About Nate Whitehill

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

I am also a college dropout, total gear-head, and business junkie. I have been self-employed/running Internet businesses for over 2 years, since January of 2007.

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 a web design and marketing company focused around blogs. We launched this company, Unique Blog Designs, with the redesign of two of the top 100 bloggers, John Chow and Jeremy Schoemaker. Since then, we have always worked with top bloggers and affiliate marketers such as 1938 Media, Zac Johnson, Shawn Collins, and even IZEA’s Ted Murphy.

Since August of 2007, we have worked with nearly 300 individuals and business clients, including Yahoo!, Nike, and Blog World Expo and iDrive.

My History on the Net Prior to the Web

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 is a Mac Pro 8-Core/3GhZ with 8GB of RAM and an Apple 30″ Display.

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 networking community, called Club, which over a few months, amassed over 300 members. We distributed an online newsletter to kids and teens every month for several years. Keep in mind this was 1996-1998, way before even the first dot com boom.

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 kid.

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.

Developing My First Business

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

When I started working at Apple in late 2006, 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 Internet 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 2 years we have all worked for ourselves.

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 Schoemaker as well as many other bloggers, clients and friends.

the UBD team
Blog World Expo, Las Vegas, Nevada - November 2007