The Conversion Catalyst: Mark Williams on Aligning UX Design with Marketing Success
19 Aug 2026 · 37 min
Mark Williams, founder of NuX Design Studios, explains how his psychology background shapes user-centered design that drives conversions. He walks through an auto-insurance client project where short-term tweaks proved the value of UX before a full platform rebuild, and shares how AI tools like Claude and Figma accelerate workflow without replacing strategy.
Chapters
Music, food, art. These things define and unite us, and they come in colors that breathe culture. Colors that connect us with their variety and richness. You'll find that same variety in Valspar Ultra paints. Great coverage and durability starting at $29.98 per gallon. Enjoy everyday protection against scuffs and wear with a smooth, washable finish. We're made of colors, and with Valspar Ultra, you can reflect that pride of culture you have inside on every wall of your home. Available at Lowe's.
Everyone treats summer like it owes you happiness. Long days, pool parties, your best life on a loop. So what does it mean when you feel worse? The summer blues are real. It's why summer is one of the busiest stretches of the year for people starting therapy. Therapy is not only for when you're in crisis. Grow Therapy is for all the moments when you decide you want more. More support, more clarity, more tools. Mental health isn't a destination you reach. It's something you build, and Grow makes that easier. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the US, offering both virtual and in-person sessions nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability, and get started in as little as 2 days. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow helps you find therapy on your time. The therapist you want takes your insurance on Grow. Grow accepts over 125 insurance plans. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as $0 depending on their plan. Visit growtherapy.com/booknow today to get started. That's growtherapy.com/booknow. growtherapy.com/booknow. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. Most people don't realize how much of their personal information is being bought and sold every day. Data brokers are making millions pulling details about you from public records and the internet, then packaging and selling it, usually without your consent. That's how your information lands in the hands of scammers, spammers, even stalkers. It's why you get endless robocalls and why ads seem to follow you everywhere. That's where Aura comes in. Aura actively removes your data from broker sites and keeps it off. They also instantly alert you if your information shows up in a breach or on the dark web. But Aura goes beyond data protection. With one app, you get a VPN, antivirus, password manager, spam call protection, dark web monitoring, and even up to $5 million in identity theft insurance, all backed by 24/7 US-based fraud support. Other companies might just sell credit monitoring or just a VPN. Aura gives you all of it together at the same price competitors charge for just one service. Start your free trial today at aura.com/hidden. Protect yourself now at aura.com/hidden.
If your business runs on 5 different apps, 12 browser tabs, and one spreadsheet that everyone's afraid to touch, It's probably time for Odoo. Odoo is an all-in-one business management software that connects every part of your business into one powerful, easy-to-use platform. So instead of wasting time switching between disconnected systems, your entire business works together in real time. Your team moves faster, your data stays accurate, and you can actually focus on growing your business. Let one unified system run your entire business. From the first opportunity to the final payment, everything works together in one place. Whether you're a small business or managing a large operation, Odoo gives you the flexible platform built to grow with you. Try today for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com.
And you can, you're more capable of doing a lot more things than you think you are able to because of the tools that we have access to today. I think we used to live in an age where people needed to focus on one thing at a time and give all their energy to that one thing. And yes, in a sense that is still true, but we are now given the tools to work on multiple things at the same time in parallel. And a lot of that is just at the tip of your fingers on your computer and, you know, with some of these different AI tools that we can work on. And because of that, you don't necessarily need to, as a Founder, as a person who want— has an idea that you wanna bring to life, you don't need to spend a ton of money to go ahead and bring your idea to life. You can do it yourself. So as long as you have the courage and the willpower, you, you got it.
Step into the world of success with Your Brand Amplified, the ultimate podcast designed to unravel the intricacies of thriving businesses. I'm your host, Anika Jackson, and I'm on a mission to uncover the stories, strategies, and secrets that have propelled entrepreneurs and business leaders I am thrilled to have Mark Williams, the founder of Nuex Design Studios. And Mark, you are on a mission to close the gap between UX design and marketing, something that is so important. Bad UX can kill a brand, and I'm not saying that lightly. You're also running the whole thing remotely while living abroad. So before we dig in the strategy side, And your backstory. Tell us what life is like day to day right now, and where are you joining us from?
