Name: We quit our six-figure jobs after joining ‘Love is Blind’ and now make 3x our salaries as influencers
Uploaded: 2023-09-22
Duration: 9 min 12 s

How do you slyly tell your boss that you need more than five weeks off to film a hit reality T.V. show where you could meet your future spouse in a 12-by-12-foot pod? Better yet, how do you explain that you won’t see your partner before actually saying “yes” to a marriage proposal, you’ll only have 28 days with them before you say “I do,” and you’re quitting your job to pursue an influencer career?  

We quit our six-figure jobs after joining ‘Love is Blind’ and now make 3x our salaries as influencers 

Deepti Vempati and Natalie Lee have netted over $500,000 each from their influencer careers.

Features

Neither ended up saying “I do” at the altar, but their season’s finale was just the beginning of profitable careers as viral personalities

We quit our six-figure jobs and now make 3x our salaries as influencers 

How do you explain to your boss that you won’t see your partner before actually saying “yes” to a marriage proposal, you’ll only have 28 days with them before you say “I do,” and you’re quitting your job to pursue an influencer career?  

As influencers after the show has aired, we both made over a half a million dollars each each. My name is Patty. I am 32 years old and I'm Natalie Lee and I'm 31 years old and you may recognize us from Love is season two. I really enjoyed my job. I still kept my job throughout filming Love Is Blind. And also after, and even while the show was coming out, I also loved my job. And even though I quit that job, I can still use the things that I learned in technology in content creation today. Honestly, I did not tell my boss that I was going to go film a reality TV show because I, I just don't think that I would have gone over. Well, you didn't, no, I didn't have um I was just like, I accumulated my PT O days and I was just like, hey, I'm gonna be taking a long vacation and most of like the filming the second half of it, I literally just worked around it. So I didn't have to tell them. I was honest with my boss that I was doing a reality TV show I didn't say it was Love is Blind because I feel like that would have been a whole other conversation about, you know, getting engaged, sight unseen and things like that. We were able to work while filming Love Is Blind. So that made it much easier and more like palatable for my boss allowed me to take the time off for the show. They were like, what are you doing? They're like, you don't really seem like the type to do reality TV. And I was like, oh, it's like a marriage, a serious marriage show. And then so they didn't know it was Love Is Line and then it came out and they were like, uh you did this show on Netflix. Like we thought it was like a documentary about like this is why I didn't tell them. This is why I didn't tell them because I'm not trying to have that conversation. I won't lie. It did impact me professionally a lot. Like I remember being in meetings with my coworkers and my clients and they would like, you could tell, they want to ask questions and, you know, I'd be doing a presentation or something and they're like, so, uh how was it like in those, I'm like, what I thought we were talking about like this Excel Sheet that I spend like 18 hours on while the show was airing. I realized like, the impact that it had just on my life in general. And I really wanted to continue working. But I was realizing like kind of months into it that I wasn't able to do content creation and working full time and showing up at my 100% in both. So for me just to give it my own all into one career path, I had to pick a lane. And so I decided to take a risk and to quit my corporate job after love is aired. And you know, our social media following went up, I did see a huge shift when it came to my yearly salary. I am making as a content creator three times my corporate salary. And so it just made sense for me to pursue content creation full time. I would say 95% of my current income. It's from brand deals. Me and my brand manager don't want to overwhelm like my social media because you want to have a mix of like organic content and branded content. When you're representing a brand through your content, you want to make sure that it speaks to you. Sometimes it can be a very high deal like almost a salary as worth. But other times it's very low like only 2 to 3 K, but those smaller brand deals mean more to you because you are using them in your everyday life. When we saw the money that we can make from sponsorships and just from social media and putting content out there, that's when I started to think I could really go far with this. I won't share the brand, but I, the most I've gotten paid for a brand deal is around 50 K. And um that was pretty amazing and I used the brand and the fact that they also allowed me the creativity to create content for them of authentically using it. I thought that was so cool. The amount that I'm making now is exponentially higher than what I was before. I do invest a lot of it into stocks. I'm trying to educate myself more in the financial world and to figuring out how I can invest it, I want to be a homeowner soon. So even investing in property is a big deal for me and also saving for my environment, OK, here's how I save and invest my money first, it goes into my 401k, I max that out and then it goes into a back door Roth Ira and then I will invest in index funds. So the S and P 500 then I can from finance and then I will put a little bit into my high yield savings account or into the money market, my money market account. And then, yeah, and then I have nothing for myself and I are both daughters of immigrants. Something that we've talked about often is like the money that we save is really for our family to kind of give back and, and what they put in on us, like I know that sending me to college, but just like making sure that I got the best education growing up that took a lot on my family and to take me to violin lessons because they wanted me to have different skill sets. Like I know that that was a struggle for my family sometimes. And so for me, when I think about the money that I make as an influencer, it's not for me, it's for my family. Absolutely. I second that like, um my parents sacrificed so much and they left their entire family behind so that me and my could have an amazing life here. And so this is just like a testament to their sacrifice. It's really hard hearing their stories and how they grew up in the US is facing a lot of racism, but also just how poor they were in the country because they didn't know English and their parents didn't know English. I remember my dad told me that having cereal was a luxury. Like it was kind of seen as dessert when he was growing up. My parents immigrated from India. I was eight years old when I moved to America and it was the toughest transition ever. And I think I mentioned before, I was like extremely bullied. I couldn't even understand my teacher's English. Like it was like a hard dialect for me to pick up on. And so it was a hard transition I think it's really powerful, like coming from um a family of immigrants and just kind of the different values and skill sets that you do learn, you know, just the skill sets of survival, surviving in a country where you don't speak the language. Um And so you, it really helps you not take life for granted. I think the podcast has really given us a platform and an opportunity to really connect with people on a broader scale. We took a conversation and we made it into an idea and then uh everything kind of just came to fruition from there. We got the mics, we were like, let's just practice, let's let's just recap these episodes. And I think that really spearheaded us into such an amazing opportunity because now we have a platform to really speak our mind and also, you know, talk about a show that has um you know, spearheaded us into uh all these opportunities we edit, we produce the videos all on our own. And so it's been a huge learning opportunity and another opportunity for us to be entrepreneurs. We partnered with an agency. And right now we are um in the works of signing with a podcast network. So we would have never thought that our podcast could have gone this far, honestly hitting um number 20 on Apple podcast charts and also number 10 on Spotify Us podcast charts. I mean, that was insane. We did not realize um how successful the podcast can be. The show has really opened up a window of opportunities for me. I am a ted speaker. I'm an author. I feel like I have no idea what's gonna come in the future and it is a little scary, but it's also extremely exciting. I have no idea how long this content creation or influencer life is going to last. But as long as I show up authentically create good content for brands, I feel like I can keep it going. And if at any moment, I can't, I literally will go back to training, get well versed in technology again because that's where my roots are. I'm not an author, but I was mentioned in one page in D C's book. But for me, it is short term. Um I just can't see myself doing it forever and sharing my life. Um I'm a pretty private person and quite honestly, I really like being a management consultant. I like being able to work with different people, work in different industries, work with different clients and learn from them and you can't really do, do that as an influencer. So I really do kind of miss that world. I'm gonna take advantage of the money strike when the iron's hot, obviously. But I think within the next few years, I could see myself going back into the corporate world. I'm sure someone's gonna watch this interview and talk about how it was pile, right here and right here and you know what I mean? That sure. Yeah.