YouTube Star, Netflix Presenter, and Founder: One Creator’s Journey from Undocumented to Documenting

Jo Franco didn’t want to film a YouTube video in Brazil.

At the time of her visit, she had an incredibly popular YouTube channel with her business partner that they’d grown to 1.2M+ subscribers. And for the last 2 years, the channel was their full-time job. 

Jo says she was, at least from the outside, living the Creator Dream. 

But everything changed that day in Brazil in 2017.

I was reluctant to go because when you grow up knowing your mom took you out of a country because it’s violent, you don’t look at it like a tourist would.

I didn’t wanna go, but I was like, it’s a part of my career.

Jo was in the backseat of a car when robbers started shooting at it. 

Bullets are flying in the car, and then suddenly, I lose my breath, and I feel heat in my back. 

“Acabei de levar um tiro nas costas,” I said in Portuguese.

In English: “I just got shot in the back.”

I didn’t know if I was going to be paralyzed or if it was going to cause internal damage. It was that moment where your life flashes before your eyes.

I thought, What am I doing? Why am I talking about surface-level things? There are things that I care about, there are people that I care about that I’m not with. 

Jo realized, at that moment, the business she had wasn’t the business she wanted anymore. It wasn’t aligned with what she cared about most, and she’d been too busy living the dream to realize it wasn’t her dream anymore. 

I didn’t wake up that morning thinking I was gonna get shot. If you’re not living the life you want to live because you feel like you’ll have tomorrow or next year, or the next 10 years… you might not.

The bullet is still inside Jo because it’s too close to her spine to be removed. Once she healed, she was able to walk and live her life as before. 

Except, not quite. 

Because the experience changed her and awoke her to priorities she’d been ignoring. 

There was a sense of urgency to really start putting action to the things I knew I wanted. Every time I touched my back or felt my tissues healing, I was like, yep, life is very fragile. Gotta do the things you love.

On the outside, it looked like Jo was already doing the things she loved. And she did love a lot of it. But somewhere along the way, the work had buried her values, and an outside version of success had eclipsed her own.

It was time to make a big change.

“I felt like I didn’t deserve this.”

Jo was born in Rio, Brazil. Her parents divorced when she was young, and when she was five years old her mother took her and her two older siblings to the US. 

We grew up in between cultures, in between languages, and I never really fit in.

She spent her weekdays going to school and coming straight home. The family was undocumented, and in hiding. 

The rule was go to school, don’t make a mess, don’t act up, and come home.

While it was a lonely life, it was also, Jo says, a creative one. 

Because of all of that time in the house, you had to find ways to be creative.

Jo worked hard in school, journaled a lot at home, and cleaned houses and office buildings with her mom on weekends. By the time she was 12, they got a green card. After high school, she was able to go to college in New York City.  

I felt incredibly guilty when I first moved to college, and I didn’t have to work and clean on the weekends.

I remember not knowing what to do with a weekend.

I felt like I didn’t deserve this. And I think that’s what fueled me to work so hard. It’s like if I get to travel if I get to have a weekend, I’m gonna turn this into the best experience on earth and film it and turn it into a business.

And that’s exactly what she did. 

After meeting a friend in college who dreamed of being on travel TV, together on weekends they traveled as cheaply as possible to new countries, filmed their adventures, and put them on YouTube. 

The channel was called DamonandJo, and after three years, the duo was living in Los Angeles, California, running their 1.2M subscriber channel full-time.

The first time I started putting myself on YouTube, I remember feeling so honored that there were like three views from people I had never met.

And then there were 11 views, and I was like, what? There are people out there who don’t know who I am, and they care enough about me to watch this video?

And then when I first got comments, I remember being like, people care enough to comment?

I’m still in awe. 

Eventually, those first three viewers turned into millions.

What’s crazy is that those numbers are not just numbers, right?

Each person has a life with a story, with a history, with things on their to-do list.

And thinking about them made it less scary because it made it not about me. 

Sometimes I would go out and get recognized, and people would tell me, “I grew up with your videos, Jo. I followed you since I was 12.”  And these are, like, grown people!

It’s just nuts that the internet allows us the opportunity to do this for not just a little bit of time but to make it a lifestyle. 

Jo was grateful for the lifestyle of creating she’d had for many years, but after she got shot in Brazil, she realized she’d sacrificed her life for her lifestyle. 

I had accomplished all of these amazing things on the exterior, but I was disconnected from my family. I was missing birthdays, I was missing time with my niece and nephews, I was missing all the things that I cared about. 

She wondered if there was another way she could still be a creator and not miss out on the things she cared about most. 

She was unsure.

But she did know that she didn’t want to spend another 10 years being so far from what she cared about.

