I met Jess Dante at a recent beehiiv event on the future of media and immediately clocked her as someone who thinks differently about this space. 

She's the founder of Dante Media — the parent company behind Love and London, Love and Paris. If you've ever googled "things to do in London" and ended up binge-watching YouTube for two hours, there's a decent chance you landed on her content.

As a fellow travel-obsessed, London-obsessed person, this is the DREAM to me. Building a multi-six-figure business out of traveling and helping other people do it better.

But what makes Jess’s story really interesting to me isn't just the business she's built. It's when she started building it that way.

She was treating content like a business — owning her audience, building an email list, diversifying beyond brand partnerships — years before the rest of us were even using that language. A decade in, she runs a lean team (1 full-timer and 8 freelancers) and has built something she could, in theory, walk away from.

We got into how AI is impacting her creator business, how she's pivoting, how she thinks about building something that doesn't depend on her face being on camera — and her advice for creators who want to start today.

Here’s our full conversation below, edited lightly for clarity :) 

– Taylor

It started just as me in 2013. I've always known I wanted to build a business. Back when I was 25, I didn't have any money, and I didn't know anything about getting investors. So I was like, I know social media, and I see that YouTube's is taking off for other people.

I started creating YouTube videos, and a couple of videos I did specifically about visiting London did really well really early on. So I was like, okay, great. Doing the city I live in versus having to go travel to create travel content is a much safer and smarter business model.

So for quite a few years, I've basically built up an email list from Youtube and always had in mind that I want this to be a business. I don't wanna just only rely on brand partnerships. I want to be able to pick and choose and be able to say no to brand partnerships because we also have these other revenue streams.

I think maybe two, three years into it, I started trying to sell digital travel guides. The first one did okay, but then when I introduced a three-day itinerary, that was the sweet spot, and people really liked that. So that was really when I was able to start just focusing on the business and growing that.

And then a couple years ago, I was like, I'd like to try to replicate this for a different city. Because ultimately, I'd like to build a media brand that's way outside of me and that covers different locations and has basically a model that we can replicate to other cities.

So we expanded to Paris two years ago this month, and that's been pretty sick — we built up that audience pretty quickly.

I want this to be something that just goes beyond just me. And something that we could have an actual business that has multiple revenue streams and doesn't just focus on brand partnerships.

I think because I started to dabble in the beginning with speaking to brand partners, and I saw how little they wanted to pay. For the amount of work that I was gonna have to put in to help them make money.

And I also knew a few people who were doing general travel blogging. And from what they were telling me — it was a struggle. They would get press trips, but they'd go on these week-long trips unpaid. Obviously expenses were paid, but they're essentially going on a trip, producing content for two weeks after that to help a tourism board make more money and reach their goals. But they have lost money to be able to do that. And I just kind of saw all these cracks in that model.

I've always been quite business minded. I've always wanted to build something that isn't just so reliant on me. And I've always had this mindset of — I need to have flexibility that in case I wanna leave London at some point, I'm able to do that. If I wanna completely get out of this and I wanna be done with it, I would like to have the option to sell it. So I don't spend ten years building something up that ultimately, when I decide I don't wanna do it anymore, it just dies.

If we look at the last couple of years, there's been four main buckets, and the biggest one has been sales of digital travel guides. Then after that is brand partnerships — that was something I really geared up last year, and it's continuing to be a really good revenue driver for us, though I don't wanna rely solely on it. And then we have AdSense, which is the third biggest. And then quite a lot lower is affiliate revenue.

And then we have kind of one-off things. Sometimes I get hired for speaking engagements. We did some production work for one of our partners last year — we produced four YouTube videos for their channel, sourced the talent, one of which was me, and did all of that for them. So that's something we're also diving into more this year.

[As of 2025, the business was bringing in over £350K in revenue, roughly equal to $475k USD]

AI really is quite a big concern for us, even though the irony is that AI travel information is very inaccurate. But it obviously doesn't stop people from using AI to gather travel information instead of wanting the human touch that our digital travel guides kind of give.

This year, I'm expecting the pie to be a lot smaller for the digital travel guides because we are seeing that with AI; our sales have gone down quite a bit. So we are pivoting and also gonna be trying a few other things to make up for that.

That being said, there's a lot of info out there that because of AI, everybody is wanting the human element in various different ways. And actually, there's a rise of people using travel agents, which is super interesting. Because the thought process has usually been, who uses travel agents? But actually, they're being used more and more because people want to speak to a human, and they want the human experience and that human touch of someone helping to plan your trip.

