We recently connected with Thanos Markopoulos and have shared our conversation below.

Thanos, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Let’s start with a story that highlights an important way in which your brand diverges from the industry standard.

Most agencies either overcomplicate everything or overcharge to make it look like they’re doing more than they are. I started LikeButter to flip that on its head.

Instead of locking clients into bloated retainers or confusing proposals, we offer affordable, all-in-one design and marketing services with clear pricing, fast turnarounds, and local support. We work almost exclusively with small businesses in Orlando and Tampa, and we’ve structured everything from our packages to our process to actually serve their reality: limited time, limited team, and limited budget.

Unlike traditional agencies, we don’t nickel and dime for every revision or hide behind long timelines. Clients get unlimited revisions, a dedicated success manager, and full transparency into what’s happening and when. We even offer in-person meetings and content shoots locally because we believe good marketing starts with real relationships.

At the end of the day, we’re here to help small businesses stand out and sell more without burning time or money to do it.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

I started doing digital marketing when I was 16, helping small businesses that couldn’t afford much but needed a lot of help. Over the years, I worked with everyone from local service providers to tech startups, and I kept running into the same pattern: most agencies either overcomplicate everything or charge way too much to do it. That’s what led me to start LikeButter Digital.

LikeButter Digital is a digital marketing and design agency built for small to midsize businesses in Orlando and Tampa. We do websites, branding, content, paid ads, CRM automation, and SEO all under one roof. But what really sets us apart isn’t just what we do – it’s how we do it.

Most agencies are faceless, rely on templated websites, barely respond when you need them, and still charge an arm and a leg. We flipped that. Everything we do is customized to your business because we actually take the time to understand it from the inside. Our pricing is simple and transparent. Clients get fast turnaround, unlimited revisions for design and web, a dedicated success manager, and even local in-person meetings and content shoots when needed. We operate like a real extension of your team, not just a vendor on retainer.

Everything we do is designed to make marketing easier, more effective, and more affordable for businesses that don’t have time to waste or teams to manage it all. We’ve helped clients generate over $1M in influenced revenue, but more than that, we’ve given them peace of mind knowing they finally have a team that gets it.

If you’re a business that’s tired of the usual agency runaround and just want great marketing that works, that’s who we built this for.

Can you talk to us about how you funded your business?

I completely bootstrapped my business from the ground up. I spent four years working at HubSpot, an enterprise SaaS company, and saved aggressively so I’d have the runway to launch LikeButter without needing outside funding. That gave me space to test, fail, improve, and try again without the pressure of immediate profitability.

I think if your business model is lean and doesn’t require a ton of overhead or headcount, you don’t have to wait until your side hustle fully replaces your paycheck to go all in. In fact, not having that fallback lights a fire under you. It forces you to be scrappy, decisive, and relentless.

One mindset that helped me is the idea of “burning the boats.” It comes from a military tactic where commanders would destroy their own ships after landing on enemy shores, leaving no option but to win or die trying. That’s exactly what this felt like. Every sales call, every outreach, every post I made had weight behind it because failure wasn’t an option.

The early days were hard. You miss the comfort of a steady paycheck. But once things start clicking, and the momentum builds, you realize you didn’t need those boats after all.

Have you ever had to pivot?

One of the biggest pivots I’ve made recently was tightening our focus to serve only local businesses in Orlando and Tampa. At first, LikeButter tried to be everything to everyone. We were taking on any project that came our way, regardless of industry, size, or location. And while we got a lot of reps that way, our messaging started to feel too broad. We weren’t resonating deeply with anyone.

Then we looked at our actual client base and realized over 95% of them were already located in Tampa or Orlando. That was the lightbulb moment. We weren’t just attracting local businesses by coincidence, we were doing our best work with them. So we doubled down.

We repositioned ourselves as the go-to marketing and design agency for small businesses in Central Florida. That shift completely changed how we show up: from the way we write copy to how we package our services. It’s made us more relatable to local clients and helped them feel like we really understand their world, because we do.

Most agencies are completely remote or out-of-town. We show up in person. We know the neighborhoods, the events, the culture. We can do in-person shoots, meet face to face, and turn things around faster because we’re right there. That physical presence is something most digital-first agencies just can’t offer, and it’s become one of our strongest differentiators.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://likebutterdigital.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/like-butter-digital/

Image Credits

All images are my own