What I didn’t do in the first stage of my career was think about lifestyle pillars, like, who do I want to be around? How do I want to live my life? Am I missing family birthdays? Those were not elements that were baked into how I started my business.

I let the reality of life, the financial success, and the fact that it was working, take me away from all of the things that I knew in my core I loved. 

And the reason I always talk about journaling is because the journal told me the truth.

Every morning during that season, Jo would wake up and book brand deals, and every evening she would journal about how unhappy she was.

I was happy on the surface, I was happy on camera. You watch those videos, and I’m happy. 

But then, in the quiet of night, when it was really just me and my thoughts and feelings, the proof was right there. 

She didn’t know then that those journals would become the pathway to infuse her values into her next business.

“What can I do to pivot?”

Jo started by asking herself, “What can I do to pivot?” 

She was good at making brand deals; what if she tried to make some from her own Instagram account to see if she could make money on her own?

Her following there was small, she says, but she started putting herself out there more.

A few weeks in, I started getting enough brand deals on my Instagram alone to feed myself, to pay for my own bills. 

It wasn’t a lot, she says, but it showed her that she could be a creator on her own terms, that she could pivot to something else, and that being a creator didn’t mean you were only capable of creating one thing. 

Needing to pivot didn’t mean she needed to quit being a creator. It meant she needed to become more of a creator, to dig even deeper. 

And when she did, she got a call that changed everything.

It was from Netflix. They had noticed her and wanted her to audition to host a travel show. 

I went to the audition, and it was crazy because it was the first time I walked into a room and was like, “Hey, I’m Jo. Just Jo.”

And that was the day she booked a job hosting two seasons of The World’s Most Amazing Vacation Rentals for Netflix. 

That was the beginning of my complete pivot, where I took a leap of faith. I didn’t know what this was going to be. Shows often get canceled. It could have been the case where I said yes to this deal, and it completely fizzled out.

But the show moved forward, and eventually, it was time to start shooting. 

 So then I started the separation with the old channel and with the old business partner. It was public, but it was amicable. 

But the Netflix experience wasn’t what she thought it was going to be. 

“Traditional Hollywood is very different from the creator world.”

Jo struggled at first because she was used to being a creator and being in charge of every element of content. For this show, she was a host, and that meant she was just there to host—nothing more. 

As an on-camera talent, I get told, here are the things that you need to talk about. I struggled with that. I’m like, what do you mean I can’t help you with gear? Like, can I talk to you about segments? And they were like, Jo, calm down and do your makeup. 

Traditional Hollywood is very different from the creator world. A lot of my friends asked, Jo, how did you make the jump from YouTube to traditional?

And I’m like, listen, I know everybody thinks that they need to publish a book with the big publishing houses and be on the big streamers, but you actually have the best job in the world. Creators have the best jobs in the world because there are no limits to anything. You tell the story how you want to tell it.

There’s no executive telling you what to say. There’s no budget that you’re worried about. Of course, we work 55 million times harder because we’re doing everything: we’re the gear, we’re the grip, we’re the producer, we’re the assistant producer, we’re getting our own coffee. We’re doing all of it.

So I struggled. But it was a great experience to switch gears and really master the craft of being a presenter, which is a different skill. 

I wouldn’t trade it for the world because it gave me a look at how the sausage is made. What I saw in that experience was creators do what a 13-person crew does on a daily basis.

And it makes us nimble and ready for everything. 

The show also required long hours, many of them spent simply sitting and waiting. During that time, Jo journaled. A lot. 

I realized the one thing I will always do is write.

The one thing you can’t take away from me is writing.

Her co-hosts started asking her about what she was writing, and she shared some of it with them. They were astounded. And so was she. 

It was a big moment for me because here I was thinking I was just a businesswoman, but I’ve been a creator. I’ve been a creative, and I was just kind of suppressing it because of the college debt and the immigrant guilt.

But as a creator, you’re both a business person and a creative.

One of her co-hosts was so inspired that he asked her if she would read and record some of what she’d journaled so they could turn it into a reel. She said yes, and it made her think. 

I’d never considered putting my writing in videos before because writing was so personal. To me, it’s scarier to put my writing on the internet than it is to host a Netflix show because that’s really me. 

But once she started sharing her writing and her love of journaling, she couldn’t stop. She shared her writing in a few videos and started openly sharing her journaling process online. It was the most personal content she’d ever shared, and it resonated. 

People wanted more and started asking her to host journaling challenges so they could journal along with her. 

And that’s when Jo created JoClub, a journaling membership program that gave its members a guided process and community to write and journal and dig more deeply into what they were really feeling and what they really wanted. 

