We were lucky to catch up with Nimai Larson recently and have shared our conversation below.
Nimai, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Coming up with the idea is so exciting, but then comes the hard part – executing. Too often the media ignores the execution part and goes from idea to success, skipping over the nitty, gritty details of executing in the early days. We think that’s a disservice both to the entrepreneurs who built something amazing as well as the public who isn’t getting a realistic picture of what it takes to succeed. So, we’d really appreciate if you could open up about your execution story – how did you go from idea to execution?
I had just sworn off being self-employed for good. My entire adult life has been feast or famine through a decade of being in an internationally touring band and living in Brooklyn, NY, starting a food business teaching children to make healthy food, and launching an online nation-wide vegan cookie business during Covid which got too successful for one person to manage who was already going into debt to pay for dark chocolate chips and outrageous amounts of Earth Balance vegan butter.
After dipping my toe in the booming Austin real estate market, I figured maybe I had found my calling. No more dealing with flour covered clothing or high maintenance foodie customers. Sure, real estate is commission based and not salary, but the market was strong, I was making really good money and my bills weren’t too crazy because I was living with my boyfriend at the time. But then… my relationship ended, I moved out of that two income household and into a really expensive one-bedroom apartment. As long as the market kept being fire, I could totally afford it. Right??? My goal: to show my ex, my friends, and the world that I CAN MAKE IT ON MY OWN!
If you have followed the real estate market at all, or even just read the news, you would know that in the fall of 2022, when I happened to embark on my single income journey, the housing market began cooling off. The agents that I assisted no longer needed my assistance as there were no housing sales. My paychecks began decreasing rapidly as my cost of living more than doubled since moving out on my own. I had a decision to make. Either fight to save face and struggle month after month with no money and the “hope” that the market would “come back” “some time soon”, or break my expensive lease and re-group.
I did the latter.
I put everything in storage and flew home to my parent’s house in Florida, crying, feeling like a failure at 34, total mid-life crisis style. For months, I worked my butt off taking courses and becoming certified in UX Design. I had researched about this role. It sounded foreign to me as a historically hands-on artist — from music to food, my hands were always calloused and dirty. UX Design sounded clean, rich, stable. I never EVER wanted to go back to a non-salary job. My goal was to work at Google or Meta or some other huge corporation where I could collect my pay checks and afford to live in Austin on my own without fear of losing my apartment again. I worked day and night finishing out my real estate obligations remotely by daylight and prototyping responsive websites and apps by night time. All for the promise of getting a stable, salaried job in Austin.
Well, I’ve been back in Austin for over two months now and uh…. surprise, surprise, the job market is a dumpster fire. Google has NOT offered me a job on a silver platter as expected, nor have any of the other 200 jobs I’ve applied to. To stay busy and creative, I reignited my instagram account, @FunCityAustin, which I’ve dedicated my spare time to since the pandemic. I started going to networking events around town to meet other creatives to stay inspired, collaborate and promote Fun City Austin while also trying to see if anyone had connections at my beloved Google, Meta, Amazon, or Whatever Large Tech Co.
What happened was hilarious. People I was meeting took one look at my Fun City Austin instagram and asked if they could hire me to do their social media. “Thanks but no”, I would reply, again and again, determined to stick to my guns and work for The Man. My good friend, Linsi, who also happens to be a business coach, started pressing me on why in the world I wouldn’t do marketing and social media for all of the people who were asking me. “You have a talent, Nimai, an eye for branding and aesthetics. And what’s even more awesome, you ENJOY creating content! I see you when we’re out, you LOVE making reels and posts for Fun City!” My other dear friend, Eric, also started dropping in words of encouragement when we would do photo shoots for bands together. “I’ve never collaborated creatively with anyone like you– your eye for framing and creative direction amazing. You can use me as a professional reference anytime.”
They were right, I’ve always loved creating content and have a naturally good eye for design. In fact, when I was a cooking instructor or shipping my vegan cookies all over the US, the most energizing part for me was creating the posters for my events, setting up photo shoots to make my cookies look like they were somehow in a Dior ad and the satisfaction of posting my beautiful digital creations for the world to see. I felt proud of my photos on social media and I felt proud to share them with my followers, friends and family. Why oh why couldn’t I have just done photoshoots and content creation for my two food businesses instead of actually having to make food?!?!?!
One afternoon, Linsi and I went to a Friendsgiving event at Dear Dry Drinkery. Neither one of us drink, plus we heard that in addition to mocktails, there was going to be doughnuts and tarot card readings. A perfect event for Fun City Austin to capture. We sipped N/A rosé, sat down with the Tarot card reader, Austin Tarot Therapy, and my growing conflict that was bubbling up within me poured out. “I worked so hard to get out of the roller coaster of self-employment, yet even with my badass resumé, no company is hiring me! And the work I am being offered is freelance marketing! What do I do????”
The cards revealed that 1. I’m holding myself back, 2. I’m giving my power away by spending energy on job applications when I can be saying “yes” to new clients, 3. I’m creating problems with freelance work where there are no real problems, 4. I’m assuming that my potential new future professional path is going to be as draining as my previous experience with running my own food / cookie companies, and 5. I can be successful if I set my fear and doubt aside because despite what my mind is telling me, many people need the service I can offer and will benefit from it.
