Tila's career began at the age of eighteen when she was discovered at the Sharpstown Mall by a Playboy scout and was offered a chance to model nude for the magazine. She declined at first, but she was featured as Playboy’s Cyber Girl of the week on April 22, 2002, and soon thereafter she became the first Asian Cyber Girl of the Month.[5]

Nguyen gained further popularity through the import racing scene. She has been featured on the cover of Import Tuner magazine, at car shows such as Hot Import Nights, and in the video game Street Racing Syndicate.[6] In 2003, she was a contestant on VH1's Surviving Nugent, a reality TV show where participants performed compromising tasks and stunts for rock star Ted Nugent.[7] She was also the most frequent host on the first season of Fuse TV's dance show, Pants-Off Dance-Off, on which a motley group of contestants strip to music videos.

Nguyen was featured on the cover of the April 2006 issue of Stuff magazine; in the interview, she claimed that her nickname "Tila Tequila" came about when she was in middle school after she had experimented with alcohol but then had a severe allergic reaction to it.[8] She was later included in Stuff’s 100 Sexiest Women Online. She appeared on the August 2006 Maxim UK cover and was named #88 in their Hot 100 List.[9][10]

Nguyen made an appearance as one of the 12 Strangers in the first game on the April 6, 2007 episode of NBC's game show Identity. Her identity was that she has "over one million MySpace friends," a number which, as of that date, stood at 1,771,920.[

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