I'm joining from Madrid, Spain. So thank you very much for having me and being up as early as you are. And pretty much everything day to day is amazing considering that Spain just won the World Cup. Everyone outside has a ton of energy. And yeah, no, I'm just loving, loving the energy, loving the fact that I'm here to experience this. This is almost like a once in a lifetime opportunity.
So Have you been traveling as a digital nomad or did you set your sights on Spain?
I've been traveling a bit actually before I decided to come to Spain specifically for my move. I came here initially once in 2024 of April or April of 2024. And then after that, I came back to Western Europe and just went to a ton of different cities, pretty much a lot of the big ones that everyone says that you have to visit, you know, London, Paris. I even went to Switzerland, different cities within there. So it was like, I think, 11 cities across 5 different countries. And to me, actually coming back to Spain and Madrid specifically was, it was still the best city in the world, in my opinion, and still is. I think if Madrid had a beach, it would be way too overcrowded.
So, oh yeah. And just for everybody listening, when Mark is saying early morning, it's, After 10:00 AM, but where it is for him, it's 6:00 PM. And he said in Spain, that feels like, uh, early afternoon. And I'm like, I should move there because I like to take my time in the morning. So I'm just grateful that you're willing to join me when it is your early afternoon.
Of course. Of course. I, I don't mind.
Yeah. Then your background is, I mean, you majored in psychology and neuroscience. So talk about that transition from those into the world of design and User experience, user interface.
Yeah. So I was actually pre-med in college. And so I was down that track, especially I would say due to my parents. And a large part of it was myself as well. It was a lot of influence on both sides. But as I was going through the track in college, I was doing neuroscience and psychology and it was really difficult. And another thing too is that I didn't feel like super passionate about it. I knew that it was a hard track. And it was just almost something to accomplish, but not necessarily something I wanted. And I think my moment of reflection coming across this was when I was, well, during lockdown COVID, everyone had time to reflect and think to themselves. And luckily that I was able to have that opportunity to think to myself. I was shadowing a doctor during that time. I was working in a research lab. I was taking some of the hardest classes and I was studying for my MCAT and I just It kind of gave me a mindset of like, this is what my future will look like and continue to look like, especially through med school. And it just wasn't for me. So it was almost like within the next week I sold all my MCAT books. I left the research lab. I did still finish out my degrees, but I immediately started switching into let's look for a job rather than let's prepare for med school. And so was able to secure my job into Advertising/marketing and had an amazing opportunity with some of the smartest people I've ever met. And from there I came across, um, user experience and that's when I jumped into, uh, design.
Mm-hmm. Fantastic. And I'm sure that your background, even though you say it was hard, it was not where you wanted to be, it, I'm sure it really helped you because of the, the connection between how we market to people and thinking about—
100%.
their profiles, right? The psychology behind it. So what did you love about the design element?
I would say a lot of the reason why I love especially user experience design, it's you, you're on the right track. There is a lot to do with what I studied. I mean, I didn't choose neuroscience and psychology just because like, oh, these are random things I think could work out. There were things that I'm genuinely interested in how the mind works and what it's related to, especially for me on a digital aspect. So UX design, I thought, was amazing because it's a mixture of creativity and technology and how humans interact with computers. And so I wanted to explore that more. I wanted to learn how I can improve experiences. I wanted to be a part of creating some really cool things. And essentially my career goal became, I wanna be a part of something large, like for example, the Apple Vision Pros and say, I designed that experience or I was a part of that project.
So. So you've worked across a lot of different product ecosystems. You've worked with growing businesses through this journey. So how did that range of experience shape the way you approach design today and deciding to found your own design studio?
Yeah, I would say a lot of it came from For one, when I started in the advertising world, it gave me a really decent amount of experience around audiences and how people think, how marketers also prioritize business goals, how we're targeting different audiences, how we're sending them towards different experiences on the digital front. But that was almost where it cut off on the marketing side. And then when I switched over to UX design, it was a little bit more focused. Well, not a little bit more, just is focused on the user and We try to consider the business goals as much as we can, but priority on the user. I think with the agency that I'm working with now, we try to focus somewhere in the middle on making sure that the business goals and the user experiences are prioritized and that those 2 areas are also linked together because not many times, there are just many times where we've walked into different companies and different teams where we've seen a lot of these 2 sectors isolated. It's sometimes it's structurally, sometimes it's just that they don't talk to each other. They might think, oh, they just kind of design a pretty website and oh, they just kind of send people to the website. But I always say if you're sending traffic to an experience that is broken, they're not going to convert. And if you're designing an amazing experience but you're not sending the right people over, you're still not going to convert. So making sure that those 2 angles are talking to each other is very important for us. And it's really just understanding how that operates in every single industry that we jump into.