Once the Netflix show ended, Jo focused completely on growing JoClub. And she wanted to do things differently this time.

“That’s an endless game.”

Jo didn’t want her next business to be solely reliant on travel, viewers, or brand deals. 

For the first seven years on YouTube, the game we were playing was more subscribers, more viewers, more brand deals. And I’m like, when does this more end? The truth is there is no end to that. That’s an endless game. 

This time, she wanted to start with her own values: impact, leadership, making a difference, and time for family. To do that, she knew she needed to figure out a different business model. 

Living a creator life where you’re dependent on brand deals is very mentally unhealthy because of two reasons. 

One, algorithms change, and you have no control over it. So your YouTube channel could be getting tons of views one month and then the next month, no views. 

Number two, brand deals are so fickle.

And then you might not even see that money for 90 days. You can’t plan your life with that level of instability.

I didn’t want that anymore. It’s pressure, and it’s not worth the mental deterioration for me. Not only because your content could be amazing and the algorithm doesn’t give it the views it deserves, but because when your money is tied to that, it’s just such a mess.

Jo switched to Kit in 2022 and uses automated sequences to run her journaling challenges. 

JoClub is built on high-touch communication, which means it’s very personalized. We care about you as a person. So with Kit, being able to segment people, tag them, follow up, and build a member journey is so helpful. And Kit is the only tool I found that’s sophisticated enough to make it all happen.

For Jo, using tools to communicate with an audience separate from algorithms felt like a chance to take a deep breath. 

Before, I was posting three videos a week on YouTube. We had a massive audience, super high engagement, and comments from all over the world. We never gave them anything other than entertainment.

It’s a never-ending game. You can’t hire somebody to replace you. 

So when you switch to a platform like Kit and make email marketing and building funnels a priority, you realize you can make a YouTube video, and maybe it gets 5,000 views…but if you talk about a lead magnet or something of value, that gets them on your newsletter list, these people are much more valuable than the $5 per a thousand views you get on YouTube. 

And they’re valuable in many ways. One, because if they’re opening your emails, they really care about you. You have weekly opportunities to communicate your vision, your values, and your brand’s values.

And then, if you launch a product, you can launch it directly in their inbox.

If you’re trying to make this a living, what’s sustainable is having a solid, engaged email newsletter list where people are opening your emails, clicking on your links, and you’re actually selling stuff.

“I never thought anybody would care.”

The week Jo got shot, she was living what many would call a dream life. 

But today, she says, her dream come true is more aligned with her own values. 

It’s being able to travel the world and still have a great relationship with my family. It’s being able to book TV shows and run a business and still have my nephew consider me a big piece of his life. 

If you don’t honor yourself, life will take you in all kinds of directions, and you’ll end up living everyone else’s life but the one you actually want to be living. 

And for Jo, it’s not that she hated her first business. She loved and cared about and enjoyed a lot of the elements of that season of life and work. 

She just learned that sometimes what we want and what we’re willing to sacrifice for what we want changes. And sometimes, that means we have to make more uncomfortable changes if we want to align with who we are now and let go of who we used to be.

That process can be painful. But it’s also what often leads to creators finding the courage to share a little more of who they really are.

Growing up and being undocumented makes you feel like you don’t belong, like there’s no space for you. You are un-documented, which means your story should not be told. My whole life, in the silence of my journals, I was documenting.

I was documenting to prove myself: I’m here, I exist, my voice matters.

Jo’s grandma even kept a journal and vlogged. Her grandma had a VHS camera and would film her life in Brazil and mail those tapes to Jo and her family to make sure they didn’t forget about there home country. 

My grandma was literally the OG vlogger. 

When I started digitizing those tapes, my grandma was like, “I never thought anybody would care.”

Jo chokes up when she says this and then continues, “And I’m like, grandma, of course, we care. Because your way of piecing together the world helps me understand my place.”

That’s the beauty of documenting. You live, and you die, and when you document, you’re eternal. 

The same way that I hope whoever finds my journals or watches my videos or reads things that I write thinks, “I see myself in this girl, and I matter too. If she’s telling her story, maybe I should tell mine.”

I think documenting is not only honoring yourself, but it’s giving the people who come after us a leg up.

And the thing about being a woman, a woman of color, an undocumented immigrant is that all of those things make you feel like your story doesn’t matter because society tells you that, right? 

That’s why I think if you’ve ever experienced oppression, it is an act of service to share your story.

Because there aren’t enough of our stories out there, to be told, to be shared, and to learn from. So that’s how I feel about documenting. I think we all gotta do it, and it would be an injustice not to.

You can connect with Jo on the Creator Network, subscribe to her newsletter, or learn more at jofranco.world.