An Agency Story

Building Trust Across Borders - Nopio

• Russel Dubree / Piotr Nowak • Episode 161

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What happens when a lifelong developer decides to step out from behind the code and build something of his own? In this episode, Piotr Nowak, founder of Nopio, shares his journey from being fired from a comfortable job to creating an international digital agency based in Poland. He reveals how embracing simplicity, culture, and clear purpose helped him transform complex projects into meaningful, lasting partnerships.

Key Takeaways

  • Why getting himself fired became the best catalyst for Piotr’s entrepreneurial journey
  • How simplifying services led to stronger results and happier clients
  • The lessons learned from running a Poland-based agency serving U.S. businesses

Hear details for an agency planning workshop event November 10th and 11th 2025. Visit anagencystory.com to learn more. 

Russel:

Welcome to An Agency Story Podcast where owners and experts share the real journey, the early struggles, the breakthrough moments, and everything in between. I'm your host Russel Dubree, former eight figure agency owner, turn business coach, sold my agency and now helps agency leaders create their ideal business. Every agency has a story, and this is your front row seat. This is an agency story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Peter Novak with Nopio all the way from Krakow, Poland here with today. Thank you so much for being on the show, Peter.

Peter:

Pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Russel:

Well, the pleasure is all mine. If you don't mind, start us off. What does Nopio do and who do you do it for?

Peter:

Well. We call ourself a turnkey digital agency. So we're basically, um, supporting forward thinking companies with, uh, what we like to call world class development and design services and solutions. So, uh, explaining that we are creating marketing websites for businesses all over the place and our. What we call why is we really wanna stop marketing marketers from suffering. So, you know, a lot of them have so much issues working with websites. They need to, they need to edit content on and basically, you know, use them every day. Whatever we do, we have them in mind. We want them to be happy and really not. Struggling with the tools.

Russel:

We'll dive in more into the secret sauce on how you ease the pain of marketers, but go back in the time machine, what was young Peter thinking he was gonna be when he grew up?

Peter:

Oh, I was a hundred percent developer. I was coding. I started when I was like. And I was like, yep, that's what they're gonna be doing until the end of the edit. Oh man, I was wrong. So, yeah, that, that was, that was when I started. It took some considerable work to actually get to the point when I was doing this professionally. Uh, but it's, it's getting boring really fast. You know, when you're doing this and you're coding every day after like five years or so, you're still getting like. Same stuff all over the, all over again. So, uh, I discovered I really liked dealing with clients. I prefer to actually, you know, guide the clients through what they want because they not, they often don't really know what they want. They have the vague idea where they're going. So that's where I transferred from being just a developer to first like technical manager and then more like client relationship manager. Still technical. Yeah. This is, this was still like product owners thing on the, on the development side. And then, you know, I just got like, okay, I'm doing this for someone else. I always are not always aligning. I have my own, ID ask, it's time to, you know, put my money where my mouth is. Yeah. And be like, yep, I can do it. So that was there. Overall story. This, this was like wild ride. I can tell you I was always like, um, more focused on technology and like soft skills, math. Why would you need doubt? So you actually transfer from this like hardcore coder to being like, uh, you know, client oriented was, was a challenge for someone who never really thought this is important.

Russel:

Well, it sounds like you were pretty, pretty good at it and uh, you know, I imagine people are sitting around how different is, is what sounds like a very similar path that a lot of of us in the US took, did you go to university for coding or did you just go straight into the corporate world? Right out of high school?

Peter:

Yeah, I actually, I, I started my studies with environmental science, which was more of like water engineering, like dams and stuff like this. But this was quickly like, no, that's not for me. Uh, so I transferred myself to it in environmental engineering. So that is my Master's of Science. Uh. Pretty boring stuff still, but you know, it's kind of teaching you how to code. It's most more like getting the degree. For me, I was really self-taught and spent so much time with computers. Technological point of view, quite less, yeah. More of like organization and getting up to, to the standards of like actually working class. So that was, that was one, right. Anyway.

Russel:

Okay. And so once you decided you, you didn't wanna be doing this or someone else wanted to start doing it for yourself, was it just quitting your job and starting your business? Or how did that evolution look like?

