When he was 21, fresh out of film school and working three part-time jobs while interning at a failing post-production company in New York, all Andrew Rea could think was, “Somebody please give me a chance.” In the evenings, Rea plated desserts at a Brooklyn restaurant called The Chocolate Room, while his days were spent in retail – he worked loss prevention for boho brand Anthropologie, meaning he searched people's bags when the detectors by the doors beeped. “So I went through my day with everybody hating me just, like, nonstop,” Rea, now 34, says. “All I could think was, ‘Somebody give me a chance, please. If you just give me a chance, I will show you what I can do.’”
Eight years later, Rea gave himself that chance: now, he goes through his day with everybody (or at least 9.38 million people) loving him and he has certainly shown what he can do. In 2016, he uploaded a YouTube video of himself re-creating a burger featured in the mockumentary sitcom Parks And Recreation, which went viral, and a year later he had enough subscribers to quit his job and devote himself to YouTube full-time. On his channel, Binging With Babish, he spent the next few years diligently replicating pop-culture dishes, from Homer Simpson’s caramel “moon” waffles to the razor-bladed garlic from Goodfellas.
In 2020, Rea rebranded his YouTube channel. The Babish Culinary Universe features videos from celebrated New York chefs and former Bon Appétit magazine employees Sohla El-Waylly and Rick Martinez and has accumulated just under ten million subscribers (nearly double that of Jamie Oliver).
In his series Basics With Babish, Rea teaches viewers how to make everything from flatbread to gnocchi in short, digestible videos. He has his own cookware line, bestselling cookbooks and six-level home and studio, complete with a theatre, gym and coverage in Architectural Digest. But one thing that means a lot to the once-miserable bag-searching intern is that he now has his own employees too.
“I never thought I’d be in the position where I could be part of a company like that, much less be at the helm of it,” Rea says via Zoom one late August morning. He’s drinking a purple smoothie and wearing a T-shirt featuring a silhouette of his own face. Since hiring his first employee in 2018, Rea has been able to give people the opportunities he once craved. A week before we speak, a performance review with his youngest and newest employee, kitchen producer Kendall Beach, resulted in a pay rise, as well as an offer for Beach to helm her own show. “It rocks. It rocks,” Rea says when asked how it feels to have created opportunities such as this.
Filmmaker, influencer, content creator, chef – Rea has an abundance of titles, but he also fits within a new and growing breed of influencer-entrepreneurs. “Influpreneurs”, if you will, are online stars who build their own businesses that disrupt the establishment in their field. They launch products that sell out in hours, produce media for millions of loyal fans and collaborate with high-profile companies. They offer their platform to new talent by hiring hosts and create media empires by launching numerous shows. Legacy media respect influpreneurs for their expertise, whether the star in question is a chef, fitness guru or engineer.
Of course, influencers have always been business people, no matter what sneering tabloids suggest. In 2009, Lauren Luke, a single mother and taxi dispatcher from South Shields, leveraged her 300,000 subscribers to become the first YouTuber to launch a make-up range with French multinational Sephora. But influpreneurs don’t just work with existing businesses; they create their own. They don’t just make money; they invest it.
“I set out to make videos for people to watch and I’ve been lucky enough to have been dropped into the role of an entrepreneur just by sheer virtue of the popularity of my show,” Rea says. He is currently working on his third cookbook and hopes to innovate in the space (for example, he’ll list ingredients that can safely be substituted in recipes, as well as describe all the ways he’s “personally fucked up” each dish). In 2023, he will open his first “Bed & Babish”, a cabin overlooking the Delaware River complete with bald eagles flying overhead. He hopes shortly to launch a “Babish Bagel Bus”. At present, he has five full-time employees, whom he pays “very, very competitively”, and a number of freelancers.
How do these burgeoning businesses work in practice and what are the unique risks, challenges and joys of being an influpreneur? How do you tell your mother and father that your boss cooks candy meth and once fashioned a wearable tortilla chip sombrero? How much longevity do influencers’ businesses have and how likely are they to crumble (like a wearable tortilla chip sombrero laden with guac)?
Many influencers have found themselves as entrepreneurs by accident, not design. It can be difficult when someone with an undeniably fun job suddenly finds themselves dealing with the headaches of HR. It can be terrifying when audiences who love you don’t warm to the team you’ve brought on board. It can be mind-bending when your personality becomes your career and your career becomes a business.
“This is beyond my wildest imagination,” Rea says. “I think what makes it so special is that this is not something I ever anticipated for myself and I don’t know if I could ever pull it off again. So I’m damn sure going to do it right.”
