This week I scrolled ten years back through a Facebook page I’d forgotten I still had, the old page for Partizan, my first company. And I found a younger version of me already chasing everything I’m chasing now. A bunch of dots I never knew were connected, quietly lining up.
Same obsessions. Same way of thinking about brands, about fear, about doing the thing anyway. I’ve apparently been writing the same post for a decade haha!
So I figured, you know what, now that we’re here, might as well take you back to the origin story of my first company.
Why we launched Partizan
Before I wrote a single line of code, I ran an agency.
It was 2015 and I was fresh out of university. I knew I wanted to start a business. I just had no idea what.
What I did have was an obsession. I was completely fascinated by branding and marketing, by how the careful precision of words and a genuinely good story could bring a simple product to life. A lot of that came from one of my mentors in college who got me hooked on it. I got so fascinated with the world of branding that Fully Booked became one of my go-to hangouts whenever I was at the mall, and buying books turned into one of my biggest expenses. The more I dug into that world, the more I thought: maybe this is something I could actually do.
Most of my friends were opening restaurants, bakeshops, or diving into their family businesses. Well, I didn’t have that option, and I didn’t have any capital haha. But what I did have was this obsession, one that had quietly, over time, evolved into a real set of skills. So I figured, why not find a way to make money from this?
A branding and marketing agency was the obvious answer. And the timing felt right. Back then, hardly any brands were taking Facebook seriously as a way to market themselves. A lot of them didn’t even have pages yet, and the ones that did were posting horrifically designed posters and random photos that were never going to help them sell anything. So the pitch was simple: I’d help brands nail their branding and positioning, look sharper on social media, and turn that attention into sales.
And that was it. I had my idea. A branding and social media agency. Now it just needed a name.
Why “Partizan”
The name came from Seth Godin, one of the figures who influenced me most back then. I read everything of his I could get my hands on, Purple Cow, The Dip, Linchpin, and of course Tribes, and I was subscribed to his newsletter too.
I still vividly remember reading Tribes one rainy afternoon, parked in my car by the side of the road in Tigbauan, under a tree.
In it, he reclaims the word “partisan” from its negative political baggage. A partisan, in his sense, is someone so fully committed to a cause that the commitment itself becomes the thing people are drawn to.
And there’s another image the word brings up for me, especially as someone who’s a big nerd for World War II era history: the Partisans, the resistance fighters who operated against the Nazis under impossible odds. People who, despite everything stacked against them, still found the courage to take action anyway. Both meanings, the devoted supporter and the resistance fighter, come from the same idea, taking a side and giving yourself to it fully. That’s why the word means what it means. The commitment, the conviction, the refusal to sit in the safe middle ground of a cause, that was the whole point of it.
That image, people rallying to something they believe in and refusing to back down, was exactly what I wanted the name to carry.
That idea hit me hard because with this lens, when I took a second look at Nike, Apple, and even Coca-Cola, even if you don’t like these brands, when you look beyond the ads and the taglines, you realize that they’ve managed to build their brands around conviction. They managed to rally people around a single idea. People don’t rally around lukewarm. They rally around someone who has planted a flag and refuses to move off it.
As Godin put it, if you’re a middle-of-the-roader, you don’t bother joining a tribe. Playing it safe, trying to be for everyone, being agreeable to the point of blandness, that’s the actual risk. It makes you forgettable. Commitment, the willingness to stand for something and alienate the people it’s not for, is what makes you magnetic.
That was the standard I wanted the agency to live by, and the standard I wanted for the brands we worked with. People who were genuinely obsessed with what they were building, who we could help find the ones who’d rally around it.
So I took the word, swapped the “s” for a “z” because it looked and sounded better and was easier to make our own, and Partizan was born.
Looking back, the name was the mission. Everything we posted was some version of it: find what you’re obsessed with, commit to it fully, and the right people will come.
