Source: Ms. Yeah Facebook page

We have all been there.  It’s late at night at the office and your stomach grumbles as you try to focus on finishing your work on time to go home to your bed.  Choices are limited.  There’s the fail-safe instant noodles and the variety of frozen meals you can get from a 24-hour convenient store.  However you come to a point where there is just so much “unnatural food” you can take.

Enter Ms. Yeah, a Chinese office worker who one day saw her male coworker ironing his shirt in the office and asked herself, “Hey, why can’t I use that iron to make beef slices for lunch?” (Yes, that’s what most of us would think.)  That was the start of the phenomenon of online videos featuring Ms. Yeah creating Sichuan hotpot out of a water dispenser, cooking Chinese pancakes by using computer CPU parts, and barbecuing food with office light tubes.

Source: Ms. Yeah YouTube channel

After 3-4 episodes, her creative company in Chengdu, China decided to create a team.  With the increase of followers in her online community in China, Ms. Yeah decided to go overseas.  To counter China’s ban on YouTube, Facebook and Instagram, her team decided to establish a company in Los Angeles to focus solely on publishing her Facebook content.  What resulted was the unthinkable.  Ms. Yeah received more following oversees than in her own homeland.  Now she has over 6 million followers on her social media platforms combined and she is working with MNC company, which has over 50 similar online content creators.

How does she do it? 

What makes Ms. Yeah stand out from other online influencers is not exactly her cooking, but her ability to transcend through language barriers and gain a following not only with Chinese people, but with people from all over the world.  How does she do it?  At the RISE conference Ms. Yeah says there are three main factors to her success.

1. Passion: Ms. Yeah says she is a foodie by heart and it is with this strong passion that she decided to create her online food channel.

2. Thinking out of the box: It has never really occurred to anyone before that office supplies could be used to cook food.  By utilizing office supplies to whip up local Chinese delicacies, Ms. Yeah hooked followers with her creative mindset.  Even though her team may be small, she says there is great tenacity to brainstorm among her group of diverse individuals to come up with new and interesting ideas everyday.  It is this brainstorming process that drives her team in doing what they do.

3. Crossing Language Barriers: There are no voiceovers in Ms. Yeah’s videos, no language spoken, just her character and what she does.  This has helped popularize her channel abroad because there is close to zero language barrier between her and her international audience.  Regardless of where you are from, you can understand her content easily.  However English is used on foreign media platforms and for her public appearances, which may play a key role to her popularity overseas.

Women power to the max

It would be easy to say that this success was all due to food, but it is not.  Ms. Yeah says her channel is not about just being happy, but showing the world that a woman can do anything she puts her mind to.  In a country where traditional families often see the main purpose of a woman’s life is finding a husband and starting a family, Ms. Yeah wants to show that success in life can be more than that.  She is a single female publishing online content for women all over the world with over 400 staff members in Chengdu, Beijing, Shenzhen working for her.

That next challenge for Ms Yeah, is creating more interaction with her followers and she has already shifted her content to focus more on her personality.  This opens her videos to numerous other topics.  This has definitely been a big accomplishment for a woman who started out just wanting to cook beef slices with an iron.  Ms. Yeah says she sets to revolutionize online food channels and bring the new generation of content creators to greater innovate heights.