was one artist who did celebrity drawings, and he inspired me to do celebrity drawings of my own, but I wanted to do something funny. I created a celebrity selfie series, where I would draw a celebrity on my selfie. I’ve always been a celebrity hunter – I love taking pictures with local celebrities and dreamed of taking pictures with more famous people.
So I created a drawing series of celebrities that I wanted to take a selfie with, but knew it would never be possible. But with the magic of Snapchat, anything is possible – perhaps I’d just draw them in!
I didn’t know my posts were going to be a big hit, I just did it for fun. I would spend hours trying to draw celebrity
19
Chapter 1
faces, getting as much detail as possible with Snapchat’s limited drawing tools. I started posting them on Instagram, and one news website caught wind of them and decided to feature me. That article gave me my start. I still didn’t think much about it. I was focused on the website. I wanted to keep featuring artists and get to know them and their art in a more in-depth way. Although I made my website, the11thsecond, just for fun, in the back of my mind I could see how I might potentially put ads
on the site and create income from it. I became obsessed with featuring artists and checking out
Snapchat art, and I felt much more excited about this than about my actual job. I still did my job, but all I could think about was the website and how I could expand it.
Eventually the website turned into a collaboration tool for creators to find other creators. I was deeply involved and created massive collaborations that helped us share each other’s following and grow our audiences. Eventually I found that as I grew my reach, I was able to tell more people about The11thSecond. Again, I was not even thinking myself as an influencer, but focused mainly on growing the website – if I grow, the website grows too. And as I help other people grow, I help myself grow. It was a win-win situation. I dedicated countless hours to the project and Snapchat. It made me feel great, as if I was making something and contributing to a thing that was my idea, my purpose to fulfill – but I wasn’t making any money.
So I decided to make a career out of something that didn’t exist yet. Was it possible for people to make money on a platform that wasn’t even known for being something people could monetize?
11 Seconds to Success
20
I started taking this more seriously, strategizing which celebrity to draw to maybe pull in more attention. Eventually an offer arrived; it was to draw a Snapchat for the NBC series The Voice. It was my very first gig.
So I’m writing this book because I wanted to share my story about taking an opportunity and creating your dream even though there’s no road to follow to achieve it. Never settle for something that doesn’t make you happy or fulfilled. We work to make money; we make money so that we can be happy. If you aren’t happy working, then that defeats the purpose of you making money to eventually be happy.
21
22
1
23
Where did it begin? It all began in March 8, 1989, in Bacolod City, Philippines, where I was born. My mom saw a diamond-shaped birthmark in between my eyebrows when I was born, which isn’t visible now. People in the Philippines are very superstitious. My mom saw the diamond-shaped birthmark as a sign of greater things to come.
While the U.S. is the land of opportunity, the Philippines was the opposite, especially at that time. It was the land of very limited, almost nonexistent opportunities. After a person reaches the age of 30, it’s extremely hard to find a job. People with college degrees compete for retail and fast food jobs. Most people there become OFWs (overseas foreign workers), in order to provide for their families.
When I was 7 and my younger sister was 4, my mom had to think of something in order for us to survive. She had a land she’d been holding onto. It was small, but it was ours. We would daydream about what our dream house would be like. We’d spend hours drawing the exterior, then move on to picking out wall colors and furniture for the interior. It was our
My Backstory
Chapter 1
11 Seconds to Success
24
dream, our land...and we sold it. Our family was all out of options. We gave up one dream to invest in a
bigger dream - going to the United States.
There we were, in the U.S., terrified and alone. A single mom, two kids, in a foreign country with no family close by...but what came next was unexpected, fun, emotional, and wholly ours. We got a small apartment. Looking back on it now, it wasn’t in the best neighborhood, but it was what we could afford. We never played outside, or really ever even left the house. My sister and I would keep ourselves busy indoors; we never thought anything was missing. One of the main ways we entertained ourselves was by creating videos with my mom’s camcorder. We would act out and re-create movie scenes and create stop-motion films and dance videos.
My mom worked part-time at a retail store, while my sister and I babysat each other, making sure we kept very quiet and didn’t do anything too dangerous in the house. Babysitters weren’t an option. It was something that we never even considered. It wasn’t possible. Back in the 90s, you would sit down and watch family sitcoms on TV, and they never looked like my family. It was typically two parents, joyful kids, colorful sweaters, and a nanny. We were so not that. So the fact that we never had a babysitter in the formal sense is something that I now take pride in.
My sister and I grew up a little faster because of the fact that we were responsible for ourselves and for each other. This accelerated our maturity, I think, and was one of the first sparks in creating an entrepreneurial
