Julian and Jovani Jara attended Santaluces for two years before they became famous across a variety of social media outlets. The Jara twins, who would be juniors this year, are now home schooled as they spend the majority of their time on tour meeting fans at different kinds of events.
Jovani Jara currently has 413,000 followers on Instagram and Julian Jara has 409,000 followers. Together they call themselves 99Goonsquad on a joint account where they have 629,000 followers.
The twins’ social media platform exploded when their Youtube videos began gaining more and more popularity in the middle of their freshman year. When the app younow became relevant, the twins used it to broadcast daily, and it gave them the ability to interact with thousands of supporters who watched them live.
“We started on youtube, but younow is most likely why we have become so well known. We wouldn’t consider us famous, but we are definitely climbing the social media ladder,” Julian Jara said. “We don’t really call people our fans, but more like our supporters, because they’re supporting our dreams to be successful.”
The Twins have been on four tours since their careers have taken off. Each tour covers about 20 or more cities in the span of 2-3 months. They have also had the opportunity to host social media events like Vidcon and Playlist Live.
“Our last tour was this past summer, we traveled internationally to Amsterdam, Paris and London,” Jovani Jara said. “We also visited Canada which was an out of this world experience.”
The twins work intensely hard everyday promoting their platform. The twins say their work days total to about 20 hours a day, because there is a lot of work to do to stay relevant and to keep climbing up the latter of social media.
“Few realize how much effort we put into our social media platform,” Julian Jara said. “It’s a lot of work planning, producing videos and music. All on top of working on music sets we will perform when we DJ at our shows and doing promotional work, but we love it and wouldn’t give it up for anything.”
Both twins love doing social media not for the fame or glory, but to inspire their supporters to get past all the bad things in their life. The motto for 99Goonsquad is “It’s not a bad life it’s just a bad day.”
“I love doing this because I always love motivating people,” Jovani Jara said. “Getting people to follow their dream to work hard and to never give up when life gets tough is something I regard very highly.”
“I love doing this because I get to travel the world to see people who love what my brother and I love doing,” Jullian Jara said. “I love inspiring people to work hard to achieve their goals like Jovani and I have.
The twins have been doing this for nearly two years now and have no plan in the near future of stopping. They absolutely love what they do and especially the feedback they receive from their fans.
“We plan on doing this as long as our supporters allow us too. We love what we do and know that all our hard work is worth it when we hear from our supporters,” Jullian Jara said. ” The way we have made our supporters’ day or made them happy or how we have motivated them to be better at anything they put their minds to. How we have stopped them from having depression and hurting themselves, all of these things make it worth it.”
The best part of having a voice on the social media platform, the twins believe, is connecting with their supporters, which they call “goonies”.
“We can’t put it into words how much we love our goonies! They are our motivation, our life! It’s one of the main reasons we go on tour to thank them personally for all the love and support they give us everyday,” Jovani Jara said. “For allowing us to follow our dreams of becoming the greatest DJ and music producers as well as social media influences and having them every step of the way supporting us. There is no better feeling in this world.”
