In 2021, Joanne Molinaro recorded an episode of the “Rich Roll Podcast” that ran over two hours. Two weeks later, she called her boss at Foley & Lardner and said she was leaving. Rich Roll, who had walked the same path from law to a creative career, had made the argument plainly at the end of their session: “What are you even thinking? Of course you have to do this full time. Why are you even trying to do both?”

Joanne is the creator behind The Korean Vegan, a food and storytelling brand with more than six million followers across TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. She has published a New York Times bestselling cookbook, won a James Beard Award, and founded Korean Vegan Beauty, a K-beauty line she spent three years developing before its launch. A memoir is now in progress. The conversation that marked the end of her legal career launched what has become a multi-platform media business.

A year before the Rich Roll episode, a different signal had already begun to shift her thinking. In November 2020, The Atlantic invited her to write an op-ed from a lawyer’s perspective on the contested election. The invitation came not through her record at the firm but through the audience she had built on social media. 

“Probably the proudest moment I ever had as a lawyer came by virtue of the fact that I had made TikTok videos,” she says. “How beautiful is that.”

Facebook Turned Out to Be Where the Money Actually Is

Late last year, a friend showed Joanne his Facebook analytics: videos going viral from cross-posts he had never created separately. All it required was toggling a setting in Instagram that mirrors posts automatically to Facebook. She had slept on the platform for years, assuming the demographics were wrong. “I went from like 200,000 followers to a million” in roughly three months after making the switch, she says.

The growth surprised her. What it revealed about her revenue model surprised her more.

Of all the platforms Joanne operates, Facebook is the only one she describes as a genuine direct revenue generator. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Threads function as marketing infrastructure, driving audiences toward her books. “My books are like 80% of it,” she says of her revenue. Brand partnerships contribute but are, she notes, “wildly inconsistent and largely unpredictable.” The TikTok Creator Fund was never the foundation. “It was so erratic and inconsistent that I knew that could never be a basis for a sound financial business model,” she says.

A TikTok Near-Ban Was Never Going to Hurt Her

When TikTok faced a potential U.S. ban, Joanne says she was not particularly alarmed. “I knew from the very beginning that I needed to diversify my verticals,” she explains. 

By the time TikTok was still a new platform and many other creators were building their businesses on it exclusively, she had already invested in YouTube, grown a significant Instagram presence, and maintained an email list, a newsletter, and a blog generating its own revenue. 

“I think there were a lot of content creators who thought that they could just make a living off of one single social media platform,” she says. “And that’s just not smart from any perspective, certainly not a business one.”

Korean Vegan Beauty, still early with two products on the market and no outside investors, adds a non-platform layer. Her subscription service, running for several years at around $14 a month, gives subscribers access to meal planning tools and registered health professionals. Each revenue stream operates independently of the others.

Photo credit: Tek Chung

She Runs Brand Partnerships the Way She Ran Client Matters

Joanne’s legal instincts surface most directly in how she approaches brand work. The standard she holds herself to is borrowed from professional practice.

“I will give you freaking white-glove, Four Seasons concierge service as an influencer, because I understand the importance of professionalism in a corporate setting,” she says. That means delivering content early, accommodating client feedback without argument, and treating every campaign as a client matter. “You’re the client. You win.” The feedback she receives most consistently from brands, she says, is not about the quality of her videos but about the professionalism of the experience.

The same framework produces a clear limit. Since founding Korean Vegan Beauty, Joanne declines any brand partnership with a competing beauty or skincare product. Her reasoning is grounded in professional ethics. “I owe them a duty of care, and I owe them a duty of professionalism, and I can’t do that if I am competing with them,” she says.

Political content has introduced a separate trade-off. Joanne posts substantively on immigration and legal affairs, and she acknowledges that some large brand budgets have moved elsewhere as a result. But non-profit organizations and values-aligned companies have stepped in. “You’re going to pay me for something that I was already talking about anyway,” she says.

Creator Voices Are Depreciating Assets. Treat Them Accordingly.

Joanne identifies 2024 as a turning point in how brand budgets move through the Creator Economy. According to her, spending shifted toward the very largest creators and toward micro-creators, squeezing the broad middle tier. “Everyone else who was sort of in the middle, which represents like 80% of us, there weren’t budgets for them like there once was,” she says.

The prescription she offers goes beyond building email lists and owned products, though she advocates for both. The underlying concern is about the asset itself. “Our voices and our faces, by virtue of physiology, they’re not going to stay the same,” she says. “When you have that, you really need to start building a plan for an off-ramp.” 

That means retirement accounts, secondary businesses, and revenue structures that do not depend on continued on-camera output. Younger creators, she notes, are not approaching this with sufficient urgency.

Writing Cookbooks in Korea, Eventually

Joanne is currently finishing a memoir, a departure from the recipe-and-story format her cookbooks are known for, though she notes the line is less clear than it sounds. Many readers have told her they read her cookbooks cover to cover without cooking a single recipe. The storytelling was always the product.

Korean Vegan Beauty is still in its building phase, with inventory reinvestment underway and a U.S. retail presence the longer-term objective. The platforms, subscriptions, and brand partnerships all serve a purpose beyond themselves. Her vision for the next decade is unhurried: in Korea, writing cookbooks.

“If somebody told me I could just stop doing everything else,” she says, “that’s what I would do.”

Joanne is currently managed by Underscore Talent.

Cover photo credit: Tek Chung

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