It's so important when we're thinking about how we're going to market and attract our ideal customers. Recall a class that I've taught off and on at USC for a digital media master's program where students would have to go through websites or apps that we all know, big brands, and redesign that experience to make it more engaging for the end user. Where do you see people get this wrong most of the time?
I think a lot of people get this wrong by, for one, and this is a very clear answer actually for me because I deal with this on a, especially with the tools that we have today on a very consistent basis where a lot of marketers, a lot of people tend to pre-prescribe the solution. before really understanding why. And I think that's the biggest issue that I find in most enterprise teams where we will see something happening. The data is saying something, but oh, it's happening on this page, so redesign it, or let's do this. Hey, here's an idea that I put together with Claude. Take this and implement it, make it better on Figma, and then we'll just launch it and it's going to improve things. Sometimes that actually will hurt the experience. Sometimes it's Not that complex. Really, we don't know. And the best way to figure that out is by taking our time to actually look into the data. So the data is really good in telling us what's happening, but it doesn't really tell us why. And when we look into more heuristics, like the actual mapping, so we take a look at heatmaps, we take a look at user sessions, we take a look at pretty much all the amazing tools that maybe like Content Square, Hotjar, things like that are able to give us. That's where we're able to actually develop a story and come up with different hypotheses for what we can do to test things and not test blindly. We're measuring it. So I think that's the biggest thing.
That's such an important point because I know I get, I mean, I'm not doing any Google advertising, but every once in a while Google will send me the analytics for my website and I'm not an expert in that, right? I know enough and I'm adjacent, But I can look at that and go, okay, does that mean I just need to put another, you know, I need to have a popup sooner or I need to have button that states more clearly that they can click here, but that might not be enough. So will you walk us through an example and you can name the client or not, your preference, as to how you were able to shift the perception of the brand internally? And then that of course would help them shift externally and get those downloads, those clicks, those sales that they wanted.
Yeah, of course. Yeah, we're definitely working. One of our largest clients actually right now is an auto insurance company that has 2 different brands. So one of them's actually named Amax and the other one is Alpa, and we help them with their website redesign. We're helping them with their migration and also just restructuring what we do on the backend so that we're able to move a lot faster. Those are all long-term projects and the things that we're all, we're able to do in the short term, I would say really help us gain buy-in and also building that story of how we can change the experience and continue to do so, which will show for one that we're moving towards business goals, but two, your customers are happy and they want to stay with you long term. So it's really just, I would say the, the short-term area. Taking a look at those analytics, doing some of those different conversion rate optimization best practices. So going in there, taking a look at all the videos and saying, hey, this landing page that we're sending traffic to actually is not performing well in this portion of the page. Maybe it's just changing language. Maybe we just need to do a button shift or a component swap, something that resonates more with the audience that we're driving towards this page. And so truly that could be the issue. And if we do see growth in conversions, then it really helps us. It wins our case and that's what we've seen before. And it also helps us buy more time for, let's take some real time and effort to build this amazing website that we're moving over to this massive platform website of over like 1,500 pages. There's so much work that goes into that and it's hard to have patience and a AI-focused world where everything moves so quickly, but we also have to make sure that we're prioritizing quality.
So like anything in marketing, the good things take time is what you're saying. And exactly as you mentioned, today's world, people expect those quick fixes, especially when you can. I mean, you mentioned Claude. Claude is one of my favorite tools to use to like input a whole bunch of stuff and then, you know, find little threads. But now people are expecting that quick turnaround. So how do you position yourself? How do you fight that perception nowadays when people want to move fast, but really to go fast, you need to move slowly and you need to do everything right and set that strong foundation for your business?
