I'm Nathalie Lussier

Following the digital trail…

I started “dreaming in digital” at an early age and designed my first website at age 12. Before that, I flexed my entrepreneurial muscles by putting together a self-published magazine I sold to my friends and family.

I put in 10,000-plus hours of programming time while earning my bachelor’s Degree in Software Engineering.

When graduation rolled around I had worked as an intern for a start-up in the Silicon Valley, a Wall Street firm, and hopped around Europe while interning as a programmer in London.

I was lucky enough to graduate with a job offer from a Wall Street firm, but my intuition told me that the economy was shifting in ways we couldn’t comprehend, and I had always wanted to start my own business, so I turned down that job offer.

My parents and peers thought I was crazy to chuck away such a stable career, especially because the first business I started was all about my passion for healthy eating.

I mastered online marketing…

While growing my first business, being my quirky self, and wearing a witch’s hat in my videos, I built a website that reached 750,000 yearly visitors and over 1 million page views.

Soon my readers and clients were asking me how I had grown my healthy eating business so quickly, how I set up my website, and how all of these digital strategies really worked…

Answering their questions led to the creation of my second business, which quickly grew to a six-figure web design and consulting company.

Climbing the spiral staircase…

Although my consulting company was doing well, I knew I wanted to start a family and the travel and regular calls were not going to be the ideal scenario with a baby.

By this point, my business was doing so well financially that I asked my husband to quit his corporate job and join me in my business.

At first, he resisted but when we ran into some technical issues with our membership website he quickly dusted off his coding skills and pulled together what would eventually become the AccessAlly plugin for WordPress. He could see where he could bring value to people in this coaching and entrepreneurial space!

Together over the next few months we added more functionality and released our first WordPress plugin, PopupAlly. 

This was our test to make sure we could handle supporting software customers. We found that we really liked creating software solutions, so we decided to go all in and make AccessAlly our main gig.

I call this climbing the spiral staircase because I found myself in the software space again after stepping away, but this time I had a new perspective as a business owner.

Stepping into leadership and mentorship

Many years into this entrepreneurial adventure, I’m grateful to have an amazing team making AccessAlly better every day. 

I’ve also been able to hire interns and mentor them in a way that I wish I had when I was just starting out in my tech and business career, too. 

Today I share my insights and experience running a permaculture farm, raising two kids, and running a successful software startup.

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