Peter:

I got myself fired. I got myself fired. I love it. Yeah, it's, you know, I, I was pretty high in the ranks of the, of the previous company I was working in. But then, you know, it was pretty obvious that my views on what I wanna do and how, where I would like the company to be going wasn't really aligned with, uh, with the owners. So we were talking about this for some time. They knew what I had in my plans and, you know, one day it was like. My ideas were just a bit too much. So this was like, hey, best to pathway. So still at good terms. So nothing really, you know, wrong there, but you know, that gives you the kick basically. So some people, I was super comfortable in that, in that job, so I was like, yep, I still have some time. I have things to learn. So that was the push I needed to actually be like, okay, it is time I need to do it.

Russel:

Okay. And I mean, again, I, you know, you don't have the comparable in the and from the US perspective, but is starting a business just signing up kind of how we do in the US or is there anything different as far as actually getting your business up and running?

Peter:

Uh, it's actually not that different because Poland was terrible bureaucracy wise previously, but when I was starting it was already like a single window. You just go there. Big difference between the US and Poland, I think if nothing change in the US you don't need to pay your social security when you're not having an income. And in Poland, when you have an active business, they don't really care. You still need to pay. So when you have a Right, especially when you're starting, they have a program where there's like a, you need to pay less for two years, but when you're struggling those like first year, months or years, you can be really like, oh my god, this, you need to pay my, you know, health tax. Yeah.

Russel:

Okay. Uh, very interesting. And so how did you get your first set of clients? What did that look like?

Peter:

Uh, first I, because I was working with my previous employer, which was a US based company. I, you know, over the course of years, I worked there for like eight years. Basically. I was still on the, on the university when I started working them on third year. So I knew a bunch of people there and you know when you're starting, you start starting small. So my previous employer did not really have anything against, they weren't interested in the kind of jobs I was taking as myself. And this obviously helps you to build the referrals base'cause people are happy with what you're doing. They knew me, they liked working with me in a lot of cases. They, you know, asked for me while working with my kids employer. So I was like. I had a good standing with them and you know, there wasn't competing, we weren't doing the same stuff as there as my previous boss, so it's fine.

Russel:

Was there a moment you encountered as you're kind of in the early stage of you're like, oh crap, maybe I shouldn't have done this, or this was not the best decision, or was it all roses and sunshine?

Peter:

No, because we parted ways in like October. So sometime in January, February, the next year, I got my tax slip from my previous job. And I looked on my income from, you know, the first 10 months of the previous year. And then the month I, when I started the business, like man. It still be some considerable time to actually get back to the way of earning when I was, when I was employed. So that was like, I was a bit of a shocker because everyone's like, oh my God, I gonna get so many clients and it's gonna be all rose and flowers. But in the reality, it actually takes time to get that. Through output. You need to, to build the same income when you have, you know, when you have a salary running, um, five people team or 10 people team. So that's, uh, that was the hard lesson. Fortunately back then, I didn't really have a lot of, you know, fixed expenses. I couldn't, uh, I couldn't manage. So that was, that was fortunate. Okay.

Russel:

And how long did it take you to get to a turning point where you're like, all right, I've got this. Life is good, I'm not stressed, or have you arrived at that point yet?

Peter:

There are multiple points like this, I think because ba basically where we are, right? Uh, where we're right now we are after a pivot in business. So when we originally started, this was a software house and we were doing group Beyond Rail and beyond plus, plus React, uh, js, uh, web applications. And this was extremely stressful, really, like this was not an like. With those, you do a single mistake on the planning phase or someone does something stupid on the development and you can be, you know, from profitable to under the line. So yes, we were making the need, but there was so much risk. I was really like stressed all the time. So we grown up like almost 20 people. We were doing relatively well. But you know, the next bad luck is just. Behind the corner and in Poland when we actually started, when I actually started my own, it became the moment where salaries in Nike just exploded. You know, when I was still working with Profu employer, you could get a really good tenure developer for probably equivalent of two and half, maybe two or something like that per month. Yeah. And that was like a really high salary for. But you know, right now you're probably not gonna be able to find someone for like eight to 10 if you want. Really someone, someone like really senior. So for policy reality, this was like ridiculous for a small team because you can't really afford to have anyone on a bench. And if you don't have anyone on a bench, you can really take an project because you don't have the resources. So that's like, uh, the city could closes. Yeah. We didn't want to get any loans to run the business. So this was like, okay, this is really shaping to be problematic. But in the meantime, so these were the people that I was getting more stress, stress, stress, stress. Because like I knew even if I do exceptionally well, there is something that's gonna go wrong. So this was the moment where a lot of our clients that we more corporate clients, started to be like, Hey, we, the website built for this product as well. Can you help us? How hard can it be? And like there, there's WordPress on the market. Um, we tested it previously, I hated it with passion, but after version like four or something, three, maybe after three, it became actually a useful tool if you wanted to do this more professionally. And in most cases, those were, you know, bigger clients like for example, port Novelli, which was, they did most of their design in-house and they were just like, Hey, we need a really trusted technology partner to do this the right way. And after some time it became obvious that salaries on WordPress developers are actually way lower than the rack will be Java, whatever you the name there. The work is actually way easier there is because there isn't really that many things that can go wrong on the WordPress side, maybe integrations, but in general those are less complex projects. But the fun is there. The clients are awesome because those are typically marketing people who are fun to be in most cases. So at this stage, one of the clients came and I met Nick, my current business partner, and he was the designer for the startup he was working for at the time. And so suddenly we went from being a really 30, uh, technology partner to having, uh, design and technology. Design and develop on that that. Foundation for what we are right now. Because right now we like this consolidated hybrid 50 50 design technology. We wanna be equally good at both those things. People love it because they get a tool that they can actually use that works well, but it's also beautiful and beautifully designed so. Also perfect. Uh, over time we decided to do okay, we need to do content because a lot of people were coming to us and they really cannot do anything with their own content. People cannot write for web, so we found people with, they're not partners in the company per se, but with working with them pretty exclusively. So those are our copy strategists, copywriters, and we also have very good resource for SEO, so we can actually do pretty much the whole thing. Except for like regular marketing work where you need to do ads and stuff. This is something we're not exactly sure what.

