a lauded, celebrated and later award-winning series - feeling little lasting effect? This was supposed to be the levelling up, the next echelon, the “we finally made it” feeling…

All the while the content creation sphere was hurtling everyone, without asking, towards short-form video. TikToks, Instagram reels, YouTube shorts, even Substack as of late. Attention spans diminishing at rapid speed and content now needed to grab you by the eyeballs and mind simultaneously in three seconds or less, and that’s not what we got in this gig to do. We started as bloggers to write, not to endlessly edit together clips on InShot or CapCut with fancy transitions or to put ourselves front and centre on-screen as our content.