You can have a few thousand followers and still make it a job. Maybe it starts as a side hustle and  turns into a career. You really don't need to have that many followers to make it into a career.

When I first started, I had no idea that you could make money, that this could be a career. It was 2011, and I just really liked doing it.

I always say that I'm a slow and steady grower when it comes to subscribers and followers. I never had any viral video, it was just consistency that really helped.

I think the reason why I have a strong community is because I post about things like engineering content, consulting content, founder content - but I'm still showing the girly side of myself as well in these industries that are really male-dominated.

There are a lot of women that are still very feminine and like fashion and makeup, but they're also into tech.

There's not that much representation on the internet about that.

I started making like double my salary on social media, so I decided to quit.

Being a Creator is a business. You don't need to have millions of followers, you can have a few thousand and still make it a job - maybe it starts as a side hustle and then turns into a career.

Once I started Rella, I had to cut some things. I knew I wanted to continue creating content, so I pretty much cut everything but content creation.

I cut the coaching, the Patreon, [the ecommerce business]. I just focused on content creation and my podcast and then, obviously, Rella.

Rella is only 26% of my income, and I actually stopped paying myself pretty recently, so right now, my income is pretty much all social media, 

I use Rella to manage everything.

I do know the founders of Beacons, so I think that that helps. I just want to support other founders in the Creator space, but I genuinely like the product.

I started a Patreon with fellow content creators, and that had a Slack channel if you were a part of it. It was all Creators, a community of Creators.

I just need to start. It just takes a lot of time to link everything, always remember to link everything.

I was using so many different things to manage my business as a Creator - content planners, notes on my phone, spreadsheets for revenue, project management tools for brand deals, and it was just so scattered and fragmented.

I would always spend hours each week on admin tasks because I had a lot of brand deals and content that I was putting out across different platforms.

I was like, “Why is there nothing out there that's just one tool for all of this?”

And so that's how Rella started.

I've referred my accountants to so many Creators that they now have a whole social media influencer department.

I know [that in] bigger agencies, if you're not the top of the top Creator, they don't pay as much attention to you. You have to have hundreds of thousands or millions of followers for them to focus on you.

I mean, that makes sense from a business perspective because you're not going to be bringing in as much money. For me, I love the personalization and the fact that [my manager, Lindsey] can text all the time. I know that she has my best interests in mind and that she's paying attention to me. So that's why I prefer smaller partners, like people that go off and do their own thing.

I would say 70% of my deals are just inbound, straight to me. Maybe 20% are inbound to my manager, and then 10% are her pitching and outbound.

The most helpful part [that my manager takes care of] is the negotiation, the back and forth, the contracts.

Like, I don't want to do any of that, and I love that I can just create a list of brands, and all I have to worry about is creating the content.

I do have a podcast editor that I pay for videos, since I'm now doing video and audio. She does the video. She makes it into short form clips, and she uploads it onto social media sites.

I always prep for my podcasts or my YouTube videos, so I take my prep work that I did and I put it into ChatGPT, and then I make that into a LinkedIn post.

They source all of the ads, they edit the audio, and then they distribute it across all platforms…they were the first ones to approach me and I had a call with them, and I just really loved talking to them. 

This is gonna sound so stupid when I say it, but I’m a big “vibes” person. I think making sure that we have the same vision, that you really understand what I'm putting out -  is so much more important to me than just the name. 

But they’re very reputable, they have huge shows on there too.