So basically, the thought process is — there's potential that we're going to try to do some kind of in between of the travel agent, because that's just too time-consuming for me, and the low-touch, no-human aspect. So potentially some kind of membership or plan-your-trip-alongside-us or something like that.

Also, live events. That's something that towards the end of this year, I am going to test, and that's obviously something AI can't take away — people really love live events.

So we did a pop-up souvenir shop last year for two weeks. And I wanted to test to see if that was something because that's another thing AI can't take away, going in destination and picking up something really cool to take home.

We did a community event where people bought tickets, and they got to be in the shop for a couple of hours with just me and my team. And we had some food and drinks for them. And the reaction — people just really loved it. It was fun, and it was intimate. And a bit exclusive, and everyone shopped like crazy, which was also great for us.

I was trying to get some feedback, and people were like, oh my god, I would have paid way more. This was really fun. I really enjoyed it. It was really nice to come do this and meet you.

So it's definitely a work in progress. A couple of years ago, we started working towards pulling me out of the content. And we brought on other creators.

For short-form video, it actually was fine. It didn't make a huge difference. We didn't notice a big drop off or anything like that, which was good. But for YouTube, we did notice that. And it was disappointing for me because I was really enjoying not having to go out and shoot two to three days a month, and then having to do all the prep for it.

So we ultimately had to backpedal on that. But the plan is that we will try that again just in a more considered way.

When we replicated for Paris, I was very nervous that I didn't really know how it was gonna be not having a central Jess. But it's actually worked fairly well. So it can happen. I think it's just — it's been me for so long for London that it was really hard to shift that for YouTube specifically. But it is hopeful that it has worked for Paris, and we could replicate that for other cities.

We had been doing biweekly YouTube videos, which isn't really best practice, but it was all I could take. But in order to try to increase the reach of the channel more, I'm testing currently doing weekly content — and I'm drowning. So I'm like, this is not sustainable. But I need to figure something out for this.

The first thing that I outsourced was video editing, and that was like — I've literally never looked back. That's been amazing.

And then about eight years ago, I brought on a virtual assistant. And she actually still works for me. She's a full-time employee now, and she's actually my right hand. She's really grown with the business, which has been amazing. And handing off all that small stuff really just kind of got me like, oh, delegating is actually really helpful.

I brought on somebody to do email specifically, so she's been on that for a few years at this point. She comes to me with new ideas on things we can change, and this isn't working, so maybe we try this. She builds out funnels for us. She does all the launch campaign planning, and that's been really great to hand that off.

I've worked with a couple of different people to help with that. But ultimately it always went back to me, which does seem like the best option.

I think it's for a couple of reasons. The brand partners just really like working with me. And also, because it's my business, I can listen to them and visualize some more unique options for things we could potentially do together. So it's a lot more work for me, but it's also a bit more fulfilling for me because I have some really good relationships with some of our ongoing partners now.

I kinda see it a little bit more intertwined than that. My thinking is it will help both me and whatever I plan to do even after — if I decide to quit tomorrow or if I do sell the business, I won't be going back to zero. So I can always leverage that into something else.

And also, it does help tell the story of Love and London and Love and Paris. People can understand the build behind what we're doing. We did that for launching the souvenir shop pop-up — all of the promo was the behind the scenes of building that. Which helped significantly. It really hyped everything up and got people really excited. And people love those kinds of stories.

It's definitely harder for sure. I think part of the success that we had especially on YouTube was first mover advantage. Nobody was really doing videos about traveling to London on YouTube when I started ten years ago.

But my advice would be — and I know this isn't a particularly hot take, but it is really important — you have to have something that sets you apart from everybody else. 

Whether that's the type of information that you are giving, so like a really niche topic about travel — maybe it's vegan travel, or finding the best vegan places and vegan experiences. Or like what we do, focusing on one specific location. Even if people live in a smaller destination, if you can specialize in a certain town or a certain city, that puts you ahead of a lot of people because you have your expertise and you are the go-to for that.

But also, sometimes it's personality. There's a travel creator I follow — she's solo traveling in her thirties. And I think a few men commented, like, oh, you're gonna die alone or with your cats or something like that. And she took that and ran with it, and her voiceovers are all about how she's an old cat lady who's gonna die alone, but she's doing it in these amazing locations. And it's hilarious.

So having some kind of angle like that or personality trait or just being entertaining — because a lot of travel content's really boring — that will also set you miles ahead.

That’s all for this week - this email is getting WAY too long! See y’all next time 👋🏻