What it's like to ‘fail’ at being an influencer
“I was like, I’m just gonna bop around and take pictures of my outfit and hope for the best.”
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In 2020, 50 million people worldwide self-identified as online creators. By the end of 2022, that number is expected to have doubled, so you’d be forgiven for thinking influencing is something anyone can just decide to do. TikTok, especially, is filled with accounts whose whole thing is telling other people how they, too, can hack the algorithms, grow a following, and quit their 9-5s to become a full-time influencer.
So Alexandria Haddad tried.
This was in 2012, before creators were appearing on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and walking the Met Gala carpet, a time when OG bloggers were first pioneering the possibility of creating content online full-time. Enamored of this new potential career path and unhappy at her fashion job, Haddad quit her 9-5 and focused on her blog while living at her parents' house. But after six years, she finally had to admit: It wasn’t working.
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“I tried really hard,” she said on TikTok, which is where I first stumbled upon her story. “I was posting as often as I could, but I wasn’t seeing any opportunities come up for me that would make this a full-time gig.”
In 2018, Haddad decided to go back to 9-5 life, and she’s not alone. Her video is one of many posted by creators who are starting the long-overdue conversation about the unspoken reality of influencing: It doesn’t always work out.
I spoke with Haddad on the phone to hear a bit more about what “failing” at influencing looks like. In this interview for paid subscribers, Haddad and I talk about what went wrong with her influencing career, when she learned it was time to call it quits, and how it prepared her for the career she has now, as the founder of the social media agency Aesthetics Social.
How did your journey as an influencer start?
I started my career back in fashion. So I went to college in Manhattan, LIM for fashion merchandising and I originally thought my career path would be fashion buying. And it didn't actually work out for me. I felt like it wasn't as creative as I thought it would be, it was more numbers. I started my own blog to keep my creative juices flowing. So I was able to shoot fun content—back then it wasn't like how it is now. It was more blog-focused and a lot of writing, storytelling. So I really enjoyed that part of it. And I was blogging all the time. Like my friends, my family were like, “What are you doing?” And I'm like, “I'm enjoying this. This is for me.” I kept going with it for a while, I think it was about five years, and then Instagram came into play. I would shoot with my little brother who's a photographer. He would shoot all my content for me. It was very grassroots, but it was a lot of fun.
But then there was like a moment in time that becoming a full-time blogger was an actual thing. A lot of the people that were having blogs were beauty editors or fashion editors, or were in the industries that they were talking about, but becoming full time through brand partnerships and advertising was a new thing. And I was very interested in that. I had already put in the work with starting the blog, garnering a small audience. I figured trying to make it a business would be a cool endeavor. I always wanted to own my own business. So I quit a bad fashion job that I was just miserable at and I attempted to make my blog and Instagram a business, and it did not work out. At all.
A question a lot of people have when they're thinking about going full time as an influencer is knowing when to make that leap. What did that decision process look like for you?
So for me, I think my unhappiness at the job I was at made that decision for me. But in hindsight, if I were to give somebody advice, the decision to leave your nine to five job would be that you were already creating some sort of steady revenue for your blog or your Instagram or TikTok, that you're getting those like partnerships at least somewhat regularly—not necessarily replacing your entire salary, but that if you dropped your job and put the foot on the gas that you could actually churn the profits that you're looking for. I wouldn't go my route, which is allowing unhappiness to fuel that without any type of safety net.
Had you done any work with brands before making the decision to quit your job?
Yeah, I did, but they weren't steady. I would get one every other month. I had no idea how much to charge. I was getting one deal one month that was lucrative and another deal that wasn't. I would get more consistent content in exchange for product than for actual money. That's kind of what ended up happening. And I had to go back to nine to five. I was getting married, my husband and I had just gotten engaged. As much as I wanted to try and live at my parents' house and own my own business, I needed to be realistic about where my future was going.
So I went back to a corporate nine to five job, and not for very long, I think it was just two years. And then I had gotten pregnant with my first daughter—I have two kids. I knew after I had my first daughter I wasn't gonna go back to corporate, just for other reasons aside from wanting to be an entrepreneur. I really wanted to be home and present with her. It was super important to me. I was one step into working and one foot into staying at home and I wanted to figure out a way to combine them both. So then I started going back to freelancing and then that kind of spiraled into where I'm at now, which I own my own agency.
So you quit your job and then you have your first day where you're like, "I'm doing this, I'm a full-time influencer." What did that day look like? I think the day when I decided I was a freelance writer and I realized I was just kind of sitting at my desk, spinning in my chair.
Like literally the same exact thing. I remember I was home, still in my parents' house. I'm sitting at my desk, I'm like, “This is the first day of my own business.” And then I'm like, “What the fuck am I doing?” Truly I'm sitting here, I have no idea. And I feel like a lot of people don't realize when you're in a corporate environment or a more structured environment, that helps you condition your day, and when you have no structure and you are the only person giving yourself structure, the floodgates open. You're just like, “Where do I start first?” And where I poured my energy into was the content. I was like, “I'm gonna go out, shoot, write until I can't do it anymore.” That's great, but I was leaning into my strengths instead of leaning into my weaknesses, which was the business side of everything. I should have probably figured out who my first client would be in terms of a brand to work with. Instead I was like, “I’m just gonna bop around and take pictures of my outfit and hope for the best.” Not the right way to go.
