Samantha Cutler is a social media force, with 40,000 followers on Instagram and 80,000 on Tik Tok (and counting!) She’s continuing to evolve in the fitness and wellness space, not only helping other creators, but also positively influencing and supporting her community.
She spoke with Debu about wellness, authenticity, and growth along her journey.
You’ve created a community of lifestyle, wellness, and fitness followers through The Fit Fatale. You address meditation, self-care, and resilience, and you also share your journey through podcasts. How did this all start?
I started my career on social media eight years ago. I was working in the corporate space and wanted a creative outlet. I met a lot of young entrepreneurs and interviewed them on my blog. Things started to grow in the early days of Instagram while I was balancing 60- to 80-hour weeks at my corporate job.
Due to stress, I started to get really sick, including a stomach ulcer, acne, and weight gain. At the time, I did not understand the link between mental stress and the impact on my body. I took a step back and I left my job, rebranded, focused on wellness, and created The Fit Fatale — a community based on the belief that women can turn fitness and feeling good into their most powerful tool.
We started with a blog, Instagram, developed a podcast, on-demand meditation platform, wellness coaching, and TikTok — and now, at-home wellness planning products. With the content we’re building, our priority is adding value every day and positively impacting others. It’s about telling the story of what works for me and hope that people can find tools that help them.
In addition to your own work, you and your fiancé founded Cloutdesk, a business that assists other creators with various aspects of growing and scaling their content, including streamlining invoices, brand partnerships, and content approval. How is what you do in this space unique?
We started Cloutdesk because of my issues with getting paid by brands, keeping up with deliverable requirements, and seeing myself on national tv ads after not knowing the rights I was signing off on. I had faced barriers with lengthy contracts, including complex legal jargon and not being properly compensated. We built the platform to help the industry evolve and mature, giving smaller independent entrepreneurs the same tools that a brand with 10,000 employees may have.
We help facilitate the relationship between the brand and the creator. Within Cloutdesk, a creator can track deals, creator contracts, send content for approval or feedback, send invoices, and get paid. Everything is automated. It helps track and streamline everything, making the entire process really simple. It’s professional, and it helps creators succeed.
With Cloutdesk and The Fit Fatale, what is it like dealing with the business side of things while in the process of creating and growing your brand?
I’m fortunate that my fiancé is our CEO and spearheads building the platform, so I can continue to create content and widen my network of our end users, both brands and creators. What I do day-to-day at The Fit Fatale brings a lot of benefit to the way in which Cloutdesk operates.
Brands can have a hard time speaking to their customers and understanding what they actually need. I have been fortunate to be not only a co-founder and end user, but also to have a vast network of brands and creators who use and contribute to the development of Cloutdesk.
What do you love most about your current roles, and what are you looking forward to next?
What I love most is helping people. Through refining my understanding of seven key health habits in a day that lead to feeling good, and after learning for myself how to build and maintain them, I have dedicated a big portion of the past year and my time [to] helping my community do the same.
It is why we recently launched The Fit Planner, a weekly healthy habit-tracking planner that helps you customize and develop your seven key health habits, by setting goals and habits that you’re tracking. My one-to-one coaching has become very popular, but I can only help so many people a week. With The Fit Planner, I am able not only to help more people, but give them the tool I personally used for two years to make the biggest lifestyle shift of my life. They now have that at their fingertips.
Stephanie Hawkins | Contributing Writer
