It’s Christmas Day, and software developer Maurizio Leo peels away red crinkled paper to reveal a book about baking sourdough bread called Tartine. He’s not sure why his aunt gave him this book. Maybe it was popular at the time, maybe because his dad had an Italian restaurant, maybe she liked the cover, or perhaps she knew something about him that he didn’t (yet).
Maurizio still doesn’t know for sure. All he knows is that this book changed his life.
At the time, Maurizio had never been interested in the art of bread baking. He spent most of his time working from home on the business that resulted from the success of the SkyView app he’d co-created in 2010. But reading that book sparked him like nothing else ever had.
The more he learned about the history, science, and craft behind sourdough bread, the more he wanted to learn.
I’ve kind of always been this person who really dives deep on things. There’s really a lot of science with fermentation and temperatures and yeast and bacteria.
After he lists these things I almost expect him to end with the Sound of Music line, “These are a few of my favorite things.” Maurizio is a very calm and subdued person, but something in his eyes sings when he talks about bread.
He baked his first sourdough loaf in 2012.
He took a lot of what he’d learned from the book and wrote detailed notes to craft schedules so that he could break the multi-day process into very clear steps for each day. The methodical part spoke to the engineer in him, and he found that to be half the fun.
The other half was witnessing this kind of transformation. “I remember opening the pot in the oven,” he says of checking on his very first loaf, “and just thinking this is some kind of magic. Like it was just some inert flour, some water, and salt. That first loaf totally gripped me, and I was just taken from then on.”
He’d found the perfect hobby, something tactile he could do instead of sitting at a computer all day.
He just didn’t know then that in 2019 that hobby would turn into a life-changing business, or that in 2020 his website would crash, or that in 2022 people would be unwrapping his New York Times bestselling sourdough bread book.
All he knew then was that he was in love.
And that he wanted to start a blog.
“I just want to be told exactly what to do.”
Maurizio started The Perfect Loaf in 2013 because, at the time, he couldn’t find the step-by-step instructions he was looking for and wanted to share what he was learning and the experiments he was trying in case it might help someone else.
I want zero ambiguity; I just want to be told exactly what to do. There weren’t a lot of detailed guides on every step of the process.
Sourdough bread baking requires precision. All the ingredients, from the starter to the flour to the water, need to be weighed and measured correctly, and temperatures and timing have to be just right for it all to work. Maurizio thrives where precision is required, and he translated everything he was learning through his computer-science brain into the kind of detailed instructions he wished he’d had and published those on his blog.
No one really read his blog for years, though.
Anybody who starts a website knows, you’re basically talking to nobody for a long time. And it felt that way.
But Maurizio kept going. Especially when he got some of his first blog comments from people saying things like, “Hey, this is exactly what I was looking for” or “I had no idea how to mix this. You said exactly what I needed when I needed it.”
That fueled the fire, he says.
But not for a business.
I had no clue about any of that, and really it wasn’t my goal. It wasn’t why I created the blog. None of that even entered my mind. I just wanted to help people overcome the problems I was facing.
Then he learned about Memberful, a way for blog readers to become members and subscribers of his site. Originally, it functioned more like a tip jar because Maurizio didn’t want to gate any of his content.
He really only added the membership after his growing readership kept asking for a way to support him. They wanted to show their gratitude for how valuable his free content was to them.
More people signed up for this membership than Maurizio would have ever predicted, and because of that revenue stream, by early 2019 he had a full-fledged baking blog business.
And by the end of 2019, Maurizio got an email he never saw coming.
“It was way more work than I thought it would be.”
It was from an editor from his favorite cookbook publishing house, Clarkson Potter (he had 20 of their books).
It turns out this editor knew about Maurizio because her husband was baking bread as a hobby and using Maurizio’s site as a guide. “Hey, have you seen this bread guy?” her husband had asked and recommended she look into it. Then, sometime later, another person on her team mentioned her partner was also currently baking bread using Maurizio’s step-by-step recipes. That’s when the editor realized she needed to research this bread guy. And she loved what she saw.
Maurizio was excited about the book deal. But he didn’t know then how hard writing the book would actually be.
It was way more work than I thought it would be. It’s really like taking on another job.
The job was to distill a decade of baking into one book. He also had his doubts.
Is it gonna resonate with people? Are they going to buy it? There’s just a lot of upfront effort, time, and money.
He let his blog readers and members light the way.
I took the 10 years of questions people have asked me and that I’ve answered online and put it all into the book.
And just a few months after he signed his book deal, he got more questions than he’d ever received. One morning in March 2020, he woke up and noticed he’d received thousands of emails overnight, something that had never happened before. What was going on? 
Then he got an alert from his website host saying he’d gone far past his pageview allotment for the month. He’d never seen an influx of traffic like this in his life, even when the app he’d started was featured by Apple years ago.
