Nick Venturella (aka nv_marketing on Fiverr) is a creative business professional in the Madison, WI area—but first and foremost, he is a father. After his son was diagnosed with autism, he leveraged Fiverr to turn his business prowess into advocacy through his Autism HR website. Below he shares his incredible and inspiring story.
I’ve always been a creative individual. I have years of experience as a musician, writer, and visual artist. I’ve always had an entrepreneurial spirit and learned early on that the arts are crucial in marketing and promotion of one’s own creative expressions and/or any business’ brand. I learned the basics of entrepreneurship and marketing as an independent musician back when I started out in 1994 as a teenage guitar player writing and recording my own songs.
had to figure out a way to write really great copy to accompany my graphics (often flyers/posters) in a way that supported my music/recordings, which I was promoting to land gigs, build a fanbase and earn an income. This progressed through high school and college.
That experience, coupled with my visual art degree, helped me get into marketing for other organizations including start-ups, higher education institutions, software corporations, and even a publicly traded company. I enjoy a variety of creative work, which is why I continue to work full-time in a marketing role for a large software company, but also freelance creative side work here on Fiverr. I actually first heard about Fiverr on the ‘Side Hustle Nation’ podcast hosted by another Fiverr Seller, Nick Loper.
Once I understood how the Fiverr platform worked, I was hooked, and it didn’t take long for me to begin getting regular Gigs. One major appeal was that Fiverr’s platform brings new business to sellers without a lot of extra work on the part of the seller to generate new business. This was different than most freelancing I had done up to this point. Typically, I had to spend a good deal of time marketing myself to try and drum up new business, but here, the platform is working to do that for you with your reviews -- the more positive reviews your projects get, the more you’ll be promoted on Fiverr to help send new business your way.
This was vitally important to the idea of speeding up the process by which I could land and complete new freelance projects to earn extra income. Extra income that had become important as my son, who was diagnosed with autism a few years earlier, was in the midst of expensive therapies to equip him with tools to more easily navigate his life.
It was around this time, when I was having some reasonable side-hustle success on Fiverr, that I realized this platform could help serve an often underemployed or unemployed community of talented individuals -- autistic adults.
While my own autistic son is still young enough that he’s not pursuing employment anywhere, I know that one day he will need to support himself. That thought is what made me very curious to research more about autistic employment and entrepreneurship, which is why I created the AutismHR.com educational website. AutismHR is designed to provide autistic adults with creative skills an opportunity to learn how to utilize the Gig Economy (specifically Fiverr) to earn meaningful income.
The AutismHR site is still pretty young in its existence, but it provides free tutorials for autistic adults interested in learning how to use Fiverr to generate a meaningful income online in a way that is comfortable and productive.
Many autistic people have earned college degrees, and even advanced degrees. They have lots of knowledge and sought-after creative skills, however, social and sensory differences can make successfully passing the rigors of a job interview extremely difficult.
The idea of AutismHR is that it can provide autistic adults, who are typically underemployed or unemployed, an alternative option to, and/or a springboard toward, traditional employment by teaching motivated individuals how to use Fiverr to land, deliver and get paid for contract work they enjoy doing.
Did your family inspire you to get started on Fiverr? Tell us your stories in the comments below!
