This woman makes $500,000 a year by just snapchatting… seriously!
It’s absolutely undeniable at this point that Snapchat is taking over the world, one flower crown-filter selfie at a time. Though the photo- and video-sharing app is about to celebrate its fifth birthday in September (aww, Snapchat is growing up so fast!), it seems to have hit its stride in the past year or two, becoming the go-to app for people looking to share their daily lives with their friends and family for a brief 24 hours.
Be honest: Do you consider your snaps so creative or witty that you’ve thought “I should be a professional snapchatter?” Well, I’ve got news for you — that person exists, and she makes major bank off her incredible snaps.
Cyrene Quiamco is a 27-year-old graphic designer who has made a career out of her snaps simply by making them casual works of art. According to Refinery29, Quiamco “joined Snapchat as CyreneQ in early 2014, when she was working as a web designer for a telecommunications company. While bored in meetings, she took snaps of unsuspecting coworkers and doodled on them with the drawing tool to pass the time.”
Then, Quiamco started posting selfies and drawing in celebrities beside her, and she started to receive crazy attention, sometimes from the celebrities themselves.
She tells the site,
“It was always my dream to take selfies with celebrities, and I thought it would be fun — and funny — to make that a reality through the magic of Snapchat doodles. Kevin Jonas Instagrammed my doodle ‘with’ him, and that was my first viral Snapchat.”
Quiamco quit her job in 2015 to pursue her Snapchat dreams full time, and she now creates “brand-sponsored doodles” for major companies like Disney, Jolly Rancher, OPI, Walmart, Samsung, and MTV. As part of her job perks, she gets to do amazing things like interview celebrities and walk the red carpet of the 2015 MTV Video Music Awards… all in a day’s work, right?
She says each snap or story can take hours (or even days!) to complete due to the high level of detail they can require, and she is fully interactive with her audience, even raising money for charity on Snapchat. And according to Quiamco, the best part of her lucrative job is having the freedom to pursue her passions without the restraints of a typical 9-to-5 desk job.
“I may just have three to five sponsored stories a month, and the rest [of the time] I get to spend with my family and doing other hobbies, which I still post on Snapchat anyways,” she says.
Quiamco is also passionate about bringing together the community of fellow artists on Snapchat, and she started a website called The 11th Second, where she “interviews and features fellow artists that she finds through labor intensive Google searches and Instagram searches for Snapchat artists.”“I would see these disappearing 10-second masterpieces, and I felt compelled to do something to make it last more than 10 seconds,” Quiamco says of her motivation behind creating The 11th Second community.
As for her advice for fellow artists looking to break into the world of Snapchat masterpieces? Quiamco says you’ve simply got to have the heart for it. “Start Snapchat because you love to make content, and don’t focus too much on the money or career [angle] at first. Ideas are hard to come by if your heart isn’t in it.” We’ll snap to that!