To this day, he still doesn’t know what led to that overnight influx. Perhaps someone featured or linked to his site? Or perhaps during that time when people were scared and stuck at home and looking for something that would help them slow down and ease their panic they turned to sourdough baking and found Maurizio’s blog.
He doesn’t know for sure. All he knows is that in one night, his traffic exploded.
So instead, he looked for the patterns in the email questions and created videos and guides and then sent the relevant links to each person who had a question about that topic.
Being accessible and available for people is something I strive for online because it’s really rare to see that. I think when you visit a website you don’t get this sense that there’s actually somebody behind the scenes running the thing. And I’ve always wanted to do that.
In an age where many are obsessed with saving time and cutting out steps, Maurizio is passionate about the things that take time, the value in slowness, and the worth in doing things that do not scale.
To make that possible, Maurizio creates systems: he wakes up early, stays up late, time blocks, and reduces work in other areas to be able to have the time to go slow on the things that matter to him most. 
“It has really opened up a new avenue of business for me.”
In 2021, Maurizio switched to Kit.
My old email provider was way too complicated and cumbersome. It really wasn’t geared for a creator and how creators need to speak to their audience and how we need to send certain emails at a certain time and have certain automation.
It was overkill and it was really designed for businesses. And that’s not my ethos. I mean, yes, I have a business, but I’m a one person creator and I’m trying to speak to my audience kind of like one-on-one.
When he made the move, he was inspired to revamp the aesthetic of his emails.
I changed the email design to be a little bit cleaner, and more like a letter somebody would send to their friend, like, Hey, this is what I’m doing in my kitchen and I think you might be interested too.
It has really opened up a new avenue of business for me because no longer am I reliant on Google traffic. Now I can speak directly to my audience and tell them, “Hey, I just wrote this thing, I think it’s gonna be helpful. Go check it out.”
So it’s not only a means of communication, but it’s really a means of getting people to view my site.
He’s also a big fan of automated sequences, which give him the ability to send emails to subscribers at the right time, with the right message, on autopilot, so he can focus on baking.
One of his most successful sequences is the one that kicks off after someone signs up for his newsletter from his sourdough starter page. They get a sequence just on starters.
The key to keeping these automations running is continuing to grow his email list, and that’s not always easy.
You constantly have to guide people to your list to sign up. This means you’re looking to increase traffic at all costs, which can feel pushy. That’s not me.
In 2023, Maurizio joined Kit’s Creator Network, a way for creators to support and recommend each other’s email lists. Because of other creators’ recommendations, he gained 598 new subscribers in his first month.
The Creator Network helps me grow my audience while at the same time helping other creators do the same, all without having to pay for ads or by using other gimmicky means.
The growth Maurizio has seen in his business means he’s moved away from ads and affiliate links and focuses his time on baking and his audience, which at the time of publication includes 1500 members paying annual subscriptions of $50-$100. 
“You are forced to slow down.”
While many more people tried sourdough baking for the first time in 2020, Maurizio had a solid audience before then, and still does. Why, I ask him, does he think people are drawn to such a slow craft, especially today?
I think one of the appeals to that is that nowadays you’re bombarded with instant this and instant that, and it’s hard to sit down and focus on one thing for long because your mind races off to the next Instagram post or the next video or whatever.
With sourdough, there’s no speeding it up. You are forced to slow down, tend to your starter. And the dough takes one or two days to make, and then you can finally bake it.
I think having something that forces you to slow down is a good way for people to center themselves.
I could do that. But if you go through the process of making your sourdough starter, it sets you up for slowing down and being okay with stepping through the process one little thing at a time instead of impatiently trying to jump to the end. So it primes you and gets you ready for what I think is one of the best things about sourdough — that it just takes time.
Maurizio says it felt incredible to find out his book became a New York Times bestseller when it came out in November 2022, and he was so honored when he was asked to contribute to Food52 and King Arthur Baking, but the biggest dream come true he says is that he gets to take the time to bake bread every single day.
10 years ago I was like if I could just bake bread every day I would be a happy dude. And so that’s been the biggest change, that I’m able to do the thing that I want to do every day.
He does worry that the UPS guy thinks he’s a bit nuts though, with all the pounds of flour he’s delivering to their house every week.
Maurizio says that if he’d discovered baking 20 years ago he’d probably have his own bakery by now; but who knows, he says, what may still happen. But for now, what he’s doing is more fulfilling than he could have ever imagined.
I just love handling bread dough. It sounds really weird, but believe me, there’s just this huge satisfaction in nurturing this dough from nothing, like literally just dry flour to this loaf of bread at the end.
And I think that transformation really never gets old. It just keeps kind of pulling me back every day.
You can connect with Maurzio on Instagram, subscribe to his email list, or learn more at theperfectloaf.com.
