A snowboarder overheard his sponsor complaining about a $25,000 website quote and said he'd do it for five grand. He had never built a website. He went to the library, checked out books, and figured it out.
Twenty seven years later that's Ocupop.
In this episode of Forward to Extraordinary, Justin Abrams sits down with Michael Nieling, founder and creative director of Ocupop. Pre med turned zoology major turned competitive snowboarder turned designer. Studios in Hawaii and Wisconsin. Work for Google, Mozilla, Facebook, W3C, and Burton.
This one gets honest about what running a service business actually costs you.
We get into:
- The library books, the pirated modeling software, and the first trade show booth
- Why no company succeeds unless the founder is a maniac, and why that same person is a terrible boss
- The stretch where the team ran the business better without him
- Being a skate punk who had to learn business development and stop thinking sales was selling out
- Why 90 percent of websites now look identical, and what memorable actually costs
- Pricing when the same deliverable takes days instead of months
- Why walking into a Main Street business still closes at 100 percent
- The one parenting rule he set before his daughter was born
- Saying yes every single time his kids asked, and what it did to the business
Connect with Michael:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nieling
Ocupop: https://ocupop.com
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