My children still can't believe they got paid to watch a film. They were seven, five and one at the time, and in exchange for my posting a photo of them on Instagram watching the movie Trolls, Sky paid us £3,000. We got a free Sky box, too.
The kids were also impressed by the family holiday at a swanky beach house in Cornwall, with a hot tub, home cinema, surf lessons, even a private chef. The house was so big, I took my parents along. All for free in exchange for a few photos and videos on my Instagram feed.
Becoming a parenting influencer a decade ago, in the earliest days of the social media boom – before 'influencing' even had a name – was exciting, and lucrative.
What began as an online blog for mothers spinning endless plates – part of the self-care trend that sought to correct the view of motherhood as only drudgery and self-sacrifice – quickly became a one-woman clothing business selling tops emblazoned with fun logos.
Then, after lots of hard work and as my social media following burgeoned, I saw I could make more money from influencing other mums under the moniker SelfishMother.
I'd have to be diligent and I'd have to make sure the family were on board, but the rewards were high.
Over the years, for snapping pictures of my family and popping them on my Instagram feed, I've made more than £25,000 from paid social media posts.
But it's now time to stop. I love being an influencer, but it's changed a lot since I first started posting about life and motherhood. And my family has changed, too. My kids are growing up and I don't feel comfortable talking about parenting in such detail any more.
So much so, I've decided to give away my feed @SelfishMother, complete with the 53k loyal followers I've built up over the years.
Yes, you read that right. I'm raffling off my account for charity, so that a new owner can run it under a new name. My influencer days are over. I'll change the title of the feed to whatever the winner wants and gift them the follower count.
The truth is, now my children are a little older – my two sons Rafferty, 13, and Fox, 11, and my daughter Liberty, seven – the thought of featuring them in regular posts feels wrong to me.
Online safety is ever more important and as my eldest enters his teenage years, I'm aware of privacy issues. There are so many strange people out there, I don't want too much information about my kids in the public domain.
Last year I went through my personal Instagram feed (I have another account @MollyJane
Gunn) and deleted thousands of photos of my children from when they were younger (after I'd ordered a physical photobook of the Instagram pictures).
As they get older, they have their opinions too. My kids never objected to me posting about them when they were younger, but over the past few years they have become more reluctant to be photographed. The boys, especially, don't want to be embarrassed in front of friends at school by me sharing every detail.
And yes, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that, in the past, the lines have blurred between intimate family moments and 'marketable content'. I regret posting pictures of my kids in bed when they were little, and of me breastfeeding. I also don't think I should have posted a photo showing one of them having a tantrum.
Maybe, I now think, these were private moments I should have kept within the family.
Earlier this year, I flirted with being a travel influencer. Outside of the @SelfishMother community, it's the project I'm best known for. For three months, I took my kids out of school – they were then in years eight, six and two – and on a trip of a lifetime to Asia, documenting on Instagram our days in Bali, the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur, Thailand and Sri Lanka. I posted videos of gorgeous scenery but tried to make it fun and relatable for other parents too. I didn't shy from showing my bad holiday haircut or when it was just too hot to look glossy and groomed.
And thanks to my Insta feed, we were gifted a few nights' stay at Bali's incredible Jungle Resort Nirjhara Hotel, where we were given our own two-bedroom villa with a private pool.
There was a bit of a backlash to this. I had a few messages from teachers who disagreed with me taking my kids out of school, and when I wrote about it for newspapers, the comments were often prickly, accusing me of 'arrogance' for 'not thinking the rules apply' to us, or doing it only because I wanted a luxury holiday.
I also received hundreds of messages from parents congratulating me for giving the kids an extraordinary experience and asking questions on how they might go about it themselves. But since that trip, I haven't posted about my life on my @SelfishMother Instagram feed. I've struggled to post while remaining 'authentic', in the lingo of modern social media. Posting 'authentically' means posting honestly and not looking like something you're not.
I haven't been on any other swish holidays and I've slowed down my social media posting. It's not like the 'good old days' when I was fresh on the social media platform and you could only post pictures, not videos.
There were fewer brands attempting to get in on it, and they tended to be smaller kitchen-table businesses, rather than big brands with big money.
It was rock star Ronnie Wood's daughter Leah who, in 2014, told me to start posting on Instagram, having bought one of my very first Selfish Mother T-shirts.
Lots of celebrities followed suit, including model Claudia Schiffer, presenter Fearne Cotton and Jamie Oliver. The boost they gave the label helped raise more than a million pounds for charities, including Save The Children, Stand Up To Cancer, Choose Love and Mothers2Mothers.
As my following exploded, brands began to send me all sorts of things to promote to my followers – jewellery, food delivery boxes, art for the children's bedroom. Bottles of wine and craft gin – so much alcohol! Perhaps my feed gave the impression I needed it. We were even sent two beautiful V&A sofas.
When my youngest daughter was born, I was inundated with baby products. I didn't have to buy a babygro for six months, I was sent so many, alongside bath products, bedding and a beautiful dreamcatcher. Later, toys and books flooded in.
But other parts of becoming an influencer were much less fun. There will always be people online who seem to take pleasure in knocking you down.
When I questioned one woman about copying one of my clothing lines, she went so far as to find my house on the property site Zoopla and post my address publicly.
On a post about receiving some beauty products for free, one woman replied: 'You talk s**t and your lipstick's too bright.' Which was to the point, I suppose.
You get used to these comments. A lot of people are jealous of what they see or they want your life but won't put the work in. And yet, a decade on, I look at the influencing business and wonder if we've reached saturation point.
Social media followers are the currency of our time, but you don't even need a huge number these days to call yourself an influencer. 'Micro-influencing' is the buzzword right now, and a 'micro-influencer' on Instagram might have as few as 1K followers. As a side-hustle, everyone is at it.
On the social media platform TikTok, meanwhile, anyone and everyone is an influencer. It doesn't matter what following you have, as long as you can persuade someone to buy something — by posting a link to it in your video on TikTok Shop, anyone can earn a percentage of sales.
Influencing like that is often autonomous, meaning you don't need any relationship with the brand. When I did it, sometimes there was a formal sign-on-the-dotted line deal (a post in exchange for money), or there might have been an unspoken agreement where a brand would send me a 'gift' in the hope I'd post about it as a thank you.
Not all of my influencing has been deliberate: one follower told me she'd bought every single one of the cardigans I've ever worn on Instagram, even though I haven't specifically promoted them at all.
In the old days, Instagram felt more like a photo diary than a marketing strategy and it was better for it.
It's been fun and it's been hard work. But now I'm toasting a new chapter. Yes, I'll still be on Instagram as @mollyjanegunn – writing blog posts and sharing articles – but I will no longer be trying to influence you. That world has changed too much, and so has mine.