In 2008, three years after three PayPal employees launched a video platform that took over the world, the New York Times ran an article entitled “YouTube Videos Pull In Real Money”. “For some,” the article marvelled, “filming funny videos is now a full-time job.” Back then, that was new-enough news, but for the next decade articles such as that this continued to be written regularly. In 2013, the BBC revealed that vlogging had “become a career” whereby people “can earn thousands of pounds”; in 2016, the Guardian ran an article headlined “Generation Instagram: How Nail Painting And Yoghurt Eating Became Big Earners”.
Today – at last – the world has accepted that influencing is a job. And, now, it’s time to accept that working for an influencer is a job too. “I try to not explain myself that often. I just try to avoid it,” says Sawyer Jacobs, the chief operating officer of Rea’s company, Binge Entertainment. Three years ago, Jacobs quit his job as an attorney for Sabin, Bermant & Gould, who worked for the Newhouse family (who own GQ publisher Condé Nast). As Rea’s childhood friend, Jacobs was brought on board to expand the brand, build up a trademark portfolio and negotiate merchandising and licensing opportunities. “It’s very hard to articulate that you’re producing shows on YouTube and building trademarks and doing legal work, blah, blah, blah,” Jacobs explains; when people ask, he just says he’s an attorney.
James Hobson is a 31-year-old engineer and YouTuber who believes we’re at the beginning of a new age. “There are school programmes dedicated to teaching people how to be in TV and film. I suspect it’s just a matter of time before colleges and technical schools have YouTube courses – not necessarily to become a YouTuber, but to work for a YouTuber,” he says, noting that video editing is different on YouTube from on TV. “It’s an interesting perspective change, because there’ll be a chance people will work for one YouTube channel and then move on to another.”
Hobson should know: he has 21 employees, 12.3m subscribers and a 13,000 square foot production facility in Kitchener, Canada. His channel is “about as old as a YouTube channel can be” – he started it in 2006 as a place to share parkour videos with friends. While studying engineering, Hobson began to upload videos of his projects and in 2014 he had his first viral video series, in which he engineered an exoskeleton that allowed him to lift 170lb of concrete and steel.
A year later, he quit his job working for the audiovisual tech company Christie Digital and shortly afterwards brought on a business partner. Like Rea, he rebranded his channel in 2020, swapping his online moniker “The Hacksmith” to “Hacksmith Industries”.
Hacksmith Industries has worked with 20th Century Studios and Warner Brothers, helping to promote upcoming movies and games by engineering sci-fi tech into reality (in 2017, Hobson created an umbrella gun like the one featured in Matthew Vaughn’s Kingsman. His most popular video, with 40m views, is a real, working electromagnetic Captain America shield).
Although both men turn pop-culture fantasies into reality, Rea’s videos are dark, dignified and slow, while Hobson’s are loud, bright and literally explosive. Both YouTubers are beloved for their sense of humour: Rea, who usually films just his torso and hands, relies on his dry tone, while Hobson is prone to a cartoonish facial expression. The money-making mechanisms of influencing rely on this kind of personality: brands pay influencers to recommend products because audiences form parasocial friendships with their favourite creators, meaning they trust their word. These sponsorships, combined with money earned from adverts that play before, after and during videos, mean YouTubers can earn – and spend – beyond their wildest dreams.
“We found this niche on YouTube where we’re able to spend tens of thousands of dollars developing really cool technology that might not actually have a real commercial viability,” Hobson explains. When we speak over Zoom, Hobson’s long, flowing hair rests on a T-shirt featuring the company logo. “We found this neat way of being able to profit from wasting money on things that you could never market.” According to analytics company Social Blade, Hacksmith Industries is the 13th most subscribed tech channel on YouTube (though these rankings fluctuate regularly).
Hobson’s employees include six engineers, six media producers and six support roles, including a company chef. Like entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, many influpreneurs run perk-filled workplaces. “We used to joke that our company mission statement was ‘Sometimes we do things for shits and giggles’,” Hobson says. The first company he worked for subsidised meals from a private chef who “never made the same thing twice”. It was one of the only things Hobson missed about his old workplace, so he tracked down the chef and offered him a job. Every day, Hobson’s employees eat restaurant-quality meals for free. “We can keep track of everyone’s dietary needs and restrictions. Pick favourite foods. We’ve also got a Red Bull sponsorship, so lots of caffeine flowing.”
Earlier this year, Hobson purchased an 18-acre site on which he hopes to build a skunk works in imitation of the Avengers Campus. Hacksmith Engineering Research Campus (Herc) will be a “YouTuber Mecca” where creators can collaborate. “Part of my dream long term for Herc is I can be that eccentric CEO who walks in one day and can see project A, B, C, D, E, F and it’s just like, ‘The new Batmobile is done.’”
