In her first months of freelancing, Jesuena Estoque Reimer was writing proposals and hearing nothing back. Today the agency she founded serves more than 300 businesses across 14 countries. On Tuesday she is running a free masterclass with Shanine Velarde, her chief operating officer, where they will show exactly how it happened — including the proposals that failed — and answer questions live.

Everyone who has tried to build a career online remembers the silence.

You write the proposal. You read it twice. You send it, and then you wait, checking your phone more often than you would admit to anyone.

That was Jesuena Estoque Reimer’s 2022. A laptop, an account on a freelancing platform, and nobody in the industry who knew her name.

“I wrote so many proposals in those first months,” she says. “Most of them went nowhere. I was not lazy and I was not stupid. I just had no idea what I was doing wrong.”

Four years later, the agency she built from that account is ranked the number one Softr partner in the world. Mindflows has delivered more than 11,000 hours of work to over 300 businesses across 14 countries, building the internal systems that property firms, clinics, schools and logistics companies run on every day. Her freelancing profile carries Expert-Vetted status with a 100 percent job success score. In 2025 her team won the Softr Showdown, a global competition among builders on the platform, and this year she was invited to speak at Berlin AI Day.

And she no longer writes proposals.

“The clients come to us now. That did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because I got lucky. Something specific changed, and I can explain exactly what it was.”

She is Filipina. She began at home, alone, with no connections whatsoever.

One of her earliest hires took a similar road. Shanine Velarde, now Mindflows’ chief operating officer, started freelancing during the pandemic by handing out calling cards to find her first client. No portfolio, no network, nobody to vouch for her either. She reached Top Rated with a 100 percent job success score, then moved out of client work altogether to run operations across the whole agency.

“We came from the same place,” Velarde says. “That is why we talk about this the way we do. Neither of us was discovered. We figured it out slowly, and we got a lot of it wrong first.”

The reputation is real. The job is changing under it.

Reimer is quick to point out that Filipino virtual assistants did not arrive at their global reputation by accident.

“Filipinos are genuinely among the most sought-after VAs in the world, and that is earned. The communication, the reliability, the care for the client’s business. I have worked with people who caught problems before the client did, and who stayed through the parts of a project nobody enjoys. That reputation took years to build and it is deserved.”

What concerns her is not the reputation. It is that the job underneath it has quietly changed.

“Two or three years ago, a client hiring a VA wanted someone organised who could take work off their plate. That was the role. Now the same client assumes you already know how to use AI tools properly, that you can set up the systems their business runs on, and that you can figure out a new platform without being walked through it.”

Those expectations, she says, are not always written into the job post. They show up in who gets shortlisted.

“Nobody announces it. You just notice that the replies stop coming, and you cannot work out what changed. It is not that you got worse. The role moved.”

For people trying to start now, she believes the entry point has genuinely narrowed.

“Starting today is harder than when I started, and I want to be honest about that. There are more people applying, and clients expect more technical ability from day one. The good news is that the skills involved are far more learnable than they sound. Most of them are not coding. They are knowing which tool does what, how to work with AI without letting it embarrass you in front of a client, and how to build something a business can actually use.”

The part nobody teaches

Ask what actually turned her career around and Reimer does not say she started working harder.

“Filipinos already work hard. That was never what was missing. I was replying to messages at midnight and taking calls at four in the morning, and it moved nothing.”

Two things changed. The first was what she could build. The second, which she insists mattered just as much, was how she approached people.

“My early proposals were terrible. Polite, sincere, and entirely about me. Hardworking, detail-oriented, available immediately. I sent that message again and again and heard nothing, and I could not understand why.”

The one that finally worked looked nothing like it.

“It was shorter. It was about their business instead of mine. And it asked for something small enough that a stranger could say yes without having to think about it.”

That difference — between asking for a job and starting a conversation about a problem — is what she believes separates the freelancers who stay stuck from the ones who move past it.

“There are a thousand tutorials on tools. There is almost nothing honest about how you actually find the person who will pay you.”

Velarde says the same gap nearly stopped her at the beginning.

“I was handing out calling cards because I genuinely did not know there was another way. Nobody explains where clients actually are, or what to say when you find them. You just guess, and you waste months guessing.”

Opening the whole thing up

On Tuesday, Reimer is running a free masterclass through JobTayo Academy, which she founded with Velarde. Velarde will be on the call with her.

They intend to go through it properly. The proposals that got replies, placed next to the ones that were ignored. Where they found clients and where they lost months looking in the wrong places. What they charged at the beginning, what they charge now, and what they would do differently starting again this year.

The last part of the session is reserved for live questions.

“People can ask us anything,” Reimer says. “How to price. What to do when a client goes quiet. Whether their situation is too far behind. We will answer it on the call, not in a follow-up email.”

“Everything we know, we learned by getting it wrong first,” Reimer says. “There is no reason the next person should lose a year the way I did.”

They will also go through which specific skills clients are now asking for, and which ones have quietly stopped being enough on their own.

“It is not that one group of Filipinos is more capable than another,” she says. “One group found out what changed and adjusted. The other has not been told yet. That is the whole gap, and it closes faster than people expect.”

What comes next

The masterclass is free, and Reimer is clear that it is a beginning rather than a one-off.

JobTayo Academy is being built to give Filipinos a way to prove what they can do — not a certificate for watching videos, but assessed work and a portfolio a client can open and judge for themselves.

