Birdcage Business Builders

// case study · ecommerce

From 3 million followers to a business that converts.

Steph de Sousa, of Easy Recipe Gang and What’s for Dinner, is one of Australia’s most-loved food creators: millions of followers, a bestselling cookbook, an SBS show. Enormous reach. The owned business wasn’t keeping up.

Steph de Sousa

4,307

leads in 44 days

$0.33

cost per lead

57.97%

email open rate

+2,431%

landing-page traffic

// the brand

Reach for days.

What’s for Dinner is a meal-plan subscription for budget-conscious families, the answer to the nightly “what do I cook?” for someone who’s already done all the thinking that day.

The audience was there in the millions. The problem was after the scroll: nowhere for that attention to go, and no easy first step.

“The reach was always there. It just needed somewhere to go.”

, Steph de Sousa

// the challenge

Famous, but leaking.

01

An overloaded website doing everything at once, with no clear path to convert.

02

An email list not growing in step with the organic reach.

03

1,500 new Facebook followers a day, none funnelled into owned channels.

04

No low-barrier way for a new follower to try the product before subscribing.

// the work

Give the reach somewhere to go.

01

Found the real audience

We wrote to the “exhausted default parent” carrying the mental load of feeding a family on a budget, not to everyone.

02

Split the journey across three sites

Three focused websites, one per stage of the customer journey, instead of one site doing everything.

03

Built a low-barrier entry point

A “Free 5 Night Dinner Plan” lead magnet: a genuine taste of the product that turns a follower into a subscriber.

04

Turned reach into leads with Meta

A paid Meta campaign (launched 11 Feb 2026) pointed the existing audience at the lead magnet, for cents.

// the results

Cents per lead. Thousands of them.

4,307

leads generated in 44 days

$0.33

cost per lead, vs an industry $2 to $15

< $1,500

total ad spend

53,013

total email subscribers

57.97%

email open rate, vs ~25% industry

+2,431%

landing-page traffic

7,934 of those leads came through the free dinner plan from 61,100 visitors, turning reach into a 53,013-strong owned list that opens more than half of everything we send.

// sound familiar?

Big reach, nowhere to put it?

An audience but no system turning it into leads, subscribers and sales? That’s exactly what we build.

// the flagship build

From spreadsheets to a system.

We replaced MIY Outdoor’s manual back office with a custom platform, $85,000+ signed in the first two weeks the hub was live.

The MIY-Hub admin console