Hey, I’m Gev Marotz, a fractional product and design partner. I’m interested in how people build independent businesses that leave room for life. Benten Woodring’s story is about what it takes to get there.
Benten Woodring took his laptop on a two-and-a-half-week road trip with his family. He assumed he’d need it. By the time the trip ended, he hadn’t opened it once.
The design studio he founded, NOOON, had continued without him. There weren’t any emergencies that required his attention or decisions only he could make. Woodring had spent years trying to reach that point. When it arrived, the clearest evidence was a computer left unused.
NOOON is a brand and web studio serving technology companies in logistics, manufacturing, infrastructure, energy and other physical industries. Woodring started it in early 2024 and spent its first year building the company alongside a full-time job. He says it can now operate without his daily involvement, though it still depends on him to grow.
The studio’s progress can look fast when measured from its launch. The more useful timeline begins much earlier. Woodring had already run businesses, lost money, freelanced for more than a decade and tried to build a studio by working 80-hour weeks. NOOON felt natural, he says, because he’d exhausted so many of the ways it could go wrong.
“I actually think I got a lot right just because I’ve made so many mistakes,” he said.
Woodring didn’t plan to become a designer. He studied business and grew up in a blue-collar family. His father ran an HVAC business. His grandfather ran a metal shop. After college, Woodring took an internship at a youth nonprofit in Denver, where he earned $800 a month.
The nonprofit had a screen-printing shop in its basement. Someone had donated the equipment, and the organization wanted to use it to teach young people job skills. Woodring didn’t know how to run the equipment. The nonprofit initially declined to hire him, he said, then agreed on the condition that he raise the money for his own salary.
He learned the press because the job required it. He prepared screens, printed shirts and taught the young people working in the shop. Then customers began asking if he could design the artwork too.
“I guess,” he’d tell them.
His formal preparation amounted to a Photoshop class in high school. He began making what he now describes as terrible logos. When one customer asked what he charged, Woodring picked a number: $100. The customer paid it.
“Oh my gosh, I just made money doing that,” Woodring remembers thinking.
The exchange gave him his first paid design client. It also established a pattern. Much of his career would advance through the next problem someone placed in front of him.
By then, he already knew that running a business could be expensive. At 19, Woodring managed a residential painting franchise with as many as eight employees. He hired too freely and lacked the training to prepare his crew properly. Mistakes followed.
On one job, Woodring said, the team had to redo the work entirely because of an error he’d made. A project he expected to produce roughly $6,000 in profit instead contributed to a loss. By the end of the summer, he was down about $5,000.
That was a large amount of money for him at 19. Woodring doesn’t present it as a charming origin story. It was the cost of discovering, too late, that sales and competence are different things. Winning work didn’t mean he knew how to deliver it.
Design offered another apprenticeship, though not one he always felt prepared for. When Woodring and his wife were expecting a child, he decided he needed to earn more than the nonprofit could pay. He applied for design jobs and landed an interview at a corporate events agency partly, he says, because he shared an uncommon surname with the creative director.
The coincidence got his résumé noticed. It didn’t close the gap in his skills. Woodring hadn’t used some of the software required for the role, but the agency hired him. He learned while designing signs, screens, name badges and other materials for large corporate events.
Years later, at the design agency Unfold, the feeling returned. Woodring would open a shared Figma file and watch more experienced designers work.
“I don’t know why they hired me,” he remembers thinking. “I have no idea what I’m doing.”
He watched anyway. He studied how they built websites and improved through proximity. At the same time, he kept freelancing, as he had for more than a decade. Those projects expanded his skills and, just as important, his relationships with designers and developers he might later call.
Experience didn’t make him immune to overwork. In an earlier attempt to go out on his own, Woodring said he worked about 80 hours a week for a year while supporting a family of four. He burned out and made little money. The time lost with his family stayed with him.