The premise: purpose-driven brands only
From day one, Partizan worked only with purpose-driven brands. Social enterprises, non-profits, founders using business to make some kind of dent. Not a positioning gimmick, it’s genuinely what we cared about, and the feed proves it: scroll back far enough and it’s post after post about social enterprises and movements.
Which brings me to one of our very first clients: Bayani Brew.
Bayani Brew is the social enterprise from Gawad Kalinga’s Enchanted Farm, exactly the kind of brand Partizan was built for. We ran their social media. And one experience from that time stuck with me. We needed better photos for Bayani Brew, so one Saturday we headed out at around 6:30 in the morning, stopped by the market to buy ingredients to use as props, then drove out to a quiet barangay road, one that barely saw any traffic, running through the rice fields. We picked a spot, set up, and took the shots right there.
That set the tone for everything after.
Working with the Breadwinner: Angelina
Now comes one of my favorite parts of Partizan’s journey ever: working with Angelina.
Angelina Bakeshop is the biggest white loaf bread brand in the Visayas, and probably in Mindanao next. They’re on the shelves of practically every supermarket in the region, and they recently expanded to Cebu. And by reputation, in the places Angelina enters, the bread brand that dominates Luzon is said to slip to number two.
The work with Angelina was intense, but honestly, it was the most fun we’ve had working with a client, because Ted was awesome. It didn’t feel like work most of the time because we all just vibed.
One idea from the COVID season still stands out. We started making timely, relevant posts for Angelina about the strange new habits people were picking up in lockdown. We were watching social media closely, catching the trends while they were still rising, and turning them into content fast. One of those became one of the most shared posts we ever made.
What was inspiring about our time with Angelina was realizing that a family-owned local brand can fight beyond its weight-class and knockout a bread brand that dominated Southeast Asia, and all it required was the hands-on commitment and obsession to detail of the family behind it.
At its peak, Partizan grew into a team of 10 people in one room, working with 50+ brands over the years.
Then COVID hit
I’ll keep this short, because it’s really a story for another time.
COVID hammered us. An agency built on close, hands-on work with growing brands is a hard thing to hold together when the whole economy freezes and your clients are fighting to survive. Partizan didn’t make it through the way I’d hoped.
But it pushed me toward something I’d been doing on the side for years: the writing, the content, the storytelling. I went all-in on Brand Origins full time. And that turn, from running an agency to building an audience, is what eventually led to everything I do now.
That’s the short version. The full one is for another day.
Hindsight is 20/20
Steve Jobs said it best in his Stanford commencement speech: you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward. That’s exactly how this feels. Because looking back, I realized that a lot of what I’m doing now are things I already enjoyed doing back then, or things I was already thinking about that far into the past.
I mean, think about it. Partizan was the creative outlet of my obsession with branding, with building brands on stories that people rallied around. I was already writing about how to find your brand’s tone of voice and how to dig out a brand’s real purpose way back in 2015, and the 12 brand archetypes a few years after that. That’s the exact same thing I’m doing now with Gravity.
And as early as 2018 I was writing specifically about lead generation for real estate companies. Which is funny, because VendorScout, the software I made that helps realtors find and manage their vendors, turns out to be me circling that exact world, real estate, seven years before I actually built anything for it.
The purpose-driven brand work, helping founders find the authentic thing they should be saying, is now Heatseeker: the engine I built that finds the conversations a founder can actually speak to and hands them the angles. Same instinct. Different tool.
And the writing never stopped either. That same fascination with brands and their stories eventually led me to Brand Origins, and it’s the same thread running through the posts I write now. Same voice, ten years of it.
The best part? The version of me back in 2015 was only dreaming of being able to build software himself. And here I am now, building my ideas out on the same day I think of them. The ideas were always there. I finally caught up to them.
If you’d told that 2015 version of me that everything he’d go on to build was already hiding inside the work he was doing right then, he wouldn’t have believed you.
I guess everything just falls into place in its own right time, huh?