Russel:

Fascinating. That was lengthy. Yeah. No worries at all. It's a very cool part of your story, and as I understand it, a lot of your clients or most of your clients are actually based in the us. Is that correct?

Peter:

Yes. Uh, we're not like limiting ourselves to be US only, but that's the market I'm killing. I think most attached to, I know it the best. I spent most of my, my career working with American clients. But, uh, we do work with people in Canada. We work with people in United Kingdom, Germany, all over the place will be, so we have client that is out of China, Hal German. Yes. We, we can do it. Uh, we work with some clients in Switzerland. Yeah. Really all over the place. It's just. Because we have so much to do with the US it's probably like 85% of our business right now.

Russel:

So do you have to work like night hours a lot because of the time zone differences or how do you manage that?

Peter:

Actually, not really Well, except for recording. Um, no, actually it works really well because when we are in Poland, we're between the New York and Poland, theres sea sour difference. There's nine hours between, uh, California and Poland. So what we tend to do is do an work intensive time in the mornings, and then we have meeting times the afternoons, and most of our clients are really understanding that we are in a different time zone. So they do tend to schedule the meetings with us early in their days. So we typically done by 6:00 PM So that's, that's not, yeah.

Russel:

You're probably incentivizing a lot of people out there to maybe from that basis alone, to actually go work more internationally so you can get those long periods of intense working time and the whole day is now open for meetings. I could see a real benefit from that. Um, good strategy there. Yeah, good strategy there, Peter. Um, well, I mean, me personally, I imagine a lot of people asking given you have a lot of experience with American companies, what's the biggest difference between how you do business in Poland and how we do business in the us? That's

Peter:

gonna sound funny, but you guys are more honest.

Russel:

Okay. So

Peter:

for example, I don't think we ever had a client that wasn't willing to pay their bills. And in Poland it's pretty common that doing business here is really like a bit of a wild west. So for example, in the US you can send someone an email that you agree to a contract. That's actually a valid contract sign in. Even in the court. Yeah. In Poland, if it's not notarized, it's pretty much invalid. You can just throw it away. Wow. So a lot of people are using like this, you know, to get an advantage of, of other people. So I'm not too fond of doing business in Poland and a lot of my friends are really like struggling with it. Especially if you're a small player, you can't really afford to, you know, put someone through court because obviously this is expensive here as well as it's in the us. So, yeah, I think that's the biggest difference. And in Poland, you just love your bureaucracy. Like we are still, if you want to have a contract, needs to be in paper, it needs to be stamped. I remember the first time, the first time I got my, uh, in Europe we have VT, uh, tax. So basically that's, that's a tax that you're paying on all the services that are done between, uh, business and client. It's pretty much on everything. Even if you're a business paying business in Forland, you need to pay VAT tax and then you can get return of that. So when we are doing business in the us, you guys are not paying VAT on our invoices, but we're paying VAT on everything else. So we need to get tax return, and every time we get tax return, we get. By s our version of irs. Yeah. So, so the first time they did that, they were like, we need to have your contracts with your clients. I'm like, sure. Here they're, and obviously there's a pdf. No, we need your contract and they need to be stumped by the client. Uh, you're in the us So when did you have a stump for your business?