Yeah, that is the battle we fight every single day. I think it's, it's, it's a tough one, but we've found ways to manage ourselves through it. I think for one, me and my team, we really encourage each other to also be very AI native or just AI forward. So we are using different AI workflows to move a lot faster. And I think in a world today, you know, I saw a quote that said, AI can really help us get to great almost instantaneously, especially when it comes to design. But now let's take that extra step to make it perfect or near perfect. So how can we do that? And I think when it comes to enterprise websites or enterprise clients, we can't just do that on a whim because at some point the brand might lose its consistency if for every single project or every single landing page, we're just starting from scratch and we're throwing things up there. And so I think showcasing some of those different foundational pieces that we're building along with our workflows, how if we build it right and we build it only once and expand on it, not only are we going to be able to move a lot faster, especially given the AI tools we'll be able to use, but the pages will perform so much better and we don't have to redo the research every single time. We know what has happened because we have the historical data and we are able to make just even more targeted changes from there.
So.
Nice. Moving from working for other companies to Saying that you're going to start your own is also a pretty big shift.
Yes.
What was that transition like for you?
So at my second company, I really enjoyed my time there. I thought I grew a lot as a designer, and I actually learned a lot of the foundational, um, skills that I'm utilizing today in my, you know, in my team, such as like some of the complex things around building whole design systems and things like that. Although there was a point in my journey at that company where I felt as though I wasn't growing as much. And that was reflective in my portfolio where I was taking a look at some other work from different people at other competitive companies, or even the giants like Meta or Adobe, taking a look at their portfolios and going, I don't have something like that yet. And not only that, but I also was just kind of getting bored. The projects just weren't engaging me enough, I feel like. And so when I started finding clients on the side, not only within growth marketing, helping people generate revenue through pay channels, but also, hey, let's create some pages. Let's make sure the experience on the website is actually converting the users that we're sending over. That's when I realized that I almost had an addictive feeling to, hey, I'm generating your business revenue. I am able to showcase the results based on design. And it's really in front of us. Whereas, you know, at the previous company I was at, it was almost very difficult for me to showcase the direct numbers, like, because, you know, it was a very large team. This landing page that we created for this product, I don't know how many people actually were able to close on this deal because of it, things like that. So I think because at a smaller scale, it had a lot more of a direct correlation. It felt addicting and the projects were all just so different and jumping into new industries and learning more about how those users act, how they behave on the different pages, what we can do, the creative ways we can target them and grab their attention, I think was just so much more intriguing and fun that I just kept going into it and it scaled to where I am today.
Nice. And when you started that company, you were still based in California?
Yes. Yeah, I was in, uh, LA. Also.
Okay, nice. So that part of the transition going from, I'm in LA, okay, now I have enough clients that I can, I have this model I can run myself, I can start my own business to then, oh, and now I'm going to take this remote. I'm gonna take this on the road with me. Did that shift the way that you had to operate your business? Did it shift where you focused on getting clients from? Or building a team from?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if anything, it definitely put a ton of more pressure on me. It was, it was kind of crazy waking up every day and going, oh yeah, it's all on me now. And I've gotten used to that feeling. And definitely near the end of my, when I was transitioning into my agency full-time, I was already kind of feeling that. But I think it was amazing because I had more time to now focus on my agency. Because there was a point where all the work that I had on the agency side was stacking up almost more against what I was doing at my previous company. And so the balance was very difficult for me to keep. And it was also at the point where it almost didn't make sense for me to continue working at my previous company. So I just knew I could grow more here and also financially it was a smarter decision as well. So I had no complaints there, but it was definitely a lot of pressure.
And you've talked about team a little bit, so how did you decide who would be on your team? Not only the qualities and the people, but did it matter where they were located since you were going remote?
To me, no, honestly. I think really if you have the skillset to deliver on some projects, that is what matters to me more than your location. And so to me, we're a global team and I try to find people who have almost the same entrepreneurial startup mindset where they are also hustling for themselves. And so to make sure that they need, I essentially need to find people who know that they have to get the work done regardless of the circumstances. And if that applies to you, then you're just a great fit for me. And so That's where it comes from, from my end. I don't, it doesn't matter if you take 10 days of a vacation and work that last day to get the project done, or you do it all at the beginning, as long as it gets done and we're, we give a nice personalized experience for the client. That's really what matters to me. And the main thing that I just try to have for every client, the experience is that we are a small, capable team. But we're also very human and approachable. So we wanna make sure that as we're working through all of our projects, you feel as though you're collaborating with us, not just, hey, here's a deliverable, here's what we did, take it, give us feedback and we take it back. We want it to feel like you're in the room with us. We are designing together, we're strategizing together, all of that.
