Using journaling “to extract goodness”

“JoClub stands for the Journaling Club, but also makes sense with my name,” Jo Franco begins. “When I started writing, I knew I had these big feelings and I had older siblings who didn't want to hear it. So I would write.”

“I grew up undocumented, in hiding, speaking Portuguese and learning English, stumbling my way through,” she recalls. “I learned a bunch of other languages because I was obsessed with being understood. Meanwhile, I was very misunderstood because I was the odd kid out. I looked different to everybody else. I was the youngest kid so I had this quiet voice and muted personality.

“Of course, it's easy for me to say in hindsight now that's what it was, but in the meantime, it was just agony of ‘Why am I misunderstood?’ and so many of us go through this.”

Luckily, Jo had the tool of journaling: “I had a more empathetic relationship with myself of just observing without judgment. I wrote all of this negative stuff, but I know good things have happened in my life. I started to tweak not only what I wrote, but weirdly reverse engineering how I see things because I wanted to read positive things. I would have to observe positive things to have positive things to write about. I became a more positive person. This tool saved me.”

Making sense of the situation

Going to college in Manhattan, Jo was overwhelmed by the number of voices she was competing with. But she found much-needed space in her journal. “It didn't matter if I was in the States or traveling, I always had this tool that allowed me to come back home to myself.

“My ‘why’ is giving people that same confidence of ‘You got you, no matter how ugly things are. And not only can you support yourself emotionally, but it's beautiful to document your story – because in documenting it, it's a little act of gratitude that it even happened to begin with. You'll always fit in your own skin and in your own mind.”

“There's science that backs this,” she continues. “There have been clinical trials of writing as a form of medicine. People who record their gratitude, will feel more grateful.”

“Give your mind the alleviation. Take the weight from your head and put it on the page. When you write about bad things, you give yourself distance, which allows you to process it with a less emotional reaction. Emotions will drive us crazy. They are at the root of everything; at the root of confidence, at the root of charisma, at the root of walking into a room and being able to attract goodness.”

“Maybe this is a membership”

Jo had certainly attached a lot of goodness by 2020. Through her YouTube channel with over a million subscribers, she was getting paid to travel. “I had this exciting public life, but in the background I was writing. That was my essence: what was really me was journaling.”

In January 2020, she booked a Netflix job as the host of The World's Most Amazing Vacation Rentals. “It took me away from YouTube and into traditional presenting. If anybody's ever been on a production set, they know these days are long. They're 16-hour days and it's a lot of ‘Hurry up and wait’. You're ready to go: makeup, hair, everything's done. You have your lines in your head and then they're like, ‘No, just kidding, we have to pause’!”

In all of those pauses, sometimes for hours, Jo would write. “Writing was special to me and I wanted to turn it into a career.” When covid hit and the show stopped, her main source of income dried up.

“I was anxious, like everybody else. I started sharing photos of my journals. Cut to 100 days later, I had journaled with the world on Instagram Stories. I decided, ‘Hey, maybe this is a membership’ – maybe people would pay to be in a virtual room with me and be journaling as a group. That's how JoClub got started. That was four years ago, which is crazy!”

During the Netflix show, Jo realized that journaling was the lens through which she saw the world. “It was deeper than just a hobby. When you're traveling every two days, you're really tired. You find yourself doing something that has nothing to do with what you're getting paid for.

“You realize, ‘This is how I make sense of the world. This is a lifestyle.’ It was obvious to me if I let go of everything else, the one thing they cannot take away from me is writing. It was important for me to bake that into the next chapter of my career.”

Creating something bigger than herself

Jo threw herself into her project. “I was posting three videos a week in three different languages. I had to hire people, fire people. I learned what it was to create a content machine.”

But something needed to change. “I didn't want to always be working. If you're sick or burned out, which is common in the creator world, you're not going to be able to make money. I realized that if this is a career that I'm gonna keep for decades to come, I need to find a way to remove my face from some of the opportunities to make money.”

Jo wanted to create something bigger than herself. The journaling club started in earnest on Zoom: “The membership started at $19 a month and the benefit was one live call a month and I would send daily journal prompts to everybody's inbox.”

She wanted to curate an experience similar to a yoga class: two prompts, then a discussion, then two more prompts and then breakout rooms. “It became IP (intellectual property),” she recalls. “After six months, I started asking myself, can I train facilitators to run these sessions? In fact, can these facilitators enrich JoClub in ways I never could? She wanted to “extract the goodness” and work alongside the facilitators, who were once members, to create an art journaling format, a ‘bring your own song’ for budding musicians, and the like.

“Now we have six plus sessions a month and I host as many as I want,” she continues. “Beautiful things that I couldn't have imagined started happening: I host retreats and I did a pilot at a university and we're developing different challenges. I could not have done it if I kept it as Jo Franco's community with me at the top.”

Community and culture

“An interesting thing about membership is that you create a culture,” she adds. “If somebody's paying for a membership, they're walking into your house, and then you can design your house however you like.” Jo and her team have researched ways to create more engaging threads so “people are talking in the community spaces, so they feel like they're getting their money's worth.”

“It’s the difference between an audience and a membership,” she adds. “An audience is going to engage with whatever you are putting out, but it's not a dialogue. If I post a video and people comment, I'll comment back, but with a community that I'm curating, I'm involved in the actual architecture of what happens – the minute they enter the membership.”

Jo has thought a lot about the onboarding sequence and how to treat new members. “How do we mitigate that person walking into a room feeling like they don't know anybody? That is when you start to dial in on the curation of culture and that's why members stay for years to come.”

She knows this is not easy. “It's a skill that you have to be passionate about to continue to improve, because a membership is a living thing. If you don't listen to what's happening, you will lose all your members.”

It is clear that Jo has brought the empathy and self-awareness derived from her journaling into the way she manages her membership. In fact, she believes journaling brings a self-awareness we're not taught as kids: “We're not given tools to process emotion. You have tools to save yourself when you feel you're sinking. I didn't understand these benefits. It was just an amazing pastime. As I got older, I realized, ‘Damn, this has been my secret’!”

When people ask ‘Jo, you're only 30, how have you done all of this?’ I just journalled about it and everything worked out,” she smiles.

More information

To read more about Jo Franco and to become a member of JoClub, visit, go to joclub.world.