Natalie Barbu: Pioneering the Fusion of Content Creation and Entrepreneurship

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In this day and age if your business is not on social media, you're making a mistake. If you're waiting to post until your business is booming, or [insert other excuse here], you're making a mistake. By building an online community around your business, launching a product becomes a seamless process and is always a success (unless you don't actually have a great product). Natalie Barbu, the founder of Rella Social, demonstrates this masterfully. I had the chance to chat with Natalie and like all content creators, she's more than meets the eye. She's well spoken, forward thinking, and striking. Natalie represents the future of content creators and entrepreneurs by combining the reach of her online community and her product as a founder.

Natalie started posting on YouTube when she was fifteen. “I started honestly because I was bored. I saw other girls do it, so I was like, okay, I can do this! The first video was super bad quality. It's still up. And then I did it all throughout high school and college.” She wasn't totally sure about pursuing content creation full time, so Natalie graduated with a degree in industrial engineering and secured a full time job as a tech analyst at Accenture. However she quickly realized that she was more passionate about social media, so she quit her job to pursue content creation full time. But that wasn't her only ambition.

“I've always wanted social media to be a platform, a stepping stone for me. I didn't want it to be the only thing I was doing.” After leaving her tech job, Natalie was leveraging her past consulting experience to help other creators turn their passion into full time businesses. In addition, she would do one-on-one consulting calls to help brands connect with influencers. It was at this time that she recalls chatting with a friend about how all social media planning tools left something to be desired. This was her Aha! moment.

“I'm using all of these different spreadsheets, project management tools, and random notes. Things would get lost because it was disorganized, and I was like, wait a second, why does something better not exist? And so that's when I put pen to paper and started writing out everything that I wanted to create and what I wanted this app to do.”

Once Natalie had the idea for Rella Social, it was time to build, but she didn't have any previous experience in building an app. (If you read the Adam Hudson article, then you know previous experience doesn't matter because Natalie also became the conductor of her app.) So she started reaching out to everyone she knew that had built an app or was a software engineer to figure out how she make her vision a reality. Eventually she met her now co-founders. Originally, she was working with them on a contract basis to help her with the backend of the app. But after discovering how well they worked together, Natalie asked them to join her full time as co-founders. She notes how integral her co-founders are to her journey. “I give so much props to solo founders, I don't know how you do it. It's really hard to be a solo founder because you don't have anyone else sharing the ups and downs with you. Leaning on your co-founders and your team is really the biggest thing that helps.” However, since neither of her co-founders had much experience with the business development, that fell to Natalie as well.

“All of us were very new to raising money, market research, all of that stuff. So a lot of the business development landed on me, which I enjoyed doing, but it was a lot of learning. I literally knew nothing about it.” So, just as she did when she decided to build Rella, Natalie went back to her network. She would reach out to other founders in the tech space to chat about their experience and figure out how to find investors. “I would just reach out and be like, 'Hey, I'm trying to develop this app. I'd love to talk to you and pick your brain on what we're building and how to get this off the ground.'” Natalie is proving how important it is for new founders to create a strong network of other founders. There is no playbook for building a startup, the only way to learn is through your own experience and from others before you. “Talking to other founders and realizing that you're not alone, and that the people that you look up to also feel the same way is the only thing that's really helped me. Just having a community within the industry that you're in.”

What got me super excited about Natalie's product is that like so many great products, she developed it because it was something she personally needed. Furthermore, because she already had an amazing online community of followers and other creators, she had the market research right at her fingertips. “I reached out to a ton of creators and asked them for feedback, started beta groups, and just really talked about it a lot on social media to get feedback in real time.” Most founders start with family and friends as their market research, or cold dm'ing their target audience. But Natalie hacked the system by building her community first, and then reaching out to them with the product. “Before the launch I was posting blogs about building this app and what it would be, sharing with my community to get them excited. It set us up for a very successful launch. I always recommend founders to build in public rather than in secret, because people want to see the behind the scenes and then they feel like they're a part of it whenever you do launch.”

But being a founder comes with its own challenges different from that of a content creator. “You have a team, you have actual users, you have customers, there's a lot more responsibility on you to make a really great product. But also to encourage and motivate your team as well, in addition to sustaining the business. There's a lot more pressure now.” When you're a content creator it's all self-made and self-motivated, which comes with its own challenges like accountability and perseverance. But when you have a product that you're selling, and a team that relies on you, you're much more “on the hook” to power through. But for Natalie, and so many other entrepreneurs, this is where the magic happens.

“I'm learning so much. I always say that I'm getting my MBA. I truly believe in what we're building and I truly know that it's helping creators. I hope to not only just help creators, but anyone that's a creative professional or has a social media powered business. I think that that's where we want to get to and to know that we're already doing that with creators is really encouraging. So I really love it.”

The more time I personally spend toeing the line between founders and content creators, the more clearly I begin to see what the future might look like for these industries. But I wanted to get Natalie's opinion since she embodies both titles. “Content creators are just going to become business owners. Anyone can be a content creator and get paid for a brand deal. But I think that more people will do what I did where I used my community as a platform to build something else. The best way to get your word out is by sharing your own personal journey building the product. And so you have to become a creator if you become a founder today.”

If you're a content creator, or have a social media driven business, go check out Rella Social and follow Natalie on Instagram and YouTube.

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