How I end up traveling for a living ?

In about a week, I'm leaving for the other side of the world to travel for a month, and it's all payed for by someone else. How did I end up getting such a great opportunity?

In order to answer that question, we'll need to go back to 2015.

In May of 2015 I directed my first short film. Almost immediately after finishing it I left for the States where I worked for a couple of months in a small town in New Jersey. After I earned enough money I moved to NYC where I lived for the next 2 months. While I was New York, out of the need to do something creative, I thought myself how to edit and I started making Youtube videos. When I returned to Croatia I continued to make them. At first I didn't even appear in them, I mostly filmed my days and my friends and made montages out of them.

From my close friends and parents I got a lot of support, but from a fair number of my acquaintances and even some friends I got a surprising amount of, pretty much, hate. I would hear things like: ''Why are you doing that?; It's not good.; Why do you think people want to watch your shit?; Your videos really aren't interesting.; Who would watch that, seriously?'' And so on.
In short, it really didn't sit well with some people that I was doing my own thing.

But that's all good. I just continued making them, experimenting and learning through the process.

Fast forward a year and a half.

I made one more short film, and dozens of Youtube videos.

And then.

Last April my friend Vlatko was invited by Marko Mrkić, a friend of a friend, to join him on a trip to Latvia to attend a European youth project. Vlatko couldn't go so he told Marko to ask me if I wanted to come. Of course, I said yes.

We went, became great friends, and I made one video out of that trip. That video was pretty good.
That following summer Marko started writing his blog. It turned out Marko really knows how to write. And it's some of the best contemporary shit you can read in Croatian.
After the summer passed, In October, we decided to go on a second adventure though Europe, but this time Marko wrote and I made videos during the whole trip. Even though our audience was still modest, we attracted a bit of attention. Besides writing and video-making we're really good at marketing our own work.

The national TV and a few other players contacted us about potential collaboration and jobs. Not to go into details, long story short, nothing turned out from that, just one appereance on a show on the national TV channel.
Marko and I realized that we still had the wave to ride so we decided to make another video together, but this time we didn't went far, just to a town next to Zagreb, Samobor.
There we met a guy.
That encounter will perhaps change our lives forever.
After his girlfriend recognized us, we all went for a drink and there we told him our story. We stayed in touch, and about a month later we had our first meeting in his office. He turned out to be one of the co-founders of a big software company, and after three more meetings they decided to sponsor us.

Marko and I got the chance to leave for the other side of the globe, and travel for a month. For free.

So yeah, that's a the summed up story of my journey so far.

And to all my haters who asked why I did all those videos... ;)

Peace,
Vid

P.S.
Do your thing