Some influpreneur workplaces innovate in subtler ways. Influencer and fitness entrepreneur 24-year-old Grace Beverley prides herself on the way she treats her 20 full-time employees. Beverley rose to prominence posting Instagram pictures and YouTube videos about her fitness journey as an Oxford student in 2016. In December of that year she founded fitness advice company Shreddy and in 2019 launched activewear brand Tala, which turned over £6.2m in its first year. Today, if one of Beverley’s employees has a pet die or a partner dump them, they’re permitted to take time off.
“A few days a year, something might have happened that you really can’t explain in a legal way that gives you leave. But, actually, your employer should understand,” Beverley says via Zoom, her blonde hair scraped back and her gold hoops and manicured white nails flashing. Her one million followers regularly “like” this signature look on her Instagram, where she posts selfies, productivity hacks and videos of her daily diet.
Although Beverley’s online captions are fun, light and witty (“Just off for a walk in my heavy-duty hiking gear,” reads the heading on a recent bikini shot), in person she speaks the language of an entrepreneur: “early adopters”, “value alignment”, “competitive price points”, “brand exposure”, “customer acquisition costs”. She is late to our call because earlier that day she launched a Tala collection, much of which sold out in minutes.
Beverley is currently trialling a four-and-a-half-day working week and says of her policies, “It’s just this kind of understanding that your team members are humans.” But humans, regrettably, are not always the easiest bunch. What is it like to go from a one-man or -woman operation to a CEO managing a team and an abundance of risks? If your popularity is built on your personality, what happens when you try to put other people in front of the camera instead?
Oh, HR is the hardest part of running any business,” 35-year-old Linus Sebastian says when asked what he’d tell other influencers hoping to expand their brands. Sebastian is the CEO of production agency Linus Media Group, which he launched off the back of his channel, Linus Tech Tips, in 2013. Here, Sebastian’s every-nerd personality charms 14.1m subscribers as he builds PCs and tests equipment. His jokes, by his own admission, are “childish” and he’s not shy about leaving his clumsiest moments in his videos. He’s partial to a rant, or, as one commenter on his third most popular video put it, he can “sound like Gordon Ramsay criticising a restaurant, but for computers”.
Sebastian now has eight channels with a combined 22.5m subscribers and his main channel is the most viewed tech offering on YouTube. He has also founded Creator Warehouse, a merchandise company, and streaming service Floatplane. In total, he currently has 60 employees.
“People have their own lives and they’re going to live, they’re going to love, they’re going to laugh. Friends will pass away, things will happen, and all of that is very disruptive to business,” Sebastian says. “If your expectation is that by doubling your headcount, suddenly you’re going to get twice as much work done: like, no.” Sebastian used to avoid weekly all-staff meetings but has now realised they’re necessary, “even though it’s all corporate and boring”. “You just don’t really have a choice. It turns out these things exist for a reason.”
Sebastian is arguably the prototype influpreneur (Hobson cites him as an inspiration), but he doesn’t rate expansion for expansion’s sake. “I would consider myself a YouTuber first and a business owner as a necessary evil,” he says, adding that growing a team “comes with its own headaches” and later admitting, “As time has gone on, I’ve actually had less time to focus on the things that I like to do.” Yet Sebastian clearly takes his responsibilities seriously: when he noticed a morale dip during the Covid-19 crisis, he organised a “summer of fun”, allowing every employee to expense $500 (£360) worth of activities. Not every YouTube entrepreneur is this thoughtful.
In 2021, the New York Times reported that the world’s eleventh most subscribed YouTuber, Mr Beast, created a “difficult work environment” in which he berated one employee “almost every day”. At the time, Mr Beast (real name Jimmy Donaldson) declined to be interviewed by the New York Times and a representative for him declined to address the working conditions at his companies. Brooke Erin Duffy is an associate professor at Cornell University and author of Platforms And Cultural Production. She argues that “Because the influencer industry is both novel and not well understood, exploitation and worker precarity is rife.” Hobson’s initial employees were volunteers (though he was eventually able to employ most of these volunteers, many of whom are still working for him today), while Sebastian admits his early employees were paid a “slave wage”.
One perk, however, is that employees can build their own social followings. Sebastian says featuring employees on his channel was “something tangible we could offer them when we didn’t have any money”. Yet this can be risky for influpreneurs. When Rea first rebranded as the Babish Culinary Universe, a small number of subscribers complained on Reddit, plus other hosts average fewer views on the channel than Rea-fronted videos. Hobson has experienced similar issues. “This summer I took my very first sabbatical and we definitely saw a bit of ‘Oh, where’s the Hacksmith?’,” he says. “Then it comes back to the YouTube algorithm. There’s always the concern that if you start to lose some of the audience’s interest, it could have a snowball effect.”
