My Story — My journey from cleaning carpet to top-charting apps & millions of users.

My parents immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines then boom, I was born. 8 lbs 6 oz (sorry mom) into the Windy City. Fun fact: I was named after my birthplace: Chicago, Illinois. See it? My parents decided it would be best to move our family to a city in Eastern Washington, called Spokane. We later moved to a smaller suburb of Spokane called Spokane Valley. I have the privilege of saying this is where I was raised.

In retrospect, I think the entrepreneurial spirit (as they call it) was innate. No one in my family taught me about business. I started my very own lawn and driveway maintenance ‘“company” at the tender age of 8. But really, I got my first experience with business at 11. My mom let me use her eBay account to flip things I would buy inexpensively at yard sales (shoutout to the yard sale pro Gary Vaynerchuk) I earned my first comma when I was 13, and though Russ Hanneman wouldn’t be proud, I realized I was tirelessly interested in business.

At 16, I had a couple thousand dollars of capital and decided I wanted to start a clothing business. I wanted to learn, so I decided to move to Seattle to take an internship at a small clothing company. I quickly learned that the low margins and failure rate of clothing businesses was not my cup of tea. I realized that I missed my family too much, so I moved back to go ol’ Spokane.

When I got back to my hometown, I decided was bored of high school so I took advantage of a program called Running Start. It allowed me to take classes in college that fulfilled my high school’s graduation requirements. I took most of my college classes online, and read the course schedule in advance. This allowed me to have the time and freedom to learn and work on things unrelated to school. Most of my high school senior year was spent watching documentaries, reading business material, and learning on my own.

I turned 18 with a couple thousand dollars to my name and lots of free time in my small suburban city. You would think lots of college credit and some cash tucked away left me well-positioned going into college (ideally). The reality of what happened next was a rollercoaster.

I got accepted into the University of Washington, but I didn’t take my admission seriously. I didn’t plan my courses, major, or even plan housing. I knew I could experiment for about a year (or even two) because I had already earned college credit from Running Start. To me, this meant my “worst-case-scenario” was going back to school almost two years ahead of the game. I grew up middle class, and it was clear that I had to pay for college myself. I didn’t want to rack up debt while in educational ambiguity, so I decided to defer my admission to the University of Washington to Winter quarter.

The money that I had saved for the clothing business (that I decided against) ended up fueling a gambling habit. I started playing Blackjack with friends on my 18th birthday “it’s just for fun,” I told myself. Soon, I was at the tables 6–7 days a week, and even on Christmas Eve. I was losing hundreds, and then thousands. My main source of income was a job at a clothing store at the local mall. I was not in a good place.

The dots connect when I meet my future boss, David, in the casino. He managed Stanley Steemer, a franchised carpet cleaning company. The day we met he witnessed me lose about $1300, but by the end of the night he said admired my charisma. He offered me a job as a Carpet Cleaner. It paid better than the mall, so I took it.

Around the same time, I saw an article about someone my age, Spencer, who made a good living with apps. I told myself:

Shit, if he could do it, I can too.

- My conscience

(Spencer later became one of my closest friends, roommate, and business partner. More on that another time 😊)

I had tons of ideas, we all do.. right? With the “worst case” in mind, I decided to start sketching out the designs for my first app. I made it official; I started my first app company a Washington-registered LLC, called Select Apps. My first app idea was called NomoFakes, a product to help people determine if the products they bought from places like eBay & Craigslist were authentic or counterfeit.

Carpet Cleaner by day; app boy by night.

The cleaning carpet job was also a sales job. Besides cleaning soiled carpet and furniture, I sold additional products and services to the customers we’d have appointments with. In only one month, I became the #1 salesman at the branch. I was damn proud of that. Starting from zero to carpet-cleaning-hero made me feel great. My co-workers have done the job for years, and I had risen to the top. No matter the race, I always loved to compete.

Believe it or not, the lessons learned as a Carpet Cleaner paid me in dividends, and still do till this day. I learned how to sell, negotiate, communicate, manage teammates, deal with difficult clients and most of all: work hard & be humble. Everyone starts somewhere, even if ‘somewhere’ is completely unrelated to your desired final destination, the macro principles of achievement are universal regardless of the domain.

Winter came around (I deferred my college admission, remember?) and I was on my way to college orientation.

