Entrepreneur: Jessica Dante
Biz: Love and London
Tilt: Non-touristy places to visit in London
Scene: Website, Instagram (399K), YouTube (274K), Facebook (8K), guides
Snack Bites:
- Jessica moved to London for love. But she found a longer love with her content business that’s grown to a team of 14.
- She opted for content entrepreneurship because she didn’t have startup money and didn’t want to navigate the fundraising waters, given how little goes to female founders.
- After 10 years, the Love franchise will expand to Love and Paris in 2024.
Why We Stan: Jessica gets the advantages and challenges of running a content business. She hired help as soon as possible and waited to expand until she built a solid audience through her first channel. And in 2024, she plans to reduce her on-camera face time to feature other faces so she can focus on growing the business more.
The Story of Jessica Dante
Over 10 years ago, Jessica Dante moved to London full time for love. While the relationship didn’t work out, her content business – Love and London – did.
Her content tilt revolves around guiding visitors to the sides of the city she loves – the sites, sounds, and tastes that don’t have queue after queue of tourists.
The site started as her personal blog about living in the city, but then she saw the bigger potential. As she explains in an interview on TechRound, she wanted to run a business since she was a kid and realized in the United Kingdom she didn’t want to stay in her corporate job for long.
But she didn’t have any money for a startup or to navigate raising money given how little is invested in female-founding teams. However, she saw the potential for content creators. So, on evenings and weekends, she tackled how-to tutorials about YouTube and Instagram.
Now, Love and London generates revenue in the healthy six figures and counts 14 team members to make it happen, Jessica tells Ramona Magazine.
Hiring people to help the business was an early goal. “As soon as I could afford it, I started hiring freelancers to do various parts of our content production, which means we can do a lot more and a lot better than if I just did it myself,” she shares with the magazine.
Though Love and London has seen great growth on Instagram in the past 18 months, YouTube remains its biggest focus. “It’s better at building brand loyalty, has higher conversion rates for our email sign-ups, and is where brands pay most for advertising,” Jessica says.
Jessica also invites her audience to support the business with a how-to-say-thanks page on her site. It briefly explains what it takes to produce Love and London, followed by paid production options – guide books as well as tours, and hotel accommodations from which the business receives commissions.
The growth of Love and London has led Jessica and the team to plan to launch Love and Paris this year. She also tells Ramona Magazine that she plans to reduce her time in front of the camera and feature other faces so she can further grow the business.
As for her advice to other content creators interested in entrepreneurship? She tells TechRound, “First off, it totally stinks, but the good news is you’re not alone. Social media makes it seem like everyone is making absolutely no mistakes when it comes to work, but that’s truly not the case.
“Make sure you have some fellow business owners you can speak to on a regular basis about problems and concerns you’re having, and they’ll share their own, and it’ll help normalize all of the downtimes you’ll go through.”
About the author
Ann regularly combines words and strategy for B2B, B2C, and nonprofits, continuing to live up to her high school nickname, Editor Ann. An IABC Communicator of the Year and founder of G Force Communication, Ann coaches and trains professionals in all things content. Connect with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.
