Nimblelight builds dynamic web presences for businesses, non-profits, and artists. Their work includes web design and development, web consulting, web application development, paid search and search engine optimization, site analytics and user response optimization, social networking and relationship marketing, and online reputation management.

Nimblelight was founded in 2007 and has already established successful web presences for clients as distinguished as CarSense, Postgreen Homes, Auto Lenders, the City of Philadelphia, The Delaware Children’s Museum, and the seaside vacation town of Mystic, Connecticut.

Start Philly caught up with Nimblelight’s Brian Melton (Partner), who graciously answered our probing questions so that you, our treasured readers, would be thoroughly enlightened and informed about Philly’s companies on the rise.

Read on to get the inside scoop on the joys and pains of starting up, how failure can be valuable, and Brian Melton’s secret code name…

(SP) A couple of years ago, what did you think you’d be doing now (have you always been bitten by the entrepreneurial bug?)?

(BM) Before we started Nimblelight in 2007, I worked as a freelance cinematographer and then for a web technology start up that was building an online video channel. I had no clue I’d be doing this now, but I’ve always had the stomach for risk-taking and have always been into new media.

(SP) What motivated you to get involved in starting Nimblelight?

(BM) I was motivated a lot by my past experience working at a start-up. The president of that company ran 2 other businesses and was also a practicing doctor. Inevitably, he got stretched really thin and was pretty aloof to day-to-day operations. That leadership vacuum basically forced me into doing sales and developing a business plan even though that wasn’t really in my job description. I had no business school training and no experience pitching, but I was literally presenting our business plan to Microsoft VC’s and leading sales meetings with big companies like Borders and Crozer-Keystone.

As you might’ve guessed, that start-up didn’t quite make it off the ground, but the experience gave me a lot of confidence to try starting my own company and showed me how essential it is to build start-ups on a foundation of good ideas and reliable sources of revenue.

(SP) Your partners seem like a pretty cool group of guys:how did you find the key people for this enterprise?

(BM) Thanks! They are cool and very good people to work with. Patrick and I met six years ago while we were at Wake Forest and Patrick has been friends with Adam, our other partner, since 7th grade. So I didn’t have to do much looking — getting together was the easy part.

(SP) Did you have an “official” business plan? If so, what lessons did you learn from the preparation of it? If not, what type of planning did you do prior to starting up?

(BM) Not really. We thought that implementing our ideas even on a small scale was more useful than working them out in a formal document and, since technology changes so fast, we wanted to ensure a certain flexibility in the direction we were heading. After a month or so of research, brainstorming, and beating the ground for potential clients, we started working small jobs with a broad set of ideas about the kind of company we wanted to be.

That initial work provided us with a sort of reality-based business development where we shaped our company as we tested our ideas in the real world. We quickly learned exactly what our strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities were and saw things we needed to change to keep our company afloat and moving forward.

(SP) And now *drum roll please* the inevitable question of funding: how did you guys raise capital to get Nimblelight going?

(BM) We didn’t… This was a huge decision that generated a lot of discussion but it was important to us as friends coming together in business that we had the freedom to do what we wanted, including the freedom to stop if things weren’t working out.

None of us liked the idea of potentially owing money before we’d made any. Or, if we did make money, we didn’t want the goals of investors to clash with our own. So we made the decision to start up with the (meager) savings and equipment we had.

I don’t necessarily recommend starting up a company like this — it was extremely stressful and we definitely lost sleep over it. We were operating on virtually zero capital. In hindsight, we probably should’ve at least started a small line of credit or something. Luckily my partners and I were relatively young and living and eating like poor college students was still a familiar state of being. However, we learned some valuable lessons in budgeting and containing costs in that first year and it certainly feels good now to run a company with no debts.

(SP) What’s been the most difficult part of starting up?

(BM) Working for nothing. In the beginning, we knew we had to outperform similarly-sized companies, over-deliver to clients who were essentially taking a risk by choosing a company as new as us, and put every dollar we made back into the business. All of that was very difficult.

(SP) What’s your concept of a fruitful day?

(BM) Well I wear a lot of hats around here. We all do. So a fruitful day would need to be a well-rounded one where I make headway on current projects, line up future projects, check in with our freelancers, chat with with all the clients we talk to regularly, run analytics for the highest traffic sites we maintain, pay bills and update the quickbooks, and still make happy hour at the Memphis Taproom.

(SP) Random question #1: What internet site do you surf the most?

(BM) I spend an embarrassing amount of time on coudal.com — I think Jim Coudal is one of the most exciting and inspiring entrepreneurs in the world of design and technology. There’s everything from essays on experimental web publishing to 14-step martini recipes on the site. I also love Andrew Sullivan’s blog which is constantly tackling provocative subjects and proving how ineffective and irrelevant old media is becoming.

(SP) Nimblelight describes itself as “small company” that gets “big results” and prides itself on the strong relationships it builds. How do you address your competitors while not allowing them to define you?

(BM) About 80% of our new business comes from word of mouth referrals or face-to-face networking — it’s where our best-fit clients seem to come from — so we’ve spent very little advertising ourselves and haven’t done much to address our competitors. We’re not too concerned at the moment about how our competitors may define us… Instead, we stay focused on exceeding our clients’ expectations and let that define us…

Starting out, we kept noticing our clients were choosing us partially as a reaction to how unhappy they were with their previous web company. They’d found it hard, for instance, to get a live person on the phone or difficult to get their questions answered if they wanted advice or were having technical problems.

There’s a perception — deserved or not — that web developers and technology geeks have poor social skills and trouble taking responsibility for deficiencies in their work. You may have heard the joke: How many programmers does it take to change a light bulb? … None, it’s a hardware problem.

Well we’ve been trying to counter this perception with a more “old-fashioned” client-relationship approach. If you call us, you get us on the phone; if you want to know why we chose jQuery over Flash, we help you understand the reasons why; and if your site isn’t loading, we help — even if it’s not our fault.

Overall, the work we do helps guide our clients into the right decisions about their web presence and provides platforms for cultivating long-term relationships with past, current, and future customers. We believe the best way to help our clients achieve those goals is to first build strong relationships with our clients.

(SP) Random Question #2: If you were a spy, what would your alias be?

(BM) Snake Eyes.

(Snake Eyes was a completely awesome G.I. Joe covert operations specialist who had a pet wolf named Timber.)

(SP) What do you think about the entrepreneurial scene in Philly? Are you optimistic? What would  you like to see more of?

(BM) I don’t have much to compare it to. I’ve had a fantastic time running a business in Philly and I couldn’t ask for much more — in just a few years, we’ve been lucky enough to meet and work with some talented entrepreneurs who are all doing amazing things — Postgreen, Machinery, Caspari McCormick, and great independent minds like Fran McGowan, Max Sobol and Ed Tettemer.