Nik Sharma is the author of three cookbooks with a fourth, Fundamentals of Flavor, on the way, an editor at America’s Test Kitchen, a host of Netflix’s In the Test Kitchen, and a host of Flavor Forward on YouTube. On Kit, he writes his food and recipe newsletter The Flavor Files to more than 36,600 subscribers.
“I have my hands in so many buckets, or baskets, so to speak,” he says. Between cookbooks, a Netflix show, a YouTube series, and a syndicated column, the molecular-biologist-turned-food-writer needed one place that could hold all of it at once.
“I needed a place that’s cohesive, where I’m sharing what I’m doing with people and also giving them updates on anything that’s exciting,” he says. “I feel like the newsletter gives me that space to do that.”
Before Kit, that place was Substack, for about two years. He moved his newsletter to Kit late last December.
Why Nik Sharma left Substack for Kit
What moved him wasn’t a single feature. It was a pattern he kept running into as his audience grew on Substack: the bigger it got, the less say he had in who actually saw what he sent.
These are people that are signing up to read my newsletter. I want to be able to reach them. That’s the whole point. The relationship is so simple, right? They’ve signed up to hear what I’m doing, to read my work, to cook my recipes. But if they don’t even hear about it, it’s a problem.
That’s the piece he wanted to fix in moving to Kit from Substack.
“It should be a simple transaction, or rather an exchange of information,” he says. Watching that exchange get filtered through a feed he didn’t control, no matter how well-intentioned the platform, felt at odds with why he’d started writing to people directly in the first place.
A newsletter, unlike a feed, was a way to make that reach a sure thing instead of a maybe.
So he went looking for a platform that would just get his work to the people who’d already said yes to it. “Get it to them directly so it feels like they’re with me in a room, we’re talking as friends, and they have access to what I want to share with them,” he says.
4 ways Nik Sharma uses one newsletter to support multiple revenue streams
1. He thinks of the inbox as leading to several small rooms
Sharma’s biggest challenge was never finding things to say. It was saying all of it without burying his readers.
“I have so much to share with them every week,” he says. “How do I share the buckets of information with them without making it feel overwhelming?”
His answer, once he moved to Kit, was to stop sending a separate email for every update and build single sends with clearly separated sections instead.
“I’m able to set up content boxes, literally,” he says. “I say: okay, this is what’s happening this week. This is the recipe I want you to cook this week. Or this is maybe a place that I visited and I’d love for you to check out these restaurants here. Or this is a cooking tip that I wanted to share with you. This is my show, this is the episode that’s airing this week, go watch it.”
One send, four or five distinct things for his readers, each easy to bookmark for later or dig into depending on what a reader’s in the mood for that week.
“I’m not fighting for someone’s attention anymore,” he says. “The people that want to connect with me can connect with me directly. It’s freeing in a way.”
Those content boxes he describes are doing double duty. They’re content for his email subscribers, but they’re also promoting his other revenue streams: hosting and on-air work, as an editor at America’s Test Kitchen, a host of Netflix’s In the Test Kitchen, and a host of Flavor Forward on YouTube.
2. He turns a social comment into an email list subscriber
Sharma’s other lever for growth doesn’t wait for someone to already know he has a newsletter.
He posts a recipe on Instagram and asks readers to comment with a specific word to get it via Manychat automations integrated with Kit. Commenting kicks off an automation that asks for an email address, sends the recipe, and drops the reader into a welcome flow onto The Flavor Files.
“I found most useful was using automations, integrating Manychat with Kit,” he says. “That’s been a really fun and easy way just to get people who want the recipe, or to buy the book, and then they also sign up for the newsletter because it’s so streamlined. For me, that’s been the number one game changer, the integration.”
His Tomato Vinaigrette post brought in 222 new subscribers off a single comment prompt with 68% open rate on the follow-up email. Dal Makhani, his second-best performer, added 179 subscribers with a 67% open rate. No ad spend, and a list that went from scrolling to clicking.
3. He thinks of his newsletter as a way pay him back
The Flavor Files runs on two tracks: The Flavor Brief, free and weekly, and The Flavor Files Plus, a paid tier with deeper, more personal writing. This paid newsletter version is the clearest example of how the newsletter has grown from a relationship channel into a real revenue line. Every free issue also carries the same disclosure: it may include affiliate links to things Sharma personally uses, a second, quieter income stream running underneath the content itself.
“Before my newsletter, it was me walking in my shoes, and now it’s me on rollerblades,” he says of how the format has evolved.
Recipes and food science remain the foundation. Around them, he’s built room for behind-the-scenes photography stories, dispatches from chef camp, and a running, numbered series called Inside Fundamentals of Flavor that’s tracking the making of his fourth book letter by letter, in something closer to real time than a launch announcement ever could be.
“It’s like my little origami basket that I send out to people,” he says. “You unwrap it, and then there are all these little surprises inside.”
4. He turns a book launch into something readers get to be part of
With Fundamentals of Flavor releasing September 22, Sharma has used The Flavor Files to make the lead-up feel like an ongoing story instead of a string of “preorder now” reminders.
Readers get preorder-gated giveaways timed in the weeks before launch, each paired with a different kitchen brand: a Staub Cocotte and a bonus copy of the book for one, a Mill Food Recycler for another, with a simple form asking which retailer they used so Sharma can see what’s actually converting.
A separate Cookbook Club landing page invites book clubs to feature the book, in exchange for a discussion guide, a personal welcome video, a signed book plate, and a free year of The Flavor Files Plus, turning his paid product into an acquisition tool for the book, and the book into an acquisition tool for the paid product.
Behind the scenes, Sharma’s team has also used Kit’s Subscriber Signals to find the readers most likely to move the needle, not just the ones most likely to buy. Pulling out top-engaged subscribers with sizable followings of their own, they built a dedicated send asking that smaller group of high influence subscribers specifically to post about Fundamentals of Flavor ahead of launch.
It’s the same philosophy as everything else in his approach: give the people who’ve already opted in something worth opening, and let the sales case make itself.
The result: Three businesses running out of one inbox.
Add it up, and Sharma’s newsletter is quietly running several businesses at once: a paid subscription product in The Flavor Files Plus, an affiliate income stream built into every free send, and a preorder engine driving sales of his fourth book.
The newsletter also feeds a revenue stream that lives outside it entirely: his hosting and on-air work across Netflix, America’s Test Kitchen, and YouTube, which the newsletter promotes every time a new episode airs.
All of it sits inside more than 36,600 subscribers, a 65% open rate among active subscribers on his last 23,000-person send, and a built-in audience of 345,000 on Instagram.
But none of that is why he does this.
You’re in their email, in their inbox. It’s a very special place to be. It’s very intimate, it’s a privilege.
For Sharma, the newsletter was never about maximizing reach. It was about making sure the people who wanted to hear from him actually could, and building a business on top of that, rather than the other way around.
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