We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Bao Ngo. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Bao below.
Bao, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What do you think matters most in terms of achieving success?
I think the most important factors in success are practice, patience, and persistence, at least when working in a creative field. You can’t get better at what you’re doing unless you keep working at it, and a lot of people don’t have the patience to put in the time or effort. We live in a world that is very pro-instant gratification, but instant gratification doesn’t necessarily always work when there’s art or creativity involved. The only way to make it work is to push past all of that, and make connections along the way.
As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?
I’m a photographer and director working primarily in the music and fashion industries. In my early twenties, I dropped out of college and worked in a restaurant as front of house staff for a few years. During that time, I was always taking pictures for fun and sharing my photography online. People started to notice and hire me, and after a while, I was getting booked enough to quit my restaurant job. My interests at the time were in music and fashion so that’s how I ended up working in those industries as a photographer, I met a lot with people with similar interests and it worked out.
I love the collaborative nature of the work I do. What I’m most proud of is all the connections I’ve made, treating collaborators well is very important to me. I like to bring a balance to a project where the client is happy, but so is my crew. I do anything I possibly can to prevent exploitative practices from taking place where I can help it.
What else should we know about how you took your side hustle and scaled it up into what it is today?
As I mentioned before, I used to be a restaurant worker. I took pictures on the side, and as I picked up more photoshoot bookings, I decreased the number of days per week at my restaurant job, until one day I walked out. Suddenly, I didn’t have the safety net of my restaurant job anymore, and decided to fully lean into freelancing and starting a photography business.
I picked up more photoshoot bookings over time just by posting on social media and via word of mouth. I’ve never paid for ads, never paid for sponsored posts, the growth of my career has been quite organic, the only thing I really had to do was post consistently on Instagram at the time (this was in the mid-2010s) and then in 2020 I joined TikTok which also was a huge boost for my business.
Have you ever had to pivot?
In 2020, when everything shut down due to the pandemic, I wasn’t able to work on set anymore. I pivoted to being a pet photographer, which didn’t require me to work with crews of multiple people, I would just need to work alongside the pet and its owner. This, at first, was unintentional. I was bored at home, on unemployment benefits, and after six months of not touching my camera, I started to miss taking pictures. I thought since I was stuck at home, I could take pictures of my cat and my roommate’s dog, which I did. I posted the photos on Twitter at the time (now X) and TikTok and it went kind of viral. People started reaching out, asking me how they could book me for their pets. I ran with it. It was perfect for me at the time, and now for the most part I’ve transitioned out of pet photography as I plan to close that chapter of my life in the new year, but it was a pivot that helped me out a lot during a hard time.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.baohngo.com
- Instagram: @baohngo