In the past, YouTubers who have tried to expand their front-of-camera talent have found it to be a kiss of death. In 2011, American Ray William Johnson had the world’s most subscribed YouTube channel, a meme commentary and comedy offering called Equals Three. In 2014, he left the channel, turning it over to a new host whose videos gradually declined in views until he too left. When a female host took over in 2015, views plummeted while viewers “disliked” her videos in droves. After a final host swap, the show came to an unannounced end in 2016.
A decade ago, Epic Meal Time, a cooking show channel based on the dude-bro personalities of a group of bacon-and-whisky-loving friends, regularly raked in more than ten million views an episode. When hosts began to leave one by one, the show struggled to maintain its appeal (at the time of writing, its latest episode has just 35,000 views). If a business is built on personality, removing or replacing that personality can be a huge risk.
“I definitely have anxiety there,” says Rea. “To spring something new on everybody is inherently a gamble.” Rea explains that he “vibe-check” every potential employee. “While I am central to the channel, also essential to the channel is the idea of naturalistic, self-effacing, honest cooking shows.”
Yet although expansion, by its very nature, relies on innovation, not everybody likes change. The 45 most viewed videos on Rea’s channel are all from his Binging With Babish series, while a Basics With Babish episode is the 46th most viewed. When Rea launched Sohla El-Waylly’s series, some viewers complained that, compared with his understated style, this new format seemed gimmicky and overproduced. Duffy observes we’re living through a “contemporary fetishisation of entrepreneurship” that means “everybody wants to work for themselves”. But, she notes, “Those who succeed in the social media domain have a ‘boss’ of a different ilk: their audience.”
Still, it’s not impossible for creators to take a step back. Beverley deleted her YouTube channel after founding her businesses – she once had half a million subscribers who watched her work out and share intimate details about her love life. “There’s only so much time a person has,” she says by way of explanation, adding that running a business requires a certain degree of confidentiality. While Beverley says she forged her career by being online – in one 2019 interview, she said discussing personal, taboo issues helped build her business – she now wants to solely focus on her companies.
Perhaps this is an easy move for Beverley, because ultimately the product she is selling is not herself. Hobson can’t directly sell his tech (though he does have his own merchandise) and relies more directly on his YouTube income. After viewers questioned his absence, he has vowed to appear “in almost every” video. “It’s definitely a concern and a worry,” he says of expanding his hosts. “It’s hard to be doing everything, even though there are definitely some fans out there who wish I was.”
And yet, in today’s economy, online content creation can still be less risky than many traditional jobs. Legacy media isn’t exactly thriving – Binge Entertainment’s Jacobs says he didn’t mind quitting his job because “working for a big publisher, you know, nothing is ever secure”. The tech company Sebastian once worked for is now defunct. Rea was able to poach chefs from Bon Appétit after several employees quit, following accusations that the company discriminated against people of colour (as a result, the magazine’s own YouTube channel lost 10,000 subscribers in a single day). A representative from Condé Nast told Business Insider the company was “listening and are taking seriously the concerns raised” by the magazine’s employees. Later, an apology post on the Bon Appétit website said staff were “complicit with a culture we don’t agree with” and “committed to change”. A spokesperson for Condé Nast denied allegations that employees of colour were paid differently from their white colleagues.
Influencing is now such a reliable source of income that the influencer-entrepeneur pipeline flows the other way. “People resonate with stories now,” Beverley says. “There’s more of a need to sell that story, to bring that story to life through a brand and make the founder its own influencer... The whole entrepreneur sphere is changing.”
Not every influencer, however, has the opportunity to become an entrepreneur. Duffy notes that those with expertise in areas that appeal to legacy media – fashion, sports, cooking – stand more of a chance, as they work in genres that attract audiences and advertisers alike. Niche creators might struggle, as might those without an army of helpful friends (Jacobs’ first day at work involved helping Babish move house, while Sebastian calls his wife his angel investor).
“Rea’s success is the exception and not the rule,” Duffy says. “Success in the social media economy is not only hard won, but it also requires luck, timing and a little help from the algorithm.”
But in an industry where personality is everything, it’s not hard to see why Rea has achieved everything he has. Despite having the manpower to delegate, he still edits his own videos (for two hours each time), because he wants every beat to hit just right. Rea deliberately includes his mistakes in his videos; his entire brand is self-effacing. (He doesn’t normally wear a shirt emblazoned with his own face – he’d just been working out.)
“It’s been five years now. I’m sure I’ve got at least another five in me, but, you know, the platform is too big for just me,” says Rea. “There are too many unique and interesting voices out there that deserve to be heard. We have the opportunity and ability to share them.” Although Rea might invest in buses and a bed and breakfast, he seems most enthusiastic about investing in people. He remains as humble as he was as a 21-year-old security guard. “In terms of my success, of the life that I’ve been able to lead now,” he says, “I always say that I will work the rest of my life to try to earn everything that’s been given to me.”
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