The name was chosen with care. In Filipino, kami means us, but not you. Tayo means us, and you are included.

“Filipinos are already trusted for this work. I want us to be trusted for the harder, better-paid version of it too,” she says. “We are more than capable of that. What is missing is the training, and access to it.”

Asked what she hopes people leave with on Tuesday, her answer is not about tools.

“That being behind is not the same as being incapable. Most of the people I meet are a few months of the right learning away from doubling what they earn. Nobody has ever sat them down and told them which few months.”

How to join

JobTayo Free Masterclass — Freelancing in 2026

When: Tuesday, 18 August 2026, 7:00 PM Manila time
Where: Online, live, with Q&A
Cost: Free

Open to Filipinos at any stage — those who have never worked online, and those who have been virtual assistants for years.

Register here: www.jobtayo.com

JobTayo Academy is run by the team behind Mindflows, the world’s number one Softr partner, serving 300+ businesses across 14 countries.

Business News Philippines was launched in October 2015 as a portal for readers to learn more about operating a business in the Philippines.

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Moderators of the WNBA subreddit, r/WNBA, have restricted users from posting content that names Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham, according to screenshots shared online showing an exchange between a Reddit user and the forum’s moderation team, a decision that has drawn criticism from fans who argue the restriction unfairly limits discussion of an active WNBA player.

The screenshots, first reported by OutKick, show a user asking moderators directly why posts mentioning Cunningham were being filtered. “Why do you ban people from posting about Sophie Cunningham, who’s a WNBA player?” the user wrote. A moderator responded that the subreddit had chosen to filter content related to Cunningham because mentions of her tend to attract users who are not regular fans of the league. “We filter content based on Sophi [sic] because it tends to bring out trolls and people who aren’t fans of the W,” the moderator wrote.

The user pushed back, noting that Cunningham has an active fan base within the league regardless of the moderation policy. “But she’s a WNBA player that does have actual fans,” the user replied, adding that restricting discussion of a player fans wanted to follow seemed unreasonable. Moderators maintained their position, telling the user that those wishing to discuss Cunningham freely should seek out other WNBA-focused communities. “We have chosen to filter content. If you want to post freely about Sophie you can go to a different sub,” the moderator wrote, later warning the user that continued questioning of the policy could result in a ban from the subreddit. “You aren’t even a contributor to this sub, so I suggest you go back to the other WNBA subs. This is our decision. If you keep messaging about this you will be banned,” the moderator wrote.

The moderation decision comes amid a period of heightened public attention on Cunningham, who has drawn both support and criticism in recent weeks for comments regarding participation standards in women’s sports. Cunningham has publicly expressed support for policies that would keep transgender women out of women’s sports competitions, a position that has made her a polarizing figure within parts of the WNBA’s fan base, players and coaching ranks, even as public polling has generally shown broad support for such positions among the wider American public.

The reaction to Cunningham’s stance has extended beyond online discourse. She has faced booing from opposing arenas and organized protests at some games, according to prior reporting, and has been the subject of pointed criticism from other players in the league. During a recent game between the Indiana Fever and the Chicago Sky, Cunningham was involved in a physical altercation with Sky guard DiJonai Carrington, during which Carrington made contact with Cunningham’s face, an incident that drew additional attention to the friction surrounding Cunningham within the league.

The controversy surrounding the subreddit’s moderation policy adds to a broader ongoing conversation within the WNBA regarding gender eligibility standards. According to prior coverage, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert and league officials have convened discussions on the topic following public remarks from Cunningham and the WNBA draft declarations of former NBA players Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White for the 2027 WNBA Draft, though the league has not issued a definitive policy statement on the matter as of this report. The league has previously said it has faced external “hate and vitriol” in connection with the debate, according to statements attributed to league officials in earlier reporting, though it did not immediately provide further detail on a formal policy timeline.

Cunningham’s rising profile has coincided with a broader surge in popularity for the WNBA over the past two seasons, a trend widely credited to the arrival of Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, whose presence in the league has been associated with substantial increases in television ratings, attendance figures and player compensation, according to prior league and media reporting. Cunningham, a teammate of Clark’s on the Fever, has benefited from some of that increased attention, even as her public comments on sports eligibility policy have made her a more polarizing figure among sections of the league’s fan base than some of her teammates.

The subreddit in question, r/WNBA, operates independently of the league itself and is moderated by volunteer administrators rather than WNBA staff or Reddit corporate employees, a structure common across most team- and league-specific communities on the platform. Reddit’s platform-wide rules generally grant individual subreddit moderators significant discretion over content policies within their communities, including the ability to filter specific keywords, restrict certain topics, or limit posting privileges for users who violate community-specific guidelines, provided such policies do not violate Reddit’s overarching site-wide content rules.

Neither Reddit nor representatives for the WNBA have issued public statements specifically addressing the r/WNBA subreddit’s moderation policy regarding Cunningham’s name as of this report. The league itself does not typically comment on the moderation practices of independently operated fan communities on third-party platforms.

The episode has renewed broader commentary about tensions between the WNBA’s expanding fan base — bolstered in part by newer viewers drawn to the league by high-profile players such as Clark and Cunningham — and segments of the league’s more established online fan communities, some of which have expressed friction over the increased attention and differing viewpoints that have accompanied the league’s recent growth in popularity. It remains unclear whether the moderation policy will change in response to the public criticism it has generated since the screenshots began circulating online.

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