I know that marketing to businesses in different parts of the world can also be a little complex because not everybody operates, you know, businesses like we do in the United States. There are a lot of countries that are more family-oriented, or you have to have a relationship first. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because, and, and where do your clients come from? Are there, is it mostly Western Europe and the United States, or again, is your client base all over?
Yeah, a lot of it is actually based all over. At the beginning it was more so because we were taking a lot of projects from a platform actually called Upwork, which you could go on there and a lot of people from anywhere can post a job. And so I've worked with people from China, I've worked with people from England, I've worked with people from Amsterdam, and it all just depends to me. Honestly, I'm still learning Spanish, so no Spanish clients yet, but essentially if you are English speaking, you are a good fit At the moment, we are mainly focused on US-based clients, not for any particular reason, just more North American clients, only because we are just making sure our targeting can match that. So we're just trying to find enterprises, our ideal customer profile, and that typically is just within that region. And from there, we want to continue expanding. If I can find some more clients who are within my time zone, that'd be good. Yeah, the US clients have been so far a part of our targeting.
And you've mentioned enterprise, but you know, there are a lot of people listening who don't fall into the enterprise definition. What things can they be doing as smaller business owners or, you know, SMBs that would still apply for them?
I would say honestly, a large part would be you can utilize a lot of the amazing tools that we have today. It's not like any of these are gatekept from any small businesses. And I think if anything, a small business is what's more applicable for all of these different AI workflows and tools that we see today, because for enterprises, they need so much of a foundation because there's so many chefs in the kitchen that if all of them acted on their own, the company would look different and it would have 20 different fonts on the website. But because small businesses, they're able to move faster and quicker almost, they have that advantage. So utilize Claude to help you come up with an amazing, or at least a lean brand design system, and then move from there. You know, build some components within Figma. You can also just build them directly within Webflow. You can move so quickly to build a website out that still speaks to your company, to your language, and because you built it, it is a representation of you. Yeah.
And so, and you mentioned Claude, do you have specific prompts that you, you know, think that people should use? Are there other tools that they can use as well? Like what are your other favorite AI tools and workflows?
Yeah. Yeah, I have a ton. I love it. Honestly, I use Claude a lot. I use Claude Cowork a lot. Um, so Claude Cowork is essentially just an AI agent that acts on your computer. So It doesn't act in the cloud, and because of that, it's able to browse on your laptop and open up, you know, platforms that typically ban software from the cloud, like Instagram and stuff like that. And it's able to understand the information and things. So it's great in that sense because you're able to also connect it with so many other tools like your email, like your calendar, like your note-takers, so many different things. So for example, one workflow that I have is a scheduled task every morning. Where Claude actually goes into my emails, my project management tool, ClickUp. It goes into my meeting notes across multiple different accounts, and it helps me come up with all the tasks that I need to prioritize for that day. And I also use another AI time blocker called Motion, and it puts it all in there. So essentially my day is typically planned, and sometimes I might just use a voice note, I've considered getting like Whisper Flow, but typically I just use ChatGPT's voice dictation. It's really good. It's quality. So I use that as well to kind of plan my day. That's one workflow that I love. It's amazing. And there's so many others, like design-wise, I think prompts people could use there is really just tell it to think as though it's a senior, senior UX designer and also consider different information architectural best practices. And then just consider how you're writing content outline, things like that. You can find some amazing Claude skills on the internet that will help you take away some of those different AI tells, like the em dashes or the different patterns in which they talk that just copies the patterns that we see most on the internet. And you can use that to write some really engaging content and yeah, make some really engaging websites as well. There's so many things out there and I can continue talking about it, but I'll take a beat. So.
Yeah, no, I mean, this is what we want to hear, right? Because I think this is something that, I mean, it's funny because I'm actually about to go in the process of redesigning my entire website. So conversations always seem to happen at the perfect time because I've, I had shifted it to mostly be about my podcast for quite a while. And now I'm like, well, now I need to shift it back to show my business services again. Some of the things that I've You know, I've been testing and iterating and I've decided that, okay, these are the things I'll offer outside of the other work that I do. And so those are, you know, it feels big to me as a small business owner to do that, but because it's also, it's holding you accountable. So I really like the, the Claude system that you've set up with using cowork, making sure that you are getting to the most important things first, because I think that is also— Particularly for somebody who likes to be more of a creative and a professor and learn and, you know, has ADHD, that's not always the thing that I'm best at.
