Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey in design services but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Matthew Manos, Founder of verynice, located in Los Angeles, CA, USA.
What's your business, and who are your customers?
verynice is a design strategy practice that gives half of its services away for free to nonprofit organizations. With a portfolio of work that has reached millions of people across the globe, verynice’s client experience spans 1,000+ brands, including the American Heart Association, Apple, the City of Los Angeles, Disney Imagineering, Google, REI, and the United Nations. One of the first examples of social entrepreneurship in the design services industry, verynice launched with a mission to alleviate expenses for nonprofit organizations while increasing access to design for all. Since its founding in 2008, the company has been able to displace nearly $50,000,000 USD in professional services through its groundbreaking pro-bono and open-access initiatives.
Tell us about yourself
I launched verynice in 2008 from an apartment while attending UCLA, but the origins were actually a few years before that and can actually be traced back to when I was 16 years old, in 2005, which is when I started my freelance design career. I had started taking this class on “digital art.” I was learning Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign… a lot of the basics of the mediums I work in today. I got into it, and many of my family members could tell that I was getting into it. Eventually, to support this newfound passion, my godmother, who was studying art in Australia then, decided to send me a CD Rom disk with a pirated copy of Photoshop. Shortly before receiving this disc, I bought my first apple computer. I had everything I needed to kick off a career in design. Luckily, as a high school student, I also had much free time. Working late into the night each night, I taught myself things here and there in order to expand upon my understanding of the software. I found, however, that I was spending most of my time manipulating photographs to make them so that my friends would have crazy eyes and hair. Needless to say, I was hungry for meaningful work and eager to make something that someone could use. This idea of usefulness, something at the core of design, was a real inspiring concept to me. As a result, I kept my eyes open for a project that could help me fulfill that need.
Back then, and still to this day, I spent a lot of time skateboarding. Every weekend, I would go to the skate park with my dad in Sunnyvale, California. Something really interesting happened one day when I was sitting on one of the ledges taking a break. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a man in a wheelchair jumping into the bowl. Needless to say, this was a pretty unusual sighting, especially upon realizing that he was actually more talented than the rest of us. Out of curiosity, I decided to move a little closer to him. Upon doing so, I realized that we were not alone but with a bunch of little kids who were also in wheelchairs. I couldn’t just sit there anymore, so I decided to approach the man and spark up a conversation. I learned that he was the founder of a nonprofit organization, which at the time, was known as Wheelchair Skater. The organization had a simple mission – help kids that are disabled get around a skate park. That was a really simple concept that he had, but it was the first time that I had ever met the founder of a nonprofit organization, and I immediately became overwhelmed by the passion that radiated from him. I realized, at that moment, that there really is something to a nonprofit’s founder… they have a passion that is so pure and so authentic that they would die for the cause they serve. The light bulb went off, and I quickly determined that this was the type of person I wanted to work with for the rest of my life. Even more immediately, I knew that this was the guy I wanted to help by utilizing my newly acquired Photoshop “skills.” I volunteered to design a few promotional stickers for him, thus marking the beginning of my freelance design career. To be honest, I would never have imagined how pivotal a moment the creation of those silly stickers would have had on my life at the time.
After high school, I got into the Design Media Arts program at UCLA. When I arrived, I decided similarly that I did not want just to be doing class assignments but instead wanted to do more work for real people, organizations, businesses, etc. As a result, I found myself doing a lot of volunteer design work for student groups. Over the course of my first three years on campus, I worked with over 30 groups. Those groups, along with Wheelchair Skater, served as the basis of verynice’s clientele today as well as the connections that we continue to work with. In my sophomore year of college, specifically, I began doing this work at a much higher volume than ever before and began to take on many clients simultaneously. It was then that really felt the need to put a name to all of this. That is when there was this year where I began to reflect on what it was that I wanted to do in order to paint a picture for what this all could look like. In the same timeframe, I was taking on a lot of internships. I realized, through those experiences, that there was a huge need to rethink the way that the design industry operated, especially in its treatment of nonprofit organizations. This realization came, specifically, from seeing firsthand how much these studios were charging for nonprofit work or, on the flip side, how little an appreciation there was for pro-bono work. It became clear to me that the design industry was one that favored profit over purpose. Around this time, I began to ask myself: “what would a very nice design studio look like?” I wanted to know what a studio that is actually very nice in both its intentions and its offerings would look like, and that planted the seed of our business today: verynice.
What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?
Making a value of $50MM in services available for free to thousands of people.
What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?
Uncertainty. No matter how long you do things, The future remains unpredictable. One of the most exciting things about entrepreneurship is also one of the most scary things. You have to take it one day at a time, understand that you can only do your best work, and trust yourself.
What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?
First, do not define success by way of the opinions of others. Second, do not try to emulate something that you have already seen; instead, dig deep and understand what you want to put out into the world. Third, always strive to clearly define and understand your purpose and how the work that you are doing will get you where you want to go.
Where can people find you and your business?
Website: https://www.verynice.co/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/veryniceinstagram/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matthewmanos/
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