Nicole DiMascio was bored, lonely, and stuck in a pandemic apartment. So she got stoned, baked a pie, and filmed it to make her friends laugh. That was early 2020. She wasn't trying to become a content creator. She had no strategy, no niche research, no posting schedule. Just a video she thought was funny.
Three years later, Dope Kitchen has nearly a million followers on TikTok, hundreds of thousands on Instagram, and a community that shows up for Nicole whether she's cooking, hiking, or talking about quitting coffee. She's built a business around brand deals, merchandise, a subscription grocery-list service, and even travel experiences for women. And she did it all while navigating some of the strictest content restrictions on social media.
I sat down with Nicole on the Blitz Growth Podcast to unpack how she pulled it off. What she shared about platform strategy, revenue diversification, and the actual mechanics of getting brand deals is more useful than most of the polished growth advice floating around.
Here's what I learned.
Instagram vs. TikTok: She Picks the One That Pays in Trust, Not Views
Nicole spends more time on Instagram. Not because the views are higher, because the relationship depth is. TikTok gives her reach. Instagram gives her DMs, Stories, and the kind of one-on-one connection that turns a passive viewer into someone who buys what she recommends.
This isn't a guess. Before Dope Kitchen, Nicole was a social media manager in the film and TV space. Her job was community management: responding to comments, making fans feel seen, building the kind of loyalty that keeps people watching a show season after season. She took that same philosophy and applied it to her own brand.
"I want them to get to know me on a deeper level beyond just food and cannabis," she told me. "I want them to know who I am, what I do every day, and feel like we're friends through a screen."
That trust is what brands pay for. When Nicole's audience sees her recommend a product, they don't scroll past like it's an ad. They engage, because they feel like they know her. The brand deals that make up roughly 60% of her income exist because of the trust she built through DMs and Stories, not because of a follower count.
Our Take: Most creators treat Instagram as a distribution channel. Nicole treats it as a community management tool. The difference shows up in her brand-deal rates. Reach gets you in the door. Trust gets you paid. Same lesson Ellen Petersen applied when she built her Patreon around the fans who actually showed up: depth over breadth, every time.
The Revenue Mix: Brand Deals, Merch, and a Subscription That Died
2022 was Nicole's best example of diversified income. Here's how it broke down:
Revenue Stream | Share of Income | How It Worked |
|---|---|---|
Brand Deals | ~60% | Negotiated by her manager; brands approach her, not the other way around |
Monthly Subscription | ~20% | Weekly grocery list + 4 recipes; platform shut down, on pause now |
Merch & Collaborations | ~15% | Third-party merch + a jewelry collab with a friend's brand ("Do Dope Shit") |
Affiliate Commissions | ~5% | Small but passive; not a focus |
The subscription model is worth a closer look. Nicole released a grocery list every week with four recipes that used those exact ingredients. People paid monthly for it. It was recurring, predictable, and didn't depend on a brand's marketing calendar. The platform she used shut down earlier this year, and she's still figuring out where to rebuild it. But the concept worked, and it's the kind of product most food creators could launch next week if they wanted to.
"It's way less stress when you aren't relying on closing a brand deal every week to make it all work," I told her. She agreed. The diversification wasn't an accident; it was a survival instinct.
How She Got Her First Brand Deal (and When to Get a Manager)
About four months into posting on TikTok, Nicole got an email from a brand. She was somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 followers at the time. She never reached out to a brand herself. They came to her.
But she was underselling herself badly. "I had no idea what to charge. I had no idea how to negotiate." After about a year, managers started reaching out. She did trial runs with a few before landing on the one she's been with for over a year now. He handles all outreach and negotiation, and she's direct about the impact: "I would not be able to do this as a full-time job if it weren't for my manager."
When I asked her when a creator should get a manager, her answer was refreshingly specific: it depends on whether you have a unique angle. Generic food content doesn't attract management. Nicole's blend of comedy, food, and cannabis does. Managers look for differentiation, not just follower counts.
"What is unique about what I'm offering my audience? What is a unique angle that I can offer any brands that I work with?" Those are the questions she says to answer before you even think about pitching yourself to a management company.
Our Take: The manager math is simpler than most creators think. If a manager takes 20% but doubles your deal rates, you're ahead. Nicole was leaving money on the table because she didn't know market rates. A good manager fixes that immediately. The hard part is finding one who actually understands your niche, which is why Nicole's advice about developing a unique angle first matters. The same principle shows up in Neil Patel's story of his first 150 videos flopping: the work you do before anyone's watching is what makes you worth watching later.
Personality Over Niche: Why She Posts About Hiking and Coffee Too
Conventional wisdom says pick a lane. Nicole posts cannabis cooking videos, hiking content, mental health reflections, and a whole segment on how she quit coffee. Her engagement dips on the non-food content. She knows it. She does it anyway.
"I do want to steer away from just doing cannabis and food content because there is so much more to me as a human being that I want to share." The tradeoff is real: lower views on personal content in exchange for a deeper connection with the people who do watch it. Those people, she says, are the ones who change something about their lives based on what she posts. They're also the ones most likely to buy whatever she sells.
This runs counter to almost all growth advice, and it's working. The algorithm rewards focus, but audiences reward honesty. Nicole chose the audience.
