Joanna Franco, 31, quickly realized after she graduated from business school that no one job would tick all of her boxes. It’s why she decided to go all in on YouTube.
“I saw myself in a career where I could travel, speak different languages, and build things that didn’t exist yet,” she told Insider. “No organization in corporate America could give me that, so I decided to create my own way of working.”
The Brazil-born creator decided to document her travels to other countries with a focus on affordable travel. She was 20 years old at the time and didn’t have a lot of money to spend on items like accommodation, flights, and activities.
As her YouTube channel grew, she started pitching paid partnerships to travel companies and brands. She landed her first brand deal in 2013 with the travel search engine Skyscanner after she messaged the CEO on LinkedIn and proposed the idea of turning all of their online blogs into videos.
“Back then, you had to convince people that influencers weren’t scammers because there was no credibility to what we did,” she said. “The last thing that companies expected were professionals who had pitch decks and formatted emails, most of which I learned through interning at top firms in New York.”
Today, Franco, who fluently speaks six languages and has traveled to 50 countries, has 233,000 followers on Instagram, 133,000 subscribers on YouTube, and 46,400 followers on TikTok.
She’s also the founder of JoClub, a company she said is dedicated to self-awareness, growth, and cultivating a positive community through the art of journaling, consisting of tools like themed journaling prompts, live journaling calls, workshops, and custom retreats.
“Journaling on my travels really helped me become the woman I am today, and I wanted to help other people tap into that space too,” she said.
Franco said she used the income she earned from brand deals in her early YouTube days to build the company.
Being in the industry for more than 10 years has helped Franco build a reputation as a “go-to” creator for brands, she said. These days, she rarely cold pitches companies she’s interested in working with. Instead, they reach out to her.
Starting this year, she’s been working with brands who license her content. They pay her a set fee to make a specific video or post every month and preorder the content for timelines like six months.
However, Franco recognized she needed an updated document to showcase her value to brands. In early 2022, she created a media kit to help her negotiate higher rates with brands. So far, she’s worked with companies including Priceline, Adobe Max, American Express, Samsung, Amazon, and Google.
“The value I bring to a potential partnership has increased a lot compared to when I first started out, so I walk them through a very detailed biography to showcase the depth of my experience,” she said.
Even though Franco believes in fair and equitable pay for each opportunity a creator gets, she said not to discredit the value of a free collaboration with a brand.
One company she worked with for no fee the first time eventually turned into a six-figure deal, she said. A free speaking engagement at a conference turned into a $15,000 paid opportunity a year later, and a language company she used to promote free of charge on her social channels has now turned into a consistent licensing deal that pays thousands of dollars a month.
“The better deals in my life have come from me doing things for free,” she said. “If they aren’t able to pay you but you see the long-term partnership potential, go with it because you never know what could come out of it in the future.”
Here’s the exact two-page media kit Franco uses to negotiate with companies.
On the first page, Franco describes herself as a “refreshing face in media, representing the future of our global world.” She highlights her content on YouTube and Netflix, as well as being a “woman of color, an immigrant, and a multilingual self-made entrepreneur.”
The second page of the media kit includes a detailed biography, including her email, websites, social-media audience, and other credentials.
It reads:
email: [email protected]
personal website: www.jofranco.world
company website: www.joclub.world
YouTube: 133k subs
Instagram: 233k followers
Threads: 25k followers
Twitter: 22k followers
TikTok: 46k followers
Jo is a polyglot writer, entrepreneur, content creator, and travel host on Netflix’s The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals. In the last decade, she has published over 600 videos on the internet across two YouTube channels (DamonAndJo +JoFranco) amassing 1.3 million subscribers. She has created content and hosted shows in several languages, including English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. Growing up as a Brazilian immigrant in a small town in Connecticut and later getting an international business degree in NYC, Jo speaks to the multicultural generation in multiple languages to both the industry and her audience.
Her curiosity is what fuels documentary-style videos during her adventures, whether she’s buying a house or learning a new language from scratch. Her audience has become a global community of people who are inspired to take life into their own hands, as Jo does.
She is the CEO and founder of JoClub, a diverse and global journaling club where she uses journaling and community as a catalyst for self-development and community for members. The club has over 28K followers on Instagram, and hundreds of global members meet 12 times monthly to share their introspection with the world through live journaling events hosted by Jo and trained facilitators. She has also organized and successfully run three retreats in Croatia and Mexico and plans six more trips in 2024.
Jo is also the author of the bestselling language learning book and journal Fluentish and launched JoClub Fluent to teach language through her company.
Her expertise has landed her a spot on Forbes’s top travel influencer list in 2017, and she’s spoken at prestigious events such as SXSW, keynoted at the Women’s Travel Fest, and led workshops at Google and Amazon, to name a few.
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