Take a look down your Instagram feed and you will see hundreds of accounts posting images with #ad or #sponsored. These are all people using their online presence to make money, whether it’s a full time job or a side-hustle.

But connecting these micro-influencers, as they’re known, with brands who want to pay them to advertise their products can be pretty time-consuming.

That’s where Barbara Soltysinska comes in. Aged 30, Soltyinska is the brains behind IndaHash, a global tech platform that connects brands with influencers on social media which launched in 2016.

We spoke to Soltysinska about where the idea for IndaHash came from and why micro-influencers are the future.

Meet Barbara Soltysinska: CEO and co-founder of IndaHash

Soltysinska started her career in PR in her native Poland, working her way up an agency for six years. Whilst she was learning about communications and understanding the media industry, change was afoot in the form of social media.

Platforms such as Instagram and YouTube were gaining traction and starting to make an impact in the media space.

After supporting one of her friends who was starting a YouTube channel, Soltysinska had the idea to start a company supporting YouTubers. “The idea was to manage YouTubers and support them to work with brands,” explains Soltysinska.

This eventually became LifeTube, the largest YouTube multi-channel network in Central and Eastern Europe.

Following the success of LifeTube, which Soltysinska sold in 2015, she decide to start developing a new platform which would focus on micro-influencers across all platforms, not just YouTube. This became IndaHash.

“I knew myself how much time I was spending on Facebook and Instagram. And by knowing the amount of time other people were spending, I knew brands would start to use influencers much more,” she says.

How IndaHash works and its mission to change the media industry

From the start, IndaHash was about solving some of the problems Soltysinska saw with LifeTube.

For instance, the process of matching up influencers with brands, and then the time spent negotiating prices and agreements, was difficult to do manually.

Instead, IndaHash automates this process entirely through its website and app. Brands create a task for influencers, setting the budget and targeting criteria. Influencers can apply to join the campaign. If accepted, they publish the content as required and it reaches millions of followers across the world.

All IndaHash’s technology is built in-house, something Soltysinska believes in. “You have to have the best version of your product,” she says. “You don’t have to do it internally but I believe that being a tech company, it’s much easier to make it in-house.”

As well, Soltysinska always wanted IndaHash to be a global company, expanding its reach from Central and Eastern Europe like LifeTube.

“Through creating this kind of technology, we can be at the forefront of the change that is coming in the media,” she says. “It’s about supporting influencers to become publishers and supporting them to have advertisers by monetising their content.”

And, it appears to be working. Since the company launched over two years ago, it has facilitated over 1000 campaigns and has over 250,000 registered influencers in more than 50 countries. Whether you have 1,000 followers, or 50,000, you can sign up to IndaHash.

IndaHash has worked with companies such as Sephora, New Balance and Heineken to facilitate campaigns, but there’s one company that stands out for Soltysinska as her favourite brand to team up with: McDonalds.

“It was a big symbol for us. We want to work with the biggest brands for our influencers. And it was a quite a big campaign so I was really proud of it.”

The next stage of IndaHash: ICO and beyond

Soltysinska believes the company’s success is down to its mission to challenge the status quo. “We know we’re in a very fast-moving industry so we know we have to be even faster. We’re trying to keep the right culture within the company, to generate new ideas that work well.”

Earlier this year, the company launched its own initial coin offering or ICO, harnessing the power of the blockchain to push the business forward.

An ICO is when a company releases cryptocurrency tokens through the blockchain. The idea for IndaHash’s ICO is that its influencers will be able to receive payments in the token, named the IndaHash coin, which they can exchange into fiat currency (normal money like pounds and euros).

And as IndaHash’s influencers are spread out across the world, Soltysinska says it will make it faster for them to receive payments from brands, and importantly cut out bank transfer fees, that they can then exchange.

“It was very exciting for us because we’ve done lots of new things with technology but an ICO was something else,” says Soltysinska.

As well, it was also a way to raise money for IndaHash. ICOs are sometimes seen as a new form of venture capital money, almost like crowdfunding money from people who are interested in the company. Around 74 per cent of the $42 million (£30million) raised in the ICO came from IndaHash influencers. This money will be used to grow the company.

For the next year, the company’s mission is to double-down on its vision to connect social media influencers with brands, and expand its reach across the world.

“We want to cover a much wider market than we do now and go global,” says Soltysinska. “And, we really want to be the leader of this change in influencers becoming publishers.”