Russel:

Uh,

Peter:

probably not. I

Russel:

mean, well, a lot of times, anytime you sign like someone with a bank or something like that, they'll require like a notarization. But usually most business to business dealings. In fact, probably non-banking related. I think the only time was when I actually sold the business. I think we had to have something notarized then, if I remember correctly.

Peter:

And you have this like stump that is pressed into the paper. Yeah, and we just have those like ink that is, you know, the name and the signature and stuff. This is stupid. I think that's similar. Similar

Russel:

here.

Peter:

So it took us a quarter to explain that the businesses we are doing business with do not have that. And yeah, Polish government level was like, how can they not have it? Yeah. That was ridiculous that, that, that was like a fun ride. But now it's actually like I, I think they learned a lesson. It's not a big deal right now. They still control us like quite.

Russel:

Government's always gotta make themselves difficult, it sounds like in the US and um, and Poland, just, they find different ways to do it, it sounds like.

Peter:

Yeah. There are all the differences. Like you have way easier law in terms of spending company money. You can, uh, put a lot of things in company expenses. You're not like crazy with the amount in Poland, we had situations when the, you know, governmental check was like, you're using too much sugar in the office. Like, why would you care? I mean, like, this is like, you know,$10 a month. Come on. Like, are you, you're wasting your time. Okay. All right. So yeah, this, this is a bit ridiculous sometimes. Good. I'm not thinking about this.

Russel:

Maybe our US listeners won't complain so much now when they hear people like to complain about taxes and all that stuff here, so, uh, just so you folks out there know, um, what's your big goal with the business? What's the, what's the future look like for you and Nopio?

Peter:

Well, we wanna grow, basically. We wanna get bigger. More interesting clients. That's, I think, goal for every agency. I think somewhere in the longer future we would like to be able to sell the business, but right now there isn't really any drive towards this. We are still treating whatever we're doing. We're still treating it as a bit strapping pace, like we, yeah, experimenting with processes, making sure everything is as set up as possible. Uh, we constantly innovators, we, we like cannot really live long enough with. This is good enough. Now we just wanna improve that. So we're just constantly having fun with like getting our processes in internally. Because with agencies like this, the biggest issue is that you have friction point between the design and development. So in a lot of cases you are working either with design agency or the technology agency, and they need to hand off the design to the technology. And the tech was not involved in the design. Sometimes there's like, guys, what the heck did you do this? Oh, so then it's like. We are actually very good at limiting this friction point because obviously we have the teams that are working constantly together. So that's pretty much nonexisting. We're super happy with how it works, but there is always things to improve. So ideally we want this to work as a one organism. So basically that is, well, of course, to support the designers designer, understand what the, the developers need, and that's, that's what we're trying to, to achieve in the long run.

Russel:

So obviously you, you had experience in the corporate role and managing a team and employees, uh, on the US side, and then now you've, you've obviously grown your team to a decent size there in Poland. What is that specific part of the ownership experience different, uh, in terms of managing a team and from the US to Poland?

Peter:

Well, I was always managing team using Poland in general, but he was an American company. The big difference I can tell you from what I see is that in the US people are very used to working on the short contracts or like non-permanent work agreements, how we would call them. And in Poland everyone are expecting to be full-time employee and for pretty much infinite terms. So basically you sign a contract and it doesn't really have an expiration date. And this is mostly because the banking system requires you have that if you want to get a mortgage or another loan. So it's like, you know this, the system is driving people into that. Yeah.

Russel:

Mm-hmm.

Peter:

But in general, running teams, uh, I think people just like are less likely to change jobs, especially like a bit older people in Poland. So even younger. My feeling is that looking at how the businesses we are working with in the US operate and what's the, uh, rotation of the staff there. Uh, I think the exchange of staff is way lower in Poland than that is. In the US people are less likely to change job. You really need to get under their skin to make them leave or you know, you don't wanna pay them more or stuff, stuff like that. But in general, this is not, this is not our rational game. It's changing, but it's still not the same and people are moving less. In Poland, you typically wanna own the property. So when you own the apartment, you don't really wanna move the other side of the country, which is Yeah. Even though it's, you know, our country is like one of your states. So that's, that's what,

Russel:

yeah. Interesting. And are you fully remote or do you have an office? What is, what is the work environment? We're fully

Peter:

remote okay's. Fully remote. Have you always

Russel:

been?

