About Nate Whitehill

Welcome to the Internet and welcome to my blog! My name is Nate Whitehill and I am the CEO and founder of Unique Blog Designs, a company that provides blog design and marketing solutions to individuals and small businesses.

My Background

I spent most of my early life in a small town outside of Seattle, Washington called Gig Harbor. In August of 2006, I moved from Gig Harbor, Washington to Scottsdale, Arizona to attend school and start a business with my best friends from high school, Matt Blancarte and Josh Mullineaux.

Less than five months later, I was fed up with working for “the system”. I took action in January of 2007 by dropping out of school and qutting my job at Apple in order to pursue Internet business full-time. It was also at this time I started the blog which you are reading now - Nate Whitehill dot Com.

Six months after I started my blog, in August of 2007, my business partners and I started Unique Blog Designs, with the launch of two redesigns of two of the top 100 Technorati bloggers, John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker. Since August of 2007, we have worked with over 170 individual clients and small businesses.

My History on the Net Prior Web 1.0

I have been using a Macintosh since age 7 - the original Mac from back in the day. Since then, I have been an Apple aficionado and have owned dozens of different Mac computers. Today, my workstation of choice is a Mac Pro 8-Core/3GhZ with 8GB of RAM and an Apple 30″ Display. You probably would have guessed that I also own an iPhone, MacBook, and Apple TV - and you are right.

Yes, I know - I am a Mac Addict and I need help, fast.

I started using the Internet before most kids my age learned how to write a letter. This was even before Web 1.0! My first interest in the Internet came when I was in 5th grade (1995) - I was 11 years old. I started off on America Online v2.5 and I was instantly hooked to the “social community.” I was amazed that I could chat with other kids and like-minded from all around the world. One of my first online friends was a girl from Tucson, Arizona. We started talking because we both had pet bunny rabbits.

Almost immediately upon logging onto the Interweb, I wanted to become a leader. So, what did I do? I started my own social community, called Club, which over a few months, amassed over 300 members. We distributed an online newsletter to kids and teens every month.

I also registered my first domain, Club-Online.com and starting designing web sites with Adobe PageMill v1.0. Unfortunately, after about 2 years, I lost interest in Club and it dissolved. If I had any forsight into the social networking explosion 10 years later, I would have kept building it and today, it would probably be worth major bread today.

Discovering Online Moneymaking

It wasn’t until I was a freshman in high school that I discovered the power of making money online. A little site called PointClick paid its members up to 10 cents per click to go to sponsored sites. I clicked on thousands of links and earned about $1500 in a month, all of which I used at PointClick sponsored merchants to buy two Callaway golf drivers, a Nintendo 64 video game, and a $700 Kodak DC290 digital camera. Not bad for a 14 year old.

Unfortunately, anytime a novice 14-year old learns to manipulate the system to pull in $1500/month, the business is bound to go under and that is exactly what happened to PointClick, like many other late 90’s dot com startups.

It was at this time that I also started designing my first commercial web site for the Northwest Junior Golf Tour. I no longer maintain that site, but they are still using my original design.

My First Taste of Professional Success

In 2003, a friend and I started a digital video production company called infinFX media. Our highlight was filming a few web-based commercials showcasing WRX exhaust systems sold at Seattle-based import-tuner/retailer, World One Performance.

A few of the videos we produced became virally popular and received over 300,000 unique views (and this was 2003, WAY before YouTube)! That was my first taste of “business success.” Over the next few years, I realized I did not want to work in video production, and in 2005, we changed our company focus to web site development and online marketing for small businesses.

Big Risks, Big Rewards

I worked at the Apple Store at the Biltmore for about 6 months (until January 2007) before I decided I was sick of working for someone else. It was then that I quit Apple and began running infinFX full-time. It was also at this time (January of 2007), that I started blogging and educating myself on making money online and especially, branding and marketing.

My other business partners, Josh Mullineaux and Matt Blancarte followed suit and quit their day jobs in order to work full-time for our emerging enterprise, UBD. These past several months have become an extremely exciting time as we now all work exclusively for our new startup.

Below is a photo from the 2007 Blog World Expo that we attended in Las Vegas, Nevada. At the event, we were able to meet John Chow and Jeremy Schoemacher as well as many other bloggers, clients and friends.

the UBD team