About

How my mind works

The story

I was doing marketing before I knew the word for it.

I grew up in Pampanga, Philippines. Security guard dad who farmed on the side, mum who ran the house, one son who kept trying to sell things.

First it was snacks to my classmates. We had a canteen in school, didn't care. If you didn't buy from me, you weren't copying my test paper.

Then shoes — funded by ₱10,000 borrowed off my titas (aunt) and titos (uncle), which I'd like to state publicly was paid back. I delivered every pair myself. Twenty kilometres each way, some days. My legs worked out what my brain got to later.

Then a YouTube video about digital marketing turned up in my feed and I never recovered.

Nobody pays a teenager who says he's good at marketing, so I worked free until someone did. First international client at 19, it's four years since then. These days I build marketing systems for brands in Australia and United States, and I finally got the degree that says I'm allowed to.

I know what a business costs the people behind it. I watched my dad pay it at a guard post and in a field. So I treat your money like it was earned twice — because somewhere, it probably was.

I work with people who built something with heart. If that's you, hi.

House rules

Every one of these was earned the hard way, and every one shows up in the case studies.

The big idea has to survive a conversation with a real customer.

I've had my best strategy killed by one sentence from a stranger at an expo. If the customer disagrees with your plan, the customer is right.

Load before you fire.

Full context first — every file, every awkward detail — then the move. Slower for a day, faster for a year.

Pretty dashboards get audited hardest.

Good numbers that arrive too easily deserve an interrogation. Comfort is not evidence.

Build so it runs without you.

The goal was never to be needed forever. Labour doesn't scale; systems do.

What you don't say is the copy.

Every claim should survive a lawyer and a sceptic reading it twice. Restraint reads as credibility, because it is.

Frameworks are lenses, not scripts.

I study the best playbooks, then bend them to fit the actual human on the other side.

The crew

Not a one-man show (on purpose)

I direct a small crew — a developer, editors, media hands — because strategy that can't ship is just opinion. You deal with one brain; the build gets many hands. That's rule four, applied to myself.

Stuff I like