I drove to UW in my little navy blue Saab 9–3 (below) over four hours West of Spokane. The drive was snowy and cold. My drive quickly went bad when my car slid into the one ahead and then slid into a ditch on the side of the freeway. I was rattled, and my car was totaled.

I was sitting in my crashed car to avoid the cold, and waiting for the tow truck. I turned off my music, and simply sat in silence. A time for reflection. I realized shit was hitting the fan. Here’s a summary of the ‘shit:’

• My baby, my first app, NomoFakes had failed miserably. It got 2 downloads a day.
• ~30 of apps I made next did the same. They either made $0 or were rejected from the App Store.
• Oh yeah, I totaled my car.
• I was broke, I spent all my money on app development and designs.
• I saw all my friends on social media making new friends in college, and I was in my basement on my laptop.
• Living at home was not peaceful. Telling my parents that I deferred admission was hard. But telling them that I decided to not go to college at all was even harder. My parents who immigrated to the country for opportunity felt like I was squandering mine, and they made sure I knew it.
• I felt like I wasn’t progressing. As I write this, I remember just sitting in the shower, pathetically crying as if my life was over. This was my rock bottom.

My long time friend, Ron, picked me up after the tow truck took my car to a nearby lot. The next day I went to freshmen orientation.

The next day was a cherry on top of my internal-conflict-pie. I couldn’t focus on the campus tour, how to get classes, or anything else. I kept thinking about how my friends, family, and society said go to college, but my gut said no. I kept my head, and reevaluated my situation. My decision framework was split into two buckets: rational & intuitive. Intuitively, I just… didn’t want to go to college. Rationally, the drinking, the debt, the waiting 4 years to apply the knowledge, the irrelevance of the majority of classes to the rest of the world, the fact that I had ~2 years of college credit to my name and no real overhead pushed me over the edge.

Rationality won; I called the college financial aid office and said I don’t need the loan. I left the University of Washington the day after freshmen orientation.

Don’t look back.

I decided to go all in on the apps. I maxed out my credit cards and spent it all on app designs and development. Even though ~30 of my apps failed in the past, and I remember one quote that was short and simple, but it kept me going.

“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”

— Thomas J. Watson, CEO & Chairman of IBM

So, I tripled it. This is only one of my App Store accounts, but I had over 90+ rejections (3x the rejections I had before). I decided to stop giving a shit about rejections. I anticipated them.

Months later, a few of my apps ‘hit.’ Including: the first guides on iOS for Candy Crush Saga (which peaked at #185 on the US App Store), Clash of Clans, Plants vs. Zombies, and others.

The ball was finally , and my morale went up. Revenue finally let me reinvest earnings back into more development, eventually becoming cashflow positive.

With zero marketing spend and zero outside capital, I published over 160 iOS apps and 30 Android apps in used across 155 countries worldwide, and in 24 languages. Over 50 of my iOS apps have hit Apple’s Top Charts; totaling about 5 million users. My app portfolio was acquired in 2016.

I’ve appeared in Forbes Life Magazine, has spoke at the University of Washington on Entrepreneurship, and has appeared in media publications like Yahoo! Finance, Inc Magazine, and the Huffington Post.

Takeaways

I’ve learned a few valuable lessons through this part of my journey, he’s what I can share. I hope you can find value:

• Understand what’s right for you. Why do you think anyone who’s successful and/or happy says “be yourself?” Because it’s true. This will take a lot of time alone, and being alone is key. Scheduled and periodic isolation eliminates variables for influence. Introspection is the best way to know yourself. Why not just do exactly what Bill Gates, Malala Yousafzai, or JK Rowling does? Because it won’t work for you, what they do works for them. Second nature is hard (if not impossible) to externalize. No matter how much you emulate, how many books, or how much advice how you make sense of the world and your decisions determine the best (and worst) outcomes. Be you, choose wisely.
• Embrace your journey. Mistakes are made for learning: to be old and wise, you have to be young and dumb. Fail fast (or early), fail cheap, and fail selflessly.
• (business-centric): If you find something that’s working (that no one else is doing), exploit the shit out of it until the rest catch up, and then be creative and do something else.

If you found this post was worth your time and attention, please ❤️ it! I’m at chino@chinolex.com if you’d like to talk. Thanks for reading!