Peter:

No. I was a hardcore, we need to be in the office and then the pandemic happened. I, I think, learned my lesson. We haven't lost any productivity. You know, we are still relatively small team, so it's kind of hard to hide not doing your job. I'm assuming when you would have like 200 people, that's gonna be a bigger problem than it is for us. But also, like, you're not limited to hiring the high competitive environment anymore. You just can get people from all over the place. So that's, that's really good for us. Right.

Russel:

Well, my net takeaway then aside for some legality and some tax things, that running an agency in Poland is pretty much the same as it is here in the States, um, for the most part. There's so many other trends that are different between the US and different European countries that but business seems very, very similar.

Peter:

Keep in mind, this may be because I was taught by the American company, so maybe I life very similarly to what it was. Very true.

Russel:

Well, I could probably ask you a hundred more questions, but uh, time is running out, but maybe the, one of the last big questions I'll ask for you is, are entrepreneurs born or are they made.

Peter:

I think a little bit of both. So I think it's way easier for someone to become an entrepreneur if they have the firing them, like basically this like internal push to do more than just working for someone else. Uh, a bit of a self-starter as well would be needed to do it because no one is telling you what to do when you're, when you're on your own. I think it's also an environment that shapes us as entrepreneurs. You know, uh, sometimes you see that, I told you before, like I felt that I needed the push to actually go with my, with my own, and I'm pretty good at starting. So I think there's a little bit of both environment and how you being born and how you're being brought up as well. You know, I was always like. I'm single parent, just mother. So she wasn't really giving me everything I wanted. She, by, by design, this was her way of bringing me up, which was fine because I always needed to do a little bit of entrepreneurship to get a little bit more out of my life. So that's, that's why I'm calling this, uh, you know, bringing someone up as the more entrepreneurial than not.

Russel:

Yeah. It's very interesting and a and a lot of folks that I've talked to, say a similar thing or if you dig deep into their story a little bit, that they had a little bit of type of hardship. Whether it just be kind of a, as you said, a single mother situation where it created this want to the need, want or need of something a little more, or. Uh, I've had cases where parents died or, or similar type situations that created this little bit of a burning desire, uh, as kind of being a key ingredient in a, in a lot of folks that ultimately became entrepreneurs. So I, I found that to be a very, very fascinating scenario. But, thank you for sharing that. Well, if people wanna know more about Nopio, where can they go?

Peter:

Well, obviously our website com. Um. Or just ping me on LinkedIn. We can probably drop my LinkedIn profile into the description if you, if you absolutely can do that. Yeah, that's two good places. Perfect.

Russel:

And that's NOPI o.com. Reach out to Peter on LinkedIn. It's not actually Peter, for the folks at home you can share, how do you say your name in Polish? It's ot. There you go. You get it straight from Peter himself. Well thank you so much for being on the show today, Peter. It's great pleasure. Thank you for sharing all your insights from and, and staying up so late there in Poland to be a guest on the show. It was an absolute pleasure.

Peter:

Awesome. Thank you for having me. This was absolute pleasure.

Russel:

Thank you for listening to an agency story podcast where every story helps you write your own, subscribe, share, and join us again for more real stories, lessons learned, and breakthroughs ahead. What's next? You'll wanna visit anagencystory.com/podcast and follow us on Instagram at@anagencystory for the latest updates.

Peter:

We work with a lot of companies that are. Midlevel established, you know, like probably between hundred 50 and 200 people in the, in the staff. And they're at the stage where they are fairly self-conscious about like sharing access to staff. And our policy is that if we build something for you, we'd happy to deploy it for you to your hosting or help your team and stuff like that. So for me, it's always entertaining when I'm like, Hey, you know, if you want us to help you with setting up your website, get us access to your DNS system, we're gonna point it to the right records and it's gonna be all like, worked. Well, we know what we're doing. No, no, no. We have a guy that is doing this for us, like forever and it's always gonna be like he, you just sent him what you need and it's gonna be okay. And then a few times we're just sending them, like, change those records, put the a records name, record, whatever there is. And I'm getting a call. Our email doesn't work. What happened? The guy who knew who he was doing deleted all the records on the DNS except the ones we sent him. It's like, okay. Yeah, I'm not sure why. Just like that. It's obviously DNS like telling this with anyone's risking because someone can just take over your domain and you can't really do much about that back then. But yeah, this is always funny that they do have trusted people.

Russel:

Yeah. I can't say how many times we've run into that exact same issue.