Welcome to Invest in Yourself, the Digital Entrepreneur Podcast. Join the podcast mogul Phil Better as he interviews successful entrepreneurs that make their living in the digital world. Now let's join your host Phil Better as his special guest today on Invest in Yourself, The Digital Entrepreneur Podcast.

I gotta get on this. Right? And then

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another episode of invest in yourself, the digital entrepreneur podcast. I am, of course, your host with the most feel better. And today, I'm excited to speak to our guest. They are the CEO of BabbleBox and has been a pioneer in the influencer marketing space since 2,007. A passion for storytelling and brand marketing and a desire to create an innovative social media solution led our guests to create BabbleBox, the influencer marketing agency best known for its co sampling and signature box solutions. Volibox currently provides a full range of integrated marketing services to brands across industries. They launched back in December of 2015, launched in December 2015. Sorry.

Bubble Box was in 20 eighteens. They were named to Inc. 500 fastest grow growing private companies. All that to say is, Sherry Langbert, thank you so much for being here.

Thank you Phil so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

Sherry, I gave you this very nice intro with a lot of big words and fancy things and flattery, and it's all well deserved, of course. But I would like to hear from you, from you in your own words, who are you and what do you do?

Who am I? Well, I'm Canadian first. We'll start with that. I am I've been in the influencer marketing space for more than a decade. So for career wise, I am the CEO and founder of a company called BabbleBox as you nicely put it. And, we work with the brands to come up with strategies to then implement campaigns across social media, leveraging influencers.

I love that. I love that. And like like you said, you you you kind of pioneered influencer marketing. How did you, like, figure, like, influence marketing was gonna be a thing back in 2007?

I kinda stumbled upon it. I was working in corporate America and was spearheading some ad sales initiatives for Weight Watchers. Weight Watchers was one of the first companies that was started to talk about bloggers and bloggers, and I was like, what's this? And it kinda happened by accident. I started working with, by default with some of these influencers and then said, well, wait a minute. I wanna do some of this stuff, on my own. So came up with the idea to go launch a blog because there was no Instagram or TikTok back then and realized very quickly I couldn't I didn't know how to monetize, because I think there's a unique talent. You have to be an affiliate marketer, which a lot of them were back then. And so I just started saying, well, wait a minute.

Let me see if I can create. And I didn't know that that would be called a network, but maybe there's other people like me that if we add up all of our blogs, we're gonna have substantial traffic and we can create content for brands. So it was kinda like I just built this without knowing what I was building and stumbled upon it.

Oh, I love it. I love that that's the best thing. Just stumbling into your passion and just to realize, wow, I can actually make a living out of this. So you you you're back in 20 2007, I was about to say 2017. I'm not used to going back to those numbers. I feel like I'm still

in need.

But back in 2007, you're starting off your journey. Did you launch other businesses, or was it just like, hey, I'm doing this blog, building up this network of, fellow bloggers in the same space, same niche of me. Did that, like, like, how did you, like, what happened after that? After the the building that together, how did it transform into BabbleBox?

So I think from 2,007 to 2,010, it was really just me and the blog. In 2010 to 2,000 and 13 or 14 is when it was really building this network. And, yes, I did have another business. I still do. I also founded Blog Meets Brand, which is a SaaS platform. It never really got to the SaaS level. It is a platform, and there is some aspects. But, so I built that technology in 2015.

And then in 2000 no. 2013, we started it. And then in 2000 and end of 15 into 16 is when I came up with the idea for the boxes. And so we launched that in 2016 officially.