100%. Completely understand and get that on my end as well. I honestly, I feel as though because of AI, I was able to become a lot more technical in a lot of different areas because of so many things that I feel as though I was afraid to even jump into. So I think It's, it's amazing because you will also grow yourself while working with it.
Yeah. Going back to design, is there something that you're seeing right now in design and marketing, a trend or something we should be using that we aren't using anymore? Maybe something we've abandoned because of all the new bells and whistles and things that we think we should be doing?
I would say probably, and I, I've actually debated this a lot with my team and with just on LinkedIn as well. I think something I'm seeing a lot happening is that a lot of people, because of the different AI workflows we have, are just kind of skipping the mid-fidelity wireframe step completely within UX. And essentially what that is, is that we typically start with like a content outline or something along the lines of, hey, this is how it's going to be structured. And then we create a wireframe where it's pretty much just grayed out and It might have some, it'll have some text in there, it'll have a box that'll say this is where an image is going to go. And it might also show a little bit of interaction or kind of show you what the component will look like. And once you say, okay, this looks good, or it doesn't, we'll take that feedback, we can change it, or we'll just move it into high fidelity. And high fidelity is where we add all the bells and whistles, the fonts, the colors, the interaction. And the main reason we do that is because We wanna save time because if I now spend all of it, if I spend 10 hours building the component and then another 10 hours into high fidelity, that's— and, and you tell me you don't like it, that's 10 hours that I just wasted making it look pretty. So we have that middle ground to kind of align on what it should look like before we jump into high fidelity. Because we're able to move a lot faster nowadays, we almost Sometimes depending on the use case, can skip that step. And I'm still waiting to determine if that's a good thing or a bad thing, because in some instances I think it's amazing in order to kind of get your idea across and translate, especially to executives and business owners. Hey, this is the idea that we have because everyone is visual forward. If I show all these different gray boxes to a CEO, they're gonna look at me like, okay, what am I looking at? But if I showcase something of what it could potentially be and say, hey, this is still a work in progress, but this is where we're going to go, we have that ability now. And so I think that right there is great, but who knows? So that's what I, in terms of maybe it's something we're missing, maybe it's something we need to go back to. Maybe I don't.
Oh, that's helpful. I, 'cause I think that happens a lot with design is, you know, people go in with the idea of what the client wants or what would be best for the client, and that's not always what they think they need or want.
Right. 100%.
You know, you have this very easy air about you and telling your story, moving from working for other companies to taking jobs on the side to then going, wow, I can actually just start my own company now. Have you ever had those moments of uncertainty, of imposter syndrome, of, you know, feeling like, am I making the right decision? Am I supposed to be here?
Definitely all the time, honestly. And the only reason I would say that I have been able to kind of overcome some of these areas is because honestly, my friends and family, because I would say they have supported me more than they know it, honestly, in a way that I, because I have always been the type of person to kind of go, okay, this is the scenario I've been dealt with, let's figure this out. And almost in like a too isolated, slightly too isolated purpose where you don't want to almost bother anyone else. You're like, okay, I'll just take care of this. I'll get it done. No worries. And I think it's positive and negative in the sense that You maybe you could ask people for help. You should definitely learn to ask people for help. But on the other hand, people take a look at you and they can realize that you are able and capable of getting things done. And when you say that you will do something, you, they know and have trust in the fact that you will. And I think because of that mindset of my family and friends going, when I say outlandish things like, hey, I'm moving to LA from Michigan, I'm going, I, Found a job. I'm leaving next month. 'Cause I just dropped it like a bomb on my parents. They said, okay, well, here we go. And then once again with, hey, this is the path I'm going. I'm quitting my job. I have my company. I'm going full in on that and I'm moving to Spain. My family just not really flinching and just going, okay, makes sense.
Wow.
That reaction was just really enlightening and just like uplifting, I would say is a better word, just because it's like, I feel like for most people that's not the response that they would get. And so them having that confidence in me makes me go, maybe I am that type of person and I don't want to let them down. So I'm going to try my best to uphold that image. So.
Yeah, that's really beautiful. Do you still work on any paid? Because you mentioned that a little bit earlier as well, that you doing paid marketing work as well as UX and design.
