Wendy Ayche was 26 years old when she decided to quit her well paying nine-to-five marketing job.
“I was an accountant, then I switched to marketing,” Ayche told The Huffington Post. “Back then no one really knew much about social media so I couldn’t be pitching to brands without data. I ran my own blog where I’d try my own strategies before pitching.”
She began blogging after work as a hobby. On average, she’d post about three times a week, and before long she started partnering with companies to promote their campaigns. “I remember staying up and pulling all nighters to meet clients’ deadlines and going straight to work the next day,” Ayche told the ABC.
Ayche experimented with fashion blogging, before her relatively small readership asked if she would make a makeup tutorial.
“After someone asked me how I did my makeup, I did a tutorial post. It took 12 hours having to take and edit each photo step-by-step. It didn’t even make sense because it wasn’t happening in real time. So I decided to use YouTube as a platform to host videos for my blog. It was just to give content to my blog readers, but my YouTube ended up doing a lot better,”Ayche told Huffington Post.
Ayche turned her living room into a studio, and dedicated all her time outside the office to creating video content.
It wasn’t long before Ayche – or Wengie as she’s now known (her Chinese name is Wen-jie) – hit one million YouTube subscribers.
“I decided that having no sleep and working during all my waking hours was not a solution. So I decided to take the plunge and quit my job. It was the best decision I made,”Ayche says.
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YouTube offered Ayche freedom and creativity – two things that she felt had been lacking in her traditional career.