For the last decade, Damon Dominique and Joanna (Jo) Franco have traveled the world—both together and separately—while maintaining a popular YouTube channel, blog, and a global media platform—titled aptly Shut Up and Go. Describing themselves as “international badasses,” they set out to create a travel space that’s tailored to young travelers.
This turned out to be quite the plan. Having spearheaded the movement of living an alternative and international lifestyle, over the years they have cultivated a community of nearly 2M+ social media subscribers.
Their mantra? “When you’re 80 years old, what will matter most is not the latest iPhone you bought, how much you’d stacked your résumé, or how many followers you had on social media. What will matter most is the $100 you spent on a trip to Montréal and became best friends with the twerking performer on the train.” In this regard, their catchphrase “It’s time to shut up and go”, seems pointed enough.
But like most travel influencers, their journey began sort of by chance. “We started making videos mainly because we found it was fun,” they shared with CelebMix. “Nobody really watched them at first besides our friends and family (who we would force to watch), but we enjoyed watching everything we squeezed into our trips—cool, cheap, or free places to go that we thought people should know about. We didn’t see anything like it on television or on YouTube, and that’s when the journey began.”
According to the couple, they also knew that there were tons of people out there who wanted to travel but really just didn’t know how—or who thought they were too broke, or too busy, or too scared. “We knew that because we were friends with these kinds of people,” they explain.
As such, their content is very much relatable, breaking down the know-how of the travel/blogging lifestyle. You’d want to follow them around.