Yeah, yeah, definitely. We definitely still do paid channels. So we actually have just one of our clients now. We actually still work with different marketers. So regardless, we're going to have that mindset, but we do run the ads for one of our clients who has a hospitality group and they own a couple of different restaurants actually in the LA area. So Chin Chin or BBCM, if you ever heard of them, Butcher the Baker, the Cappuccino Maker there. It's a great, great spot. But, um, we help them with their, with their advertising and marketing. And within the first year actually of us working with them, we helped them generate over $150,000 in revenue. And so that number has only gone up. And if anything, it's probably more over year over year. It's just that I have not gone back and taken a look at the direct number. We just— Oh, I can tell you later, but it, it definitely is a lot better. Back then it was like a lot slimmer resources and now it's, now we, we've grown in multiple different channels.
Fantastic. And where do you see yourself, Mark, and NUX going next?
I would love to definitely accomplish that career goal that I mentioned earlier of I want to jump into a project. So essentially for NUX, building as much authority as possible. And just projects, work that make us look high quality, where the next big thing, people come to us. So we want to be on the same tier as Work Co or is Meta Lab, where the large startups, when they think of, okay, we have all this crazy funding and we're ready to make our website or our product look high quality, oh, immediately let's just go to NuX. It's, it's the first thing that comes into their mind. So that's where I wanna be.
Fantastic. What is one thing that you would like everybody to take away from this conversation?
Hmm. That's a good question. There's multiple things that I, I'm like, man, I want you to think of, but I would say the biggest thing would be that you can move a lot quicker than you think you can and you're more capable of doing a lot more things than you think you are able to because of the tools that we have access to today. I think we used to live in an age where people needed to focus on one thing at a time and give all their energy to that one thing. And yes, in a sense that is still true, but we are now given the tools to work on multiple things at the same time in parallel. And a lot of that is just at the tip of your fingers on your computer and With some of these different AI tools that we can work on. And because of that, you don't necessarily need to, as a founder, as a person who want— has an idea that you wanna bring to life, you don't need to spend a ton of money to go ahead and bring your idea to life. You can do it yourself. So as long as you have the courage and the willpower, you, you got it.
I love that advice. Thank you. And do you have a favorite quote, mantra, verse, Poem, a family motto, words that continue to inspire you?
This is a quote that I actually love to think about a lot because especially as someone who loves to travel, be in multiple different environments, and I'm still trying to find my footing in all these different areas, especially in relation to that imposter syndrome and being in rooms where a lot of people could be so immensely smarter than you or just maybe feeling as though you don't deserve all of this, things like that. I think of this quote a lot, which I read in a book called Braving the Wilderness by Brené Brown. But this quote is actually from Maya Angelou, and it says, you are only free when you realize you belong no place. You belong every place, no place at all. The price is high and the reward is great. So I love it. I think to me it's just You'll find your belonging and it's just kind of, you are who you are. I can exist anywhere. You're almost like a chameleon. You can blend in in any environment and still be true to yourself. So.
That's awesome. Thank you. And for everybody who's listening, if you are an enterprise solution, we will of course have NuX Design Studio's link in the show notes and Mark's LinkedIn. So even for those of us who are not at that level of business, we can still learn a lot from you and from what you post. And, you know, hopefully you are gonna continue seeing your journey grow and see you reach that big goal that you have.
Thank you so much. Really appreciate that.
Yeah, thank you for being here and thank you to everybody who's listening to this episode. I love sharing these stories, whether it's somebody who's been in business 20 or 30 years or somebody who's been in business for themselves. for a few years, there's always something we can learn. And the world of UX is so important and is not something we should leave behind when it comes to our marketing, our design, and how we are going to attract the right customers to our website and have them actually take the right actions for our companies. I'll be back again with another amazing guest very soon to share their story, their journey with you. Thanks for listening or watching to This episode of Your Brand Amplified. Don't forget to leave us a rating or review on your favorite podcast listening platform. And if you want to learn more, check us out at yourbrandamplified.com.
More from Anika


Dignity Through Work: Julie Colombino-Billingham on the Power of Sustainable Livelihoods


Delegation and High-Ticket Growth: Nani Israel on Escaping the Founder Bottleneck


Scaling to Seven Figures Without Ads Through Organic Relationships with Andrea Engstrom


Rethinking Consumer Insights: Holland Martini and Maria Vorovich on Creative Methodology


The Math of Marketing: George Khachatryan on Reinforcement Learning and AI Personalization