Was there ever a moment like where you were like, actually this is going okay? Or was it always a struggle?
I feel like it was always a struggle. I really put my rose-colored glasses on and I really thought that by putting my head down and working really hard at the content that everything would fall into place. I think that just was the allure of blogging and influencing that a lot of people don't talk about. Everyone's on social media nowadays saying if you post four times a day, you are gonna make it as an influencer and you're gonna have this amazing salary or income or whatever the case is. And that's truly just not it. I think there's a part of influencing and a part of having a career online that requires you to really strengthen entrepreneurial skills and face that part. And that's a hard reality for a lot of influencers, especially. I didn't realize truly when I posted this video that there would be so much conversation around it. I kind of thought it was a norm, but I guess it's not. No one really talks about it.
Back then influencing and content creating wasn't as saturated as it is now, but it was still everywhere if you were in the space. What was it like to be doing this while also consuming similar content and comparing yourself to other creators?
The comparison was truly crippling. The timeframe in which I was doing this was when the feeds were like, perfection. The perfect house, having the perfect aesthetically-pleasing everything. And also just being a minority creator at that time, it was harder. There was a creator that was in my town and she was killing it, and I'm like, “What the hell?” We’re shooting in the same locations, we have similar styles, and I'm just not getting there.
And you know, a lot of it also had to do with connections, obviously, to network, but yeah. Comparison was a big deal. Now through my agency, I don't suffer with comparison at all, because that's not how I make my money. I don't make it through brand partnerships, through influencing or posting on social media. I do that for fun.
As much as making the decision to make the leap to full-time influencing is its own complicated process, the reverse is probably just as fraught. Was there a final straw that broke the camel's back? Or was it just over time? How did you come to the decision that this wasn't working, and what did that feel like?
So I truly think coming to the decision that it wasn't working really happened with my life moving in the direction that it was going. I'm getting married, life was coming at me. As an adult at this point, I can no longer live at my parents' house. Obviously they would let me live there forever, but I needed to move on in my life. And creating content was holding me back from moving into that next phase. So that was kind of the straw, in my way. My husband's so super supportive, but he is like, “We need to move forward, and the best way to move forward would be to get back into a job, see what happens. You can always try this again.” And I always hold onto the hope that like, I would try it again or try something again. And so after going back to work for two years, then having my daughter, she was the catalyst for trying it again.
And that's having your own agency. How did that come about?
So I had my daughter, like I said, the catalyst. My husband's like, “Okay, you're not going back to corporate, but if you wanna do something, you need to figure it out.” Between quitting my corporate job and starting my agency, I kind of started my own vintage website. It was fun. I loved it. It wasn't sustainable because it would require me to leave the house a lot in order to source products and all that fun stuff. So long story short, I was going back and looking for freelance jobs in social media management and I came across a job for a freelance content creator. And back then, content creator wasn't really a term they used that often. So I was like, “What is a content creator?” And reading the job description, it really kind of aligns with all of the things I learned with influencing: creating content, shooting content, copywriting, helping with posting and optimizing on social, things like that truly fell into what I was already doing with my blog. Those skills are still with me. So I applied, I got the job. They were my first client. I still have them to this day, four years later. And through that, it wasn't overnight that I was like, “I'm gonna start an agency.” I freelanced with them for a while, gained some skills by shadowing other agencies, other freelancers, understanding the ins and outs of how to work that business. So working through this one client slowly but surely I gained the confidence, added another client, added another client and just kind of grew from there. And it wasn't until maybe a couple years into it that I switched from freelancing to now Aesthetic Social, which is my agency.
It's so interesting how the sort of bumpy journey of "failing" influencing was essential for ending up where you are now. Are there any specific things from that time where you're like, “Well, if I hadn't gone through that, I wouldn't be able to handle X, Y, Z in my current job?”
I really feel like the rejection, as cliche as it sounds, was a big thing for me. If I didn't go through having multiple rejections [as an influencer], it wouldn't have helped me now. Even when it comes to pitching a client, if it is not a great fit and I get rejected in that way, I'm able to move on and keep going. I think back then rejection was a bigger deal for me. If I wasn't a fit for a brand, I was devastated over it. Now it's just such a different feeling. I feel more confident in my ability to know that I'm valuable in what I do and the content that I create and if it's not a right fit for one person, it's a great fit for somebody else. And now I feel like I was able to get to that mindset through the failure of influencing.
So now you have your agency. Do you do any brand or influencing work in addition to that?
I don't actually. I would never say never. A lot of the brand deals that come my way are for like, I have children and things like that, and it's, like, leveraging my lifestyle or life for content. And that's something I'm not interested in doing right now. My one daughter is five and I just feel like for me, she needs to have her own autonomy when it comes to social media. But you know, if it's something that's aligned in terms of content creation, I'd consider, but at the moment, no, I don't make any money through posting on social media.