In 2016, a guy named Ben Lebus, from the UK, created Mob Kitchen.
He started posting videos of recipes on Instagram and Facebook. After a while, the project started growing and turned into books and more content.
Fast-forward to 2025, Mob is #15 in the UK App Store and is generating over $350,000 in monthly recurring revenue across 270,000 new downloads every month.
This is the story of how Ben’s hobby became a viral food content machine.
From passion to business
Ben learnt to cook from his father, who ran an Italian restaurant for a while.
When he first started posting, in 2016, his focus was on building a social recipe-video project focused on feeding a family of four for under £10.
His content started getting views, it caught the attention of press and soon he was launching his first cookbook, in 2018, precisely on that same topic.
In 2023, Ben launches Mob Premium (originally called “Mob Plus”), a paid subscription inside Mob’s website. It unlocked access to exclusive recipes, meal plans, discounts and templates. On his Instagram, Ben shared that at the time he launched the feature solely in an attempt to make some money and pay off debt, and that only later did he realize the growth potential he had tapped into.
In the same post, he said that after weeks of “painfully slow growth”, he started interviewing his small group of paying subscribers to understand what exactly they were paying for. He found that all they cared about was the recipes.
“So we doubled down on this, and the rate of growth increased. We went from seeing 1,500 new active subscribers a month, to 6,000. We continued to build and optimise throughout 2024. 6,000 new active subs a month turned to 10,000.”
Ben Lebus
The App
Mob was released in September 2024, but it was only on May 11th this year that the official brand page posted a re-launch announcement.
Prices differ from country to country:
- Mob premium (US) → $9.99 month / $59.99 year
- Mob premium (EU) → €9.99 month / €49.99 year
- Mob premium (UK) → £6.99 month / £39.99 year
It currently has a customer rating of 4.5/5.
Interestingly, Mob ranks higher in UK, Canada and Australia than in the US.
Now, at almost $4,500,000 in yearly revenue, we can argue that Ben’s content to app funnel worked (once again).
Let’s see what changed when content went from core to distribution.
Growth
Mob still relies exclusively on two accounts, one on TikTok, one on Instagram. You can find them here: https://app.shortimize.com/c/2b10kVm1Mc7a57
On Instagram, they’ve accumulated more than 2 billion views over the years. At this point, with 3.2M followers, it’s a true viral machine.
1 out of 2 videos pass the 1M view mark.
Despite doing a very similar format all throughout, an alternate mix between headshot creator sharing recipes and fun facts about food and faceless recipe tutorials, Mob does not completely disregard hook writing.
All-time highest view post is a Reel that got over 21M views back in September.
Hook: “POV: you’ve got 15 minutes to make dinner”.
Here’s a few couple of other hits:
- “So this is Brazilian lemonade. “18.2M views / Sep.2023
- “I stopped buying processed snacks “ 14.7M views / May 2025
They rinse and repeat hooks all across the account.
TikTok
Here, things get a bit more interesting. Mob’s strategy isn’t, opposed to many other apps, to post the same content on both platforms. On TikTok, Ben’s team is ditching the (always) perfectly curated recipes and aesthetics and betting on a few different formats to see what sticks. Account currently marks 324 million views and 1.5 million followers.
For some reason, a lot of TikTok’s best performing videos are cocktail recipes.
This one was their most viral yet, with an AI hook (back in 2023) and 4.7M (organic) views.
Looking at the ranking of popular videos, you’ll notice that on TikTok all their best hits are way older than on IG, with pretty much all being from 2021—2023. What’s happening?
Lately, it seems like Mob might be moving towards paid ads.
Last videos are all sound like promotional pieces, even though most get no views. They’re repeating clips and hooks and drifting away from the type of organic content that powered their growth until now.
It’s like their trying to switch to a UGC format, but forgetting the part where you make it sound organic.
The closest they’ve come to that format was here, when they were pairing a faceless clip of boiling an egg with hooks like “POV: You saw a study from Hinge that stated 86% of users said they’d prefer to date someone who can cook.”
Still, no traction.
TLDR; if you don’t know why your users would pay to be on your app, go ask them. Then re-built your app and your whole content plan around that.
Leave a Reply