Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Nierhaus.
Chris, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
I founded TinBug as a one-person creative agency. I spent the first 15 years running it part-time out of Romeo, Michigan, taking on logo design, web design, and video projects, while working for an employer full-time. Client by client, referral by referral, the workload grew until TinBug could stand on its own, and I made the leap to full-time and moved the studio into an office in Birmingham. Today TinBug has grown into a team of 16, with an extended creative team of over 150. manage close to 2700 client sites. Our creative work includes strategy, creative, AI, marketing, social, video, websites, graphics, branding, print, packaging design, animation, and even mascots. Somewhere along the way, I also co-founded Haus Coffee and Apothic Den, because the creative itch never really goes away. Our 25th anniversary was in 2025.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
The hardest stretch was the years of building TinBug in the evenings and weekends while other work paid the bills. There was no safety net and no team, just persistence and showing up for clients even when the agency wasn’t yet paying for itself. Once I went full-time, the challenge shifted: how does one person deliver agency-level service across dozens of active sites without cutting corners? That meant building real systems, from a consistent client-code structure to a standard proposal template to a layered security stack, so quality doesn’t depend on adding headcount.
Is there any advice you’d like to share with our readers who might just be starting out?
Don’t wait until the business can support you before you start it. TAKE IMMEDIATE ACTION. Build it in the margins if you have to, and let it grow at the pace your life allows. And put repeatable systems in place early, even as a team of one. The structure you build when you have five clients is what lets you scale to fifty without losing your mind.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://tinbug.com
- Instagram: https://instagram.com/tinbugstudios
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/tinbugstudios
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/tinbug
