North Carolina State graduate turned entrepreneur Natalie Barbu is a hustler, getting "real" with her audience, posting at least two videos a week to YouTube (Nasdaq: GOOG) and pulling in thousands of dollars from brands in the process.
She’s a digital influencer – a social media star sharing her monthly budget to complete strangers on YouTube, snapping selfies for her 61,300 followers on Instagram (Nasdaq: FB) and getting “real” with listeners on her “The Real Reel” podcast.
A day in the life of Barbu is hard work, as she's the filmmaker, editor, producer, actor, model and promoter of her own content. It's so hard, in fact, that she thought there had to be a better way. That line of thinking led her and her fellow N.C. State co-founders to found a startup, called Rella, currently raising $500,000 and in the running as one of 26 semi-finalists for a Fall 2021 NC IDEA Seed grant.
Her life as an influencer really started 10 years ago in her hometown of Charlotte. As a 15 year old, Barbu uploaded her first video to YouTube.
“I loved it,” she said. “I loved connecting with my audience.”
She kept at it, YouTubing through high school and college, graduating N.C. State with a degree in industrial engineering. She wound up at Accenture as a technology analyst, still pumping out content on the side.
After nine months at Accenture, she was making enough as an influencer to quit and take to social media full time. She started helping other influencers connect to brands and build their own following.
“Through that experience, I realized there was not a tool out there that helped influencers run their business,” she said.
She wanted an end-to-end tool for people like her, as well as an affordable platform where small and medium-sized businesses could take advantage of the growing influencer space – data from Statista estimates the industry is worth about $14 billion, a 42 percent increase from 2020 – without having to directly message each individual influencer to get their attention.
So she and her cohorts decided to create a subscription-based social media management tool for influencers that would allow them to plan content across multiple platforms. And the idea found early traction, being selected for N.C. State’s Andrews Launch Accelerator, a 14-week program out of the Poole College of Management designed to help startups get off the ground with funding, resources and guidance.
Barbu said the firm is currently fundraising, having assembled a cohort of friends, family and angel investors. And that it’s preparing to launch the influencer platform in December, with the brand application coming next spring.
In the meantime, she has her own personal brand to pump up, and wants people to break their misconceptions that influencing is easy – and a hobby.
“This is a career,” she said. “People are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year. Some people are making millions of dollars a year.”
Barbu travels back and forth between Raleigh and Miami for Rella. She spent a year in New York, but moved back down south amid the pandemic, at the time expecting to head back when Covid-19 case counts subsided. Since being here, however, she’s come to appreciate how inexpensive it is compared to the Big Apple. And now she has no plans to go back.
“With Rella I want to save as much money as I can and just invest in this startup,” she said.
Barbu serves as CEO, with Johnange Kernodle as president, Connor Boyce as CTO and Nick Kane as COO.