Navigating 420 Content Rules on TikTok and Instagram
Nicole makes cannabis content on platforms that don't allow cannabis content. She's figured out a set of workarounds through trial and error. On TikTok, she uses code words so the moderation bots don't flag her. She never shows cannabis products, flower, or herself smoking. She doesn't put edibles in her mouth on camera. Her audience has learned the language over three years, and they understand what she means without her ever saying it directly.
On Instagram, the concern is different: they care about whether you're trying to sell. When she tags a cannabis brand, she avoids any language that sounds transactional. Her cleverest trick is text-based: she'll add captions or text overlays to an image or video, save it, then re-upload it. Instagram's text-scanning bots can't read text that's baked into the image file the same way they can read text typed directly into the app. It's a small hack that keeps her content alive.
None of this is in any platform's best-practices guide. She learned it by getting flagged and adapting.
Her Content Creation Stack: iPhone, iMovie, and Maybe CapCut
Nicole films on her iPhone and edits in iMovie. That's it. She's considering trying CapCut, but the current setup works. "If you're just getting started with content creation, you already have very basic tools at your disposal," she said. "Almost all laptop computers will come with some editing software for free, and everyone has a nice camera on their phone."
For higher-quality shoots she has a DSLR, but the daily content that built her following came from the phone in her pocket. The lesson isn't that gear doesn't matter. It's that gear isn't the bottleneck when you're starting out. Story, personality, and consistency are.
On AI: Recipe Ideas, Captions, and Why She's Not Worried
Nicole recently experimented with using AI to generate a recipe and is considering building a series around letting AI pick her dinner. She sees AI as useful for the repetitive parts of content creation: scheduling posts, drafting captions, building content calendars, generating ideas that might go viral.
But she's not worried about AI replacing her. "AI is not going to film for you. AI is not going to edit for you. That still requires a huge amount of skill and talent that only a human can provide." She's right for now. The editing, the timing, the personality, the weird specific humor that makes Dope Kitchen work, none of that is automatable yet. The parts that are, like caption writing and idea generation, are exactly the parts she's open to offloading.
How She Quit Coffee (and What It Taught Her About Habit Change)
Nicole gave up coffee during the holidays. She was home, not working, sleeping in, and realized she'd gone five or six days without caffeine without trying. She decided to see how long she could keep the streak alive.
The key wasn't willpower. It was sleep hygiene. She started reading for 30 minutes to an hour before bed. She got in bed at the same time every night, around 8:30. She woke up at 6:00 AM consistently. She left her phone charging in the living room, not the bedroom, so she wasn't staring at a screen right before sleep. She replaced coffee with MUD/WTR (their Rise blend, matcha, and golden turmeric latte).
"Without prioritizing sleep, giving up coffee is incredibly difficult." The habit change worked because she didn't just remove the coffee. She rebuilt the structure around it so the coffee wasn't necessary anymore. That's a better framework for any habit change than "just try harder."
Do This, Not That: 5 Lessons from Nicole's Playbook
Do This | Not That |
|---|---|
Build community through DMs and Stories on the platform where your audience actually talks back | Chase views on every platform and ignore the one where real relationships are forming |
Diversify revenue so no single brand deal or platform can sink you | Rely entirely on brand deals and panic when one falls through |
Develop a unique angle that makes managers and brands seek you out | Make generic content in a crowded niche and wonder why nobody notices |
Learn the platform rules through trial and error, then build workarounds | Ignore content guidelines until your account gets restricted or banned |
Share the personal stuff even when it gets fewer views; it's what builds real trust | Post only what the algorithm rewards and lose the human connection that drives sales |
Your 7-Day Creator Revenue Checklist (Steal This)
Steal Nicole's playbook in one week:
Day 1: Audit your last 30 DMs and comments. Who's engaging deeply? These are your highest-value followers. Reply to every single one.
Day 2: List every revenue stream you currently have. If the answer is "one," brainstorm a second. A grocery list, a merch item, a paid newsletter, anything platform-independent.
Day 3: Write down what makes your content unique. If you can't articulate it in one sentence, neither can a manager or a brand. Fix that before you pitch anyone.
Day 4: Read the content guidelines for your primary platform. Not skim. Read. Find one restriction that affects your niche and brainstorm a workaround.
Day 5: Post something personal that has nothing to do with your niche. Accept that the views might be lower. Watch who engages anyway. Those are your real audience.
Day 6: Research one new platform you're not on yet. Nicole is on Lemon8, Clapper, Pinterest, and YouTube as backup channels. Pick one and create an account.
Day 7: Post again. Consistency compounds. Nicole's first video was a joke for her friends. Three years later it's a career.
The Part That Stuck With Me
Nicole didn't plan any of this. She got stoned, baked a pie, and posted a video. The business came later, built piece by piece: a brand deal here, a merch drop there, a subscription that worked until the platform died. She's still figuring out what comes next, and she's honest about that.
What stuck with me wasn't any single tactic. It was the way she talked about her audience. Not as a metric. Not as a funnel. As people she wants to know, people she responds to, people who might change something in their lives because of what she posts. That's rare, and it's probably why nearly a million people follow her.
Listen to the full conversation with Nicole DiMascio on the Blitz Growth Podcast.