Linsi, of course, was kicking me under the table saying “I told you so!” and laughing. The following day, I said yes to my first client, the next day I said yes to my second client, and three days later said yes to my third client.
Little by little, I am forming my very own freelance life in Austin. One client at a time, I am creating content and helping creative people represent their brand in a beautiful, authentic way. Day by day, my fear is melting away and I am enjoying the new lessons this is bringing to me.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
What feels like a lifetime ago (oh wait, that was just my early twenties), I was the drummer of a band that I started with my sister called Prince Rama. Like any ambitious, creative type, we moved to Brooklyn in hopes of hitting it big. We toured in America and Europe, searching far and wide for our big break. We found it here in Austin, Texas at SXSW 2010. We were “discovered” and got signed to a record label. We wrote music, recorded, toured the world. Wrote more music, recorded, toured the world. It was a BLAST. Pretty early in our career, social media started becoming woven into our everyday fabric as iPhones became more prevalent. We went from Myspace music to Spotify, Facebook invites to Instagram posts. Apart from documenting our music adventures, I made a habit of documenting my love for food on my personal instagram which led to me having two of my own magazine columns where I wrote about food and music.
After a very long, spiritual, dark night of the soul, I made the hard decision to leave Prince Rama, leave Brooklyn, and start my own cooking company. I had never known anything but the creative hustle, so why not start my own business? I started teaching cooking classes for kids, ages 3-16, at a Montessori school. That grew to a summer program for a more diverse crowd of young learners. This grew to adult cooking classes, private cooking lessons, and finally becoming a private chef for a very wealthy family. How did people find out about my cooking you may ask? INSTAGRAM. What a tool!! Each class I would teach, I would hire a photographer to take action shots of me teaching, the kiddos holding knives (safely, of course), the whole class smiling and holding up the food they had learned to cook. I would promote, promote, promote. I would post, post, post. I would tag other food accounts, hashtag any and everything foodie. I started gaining foodie followers from all over the world that would repost my arty, healthy creations. I even started an online cookbook to host my hundreds of recipes!
My career path took a couple of other twists and turns, eventually landing at food again. I was working for a vegan protein powder company doing content creation and marketing for them when the pandemic hit. I needed a second flow of income, so I started Nimai’s Kitchen, a vegan cookie company. What started out as 10 orders a week grew to 20 then to 40 then a local vegan restaurant asked if I could supply them with over 100 cookies a week and then a local boutique grocer asked the same…. How did people find out about my cookies you may ask? INSTAGRAM. Stories, reels, posts, photo shoots, customer testimonials. You name it, there was a photo shoot on instagram about it. I gained over 500 followers in about two months and invested in an Instagram master course so that I could learn how to continue growing my instagram following organically.
Fast forward to now. I’ve learned something very important about myself: I don’t necessarily love being covered in flour and selling a physical product. I also don’t necessarily love building content for my own brand when I am also the sole person in the whole company managing a million other things. I discovered that I would rather focus my energy on supporting others by building THEIR brand on social media– I relish spending hours on photo shoots for their brand, editing their photos and reels for their feed, scheduling out content for their audiences. This is where my natural talent lies, the creative content creation, the copywrite and captioning, getting to know each of my clients and learning about their brand identity and ideal followers.
I bring my energy, curiosity and enthusiasm for each creative person I work for. And I am intrinsically motivated to communicate and put in 100%. With my experience documenting my exploration of other countries and the food companies I created through social media, my certification in UX design and my renegade tenacity to keep learning and improving, I feeI my services as a content creator and designer are unique and cutting edge.
How did you build your audience on social media?
Build organically and provide beautiful content consistently. I learned a lot of tricks from taking an instagram master course from Carla Biesinger.
She teaches how to work smarter, not harder, and to utilize tools that will help you to automate certain processes, such as scheduling content ahead of time. She taught me that it’s so important to ask yourself who your ideal follower is, and then to challenge yourself to build content for them. What is a brand theme that you can stand behind? For example, a theme may be that you are woman-owned or you are a local farmer or you source your art materials from recycled cans or any number of things! That theme is going to influence the posts you make and the tone of your account.
Another good method I have learned is to do a competitive audit on other successful companies in your field. Who are their followers? What do you like about their company and what don’t you like? Is there a gap in the industry that YOU can fill?
It’s very helpful to get specific about your company and think of it from a user’s perspective. What would a person viewing your profile for the first time think? Have you optimized your bio with a call to action? Is it easy to recognize what the goal of your page is?
Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?
Being a content creator for my own past businesses and projects! My reputation has been naturally formed by those who have followed my journey on social media through music, food or Fun City Austin. The clients I have are all through word-of-mouth and I suspect that will be the main source of new clientele.
However I do love to stay busy, and I am lucky enough to have a creative circle of friends who I love to collaborate with on photography, travel and other events. So who knows, maybe the more I continue to grow my reputation, the more people will want my creative services!
Contact Info:
- Website: www.nimailarsonportfolio.com
- Instagram: @funcityaustin
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nimailarson/
Image Credits
Eric Booth Rama Poola Erika Reinsel Brandon Telg Andy Vietti