How Corporate Natalie turned a $500 brand deal into a creator empire—and her own agency

When Natalie Marshall, better known as Corporate Natalie, landed her first brand deal (a sponsored post for Twisted Tea), she made $500 and felt invincible.

“I was like, I am the richest woman in the world,” she told Fortune. The then-nascent content creator took her friends out to the nicest sushi restaurant she could find in San Francisco (but was really a “hole in the wall place,” she said) and bought everyone dinner. 

Marshall, a Notre Dame alum and former Deloitte consultant, started Corporate Natalie as a side project. Over the past six years, she’s developed a character built around the absurdities of office life, from passive-aggressive Slack messages to buzzword-heavy all-hands meetings. The skits resonated. She now has 1.4 million followers on Instagram, 827,000 on TikTok, and 276,000 on LinkedIn—numbers that have attracted brand partners ranging from major tech firms to consumer goods companies.

Pretty soon after Marshall started making content, she realized she could make real money from content creation. To build rapport and the illusion that she was already a well-established creator, she created a fake assistant.

“I made an assistant who was actually just me, operating on my other email alias, looping in my assistant to handle this brand deal,” Marshall said. “So it seemed like I had this whole business and this world around me.”

She may have been orchestrating somewhat of an illusion then, but it worked. Now, Marshall has an entire brand and character in which she parodies office culture across TikTok, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and has three full-time employees working for her. She was also recognized as a 2023 LinkedIn Top Voice and appeared on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and........

© Fortune