Meet Alex Rapp, Co-founder and COO @ Service Stories / Owner @ Crossfire Digital

Service Stories helps service-based businesses turn their work orders into AI-optimized marketing content, making businesses more discoverable by potential customers searching online and through AI tools. 

Rapp and his co-founder participated in the NMotion Accelerator Spring 2025 cohort and were accepted into the first Techstars Founder Catalyst Program for Omaha. They also won the 2025 Silicon Prairie Startup Week Pitch Competition.

Rapp’s other business, Crossfire Digital, offers advertising services to help small businesses with their online presence, such as website design, SEO and reputation management. 

What inspired you to become an entrepreneur or support other entrepreneurs?

I grew up as the new kid — new places, new schools, new friends. When you’re always the outsider, you learn to adapt, connect fast and get creative. Entrepreneurship feels like a natural extension of that: building something out of nothing, finding opportunity in change and turning challenges into growth. 

I got hooked on the freedom to build my own path, but what really keeps me in it is doing it alongside peers — all of us helping each other earn a seat at the table.

What advice would you give yourself if you could go back in time to when you were just starting out?

Early on, I thought success meant juggling everything myself and wearing “busy” like a badge of honor. Turns out, strategic focus beats busy every time. 

Pick the right problems, surround yourself with the right people and build systems that make growth repeatable. 

How do you stay motivated when things feel overwhelming — or stagnant?

I lean on what I call the “power hour.” Shut out the noise, move one thing forward and stack small wins until momentum shows back up. 

When things feel stagnant, I zoom out six months. The progress is almost always there — it’s just easy to miss in the day-to-day. And if that fails? I grab a guitar, get behind the wheel of one of my builds or chase a wave — perks of having once called Hawaii home.

What is the biggest challenge you’ve overcome and how did you overcome it?

The biggest challenge I’ve had to overcome is loneliness in entrepreneurship. Growing up, I moved around a lot and learned to figure things out on my own. That made me a great solo operator, but it also meant I carried perfectionism and a “do it myself” mindset into business. That works for a while — but when you want to scale something bigger than yourself, it breaks.

I had to learn how to let go, build a team and actually lean on community. That meant engaging with other entrepreneurs, building real relationships and realizing there are people who want to see you succeed. 

It’s easy to isolate yourself today, especially when you can run a digital services business completely remote, but I’ve found the real growth comes when you step out of the shell, share what you’re building and invite others in.

How can the Nebraska community support you?

I’ve had the opportunity to travel the world and live in cities with populations of 6 million or more. There’s an energy in those places that says you have to go big or go home — and that “churn-and-burn” pace can create diamonds. But it’s not for everyone.

What I’ve come to appreciate is the balance Nebraska provides. Here, I have stability — a solid foundation with my family, a community that shows up and the ability to hustle hard in comfort. That stability in this current life stage makes it easier to take risks, to build something meaningful and to do it in a way that lasts.

Nebraska is where I learned how to build — not just businesses, but trust. You earn results one handshake, one referral, one customer at a time. Within weeks of launching Service Stories, we had paying customers across multiple industries and early clients already seeing traffic double. Nebraska gave us both the testbed and the trust to prove the model works.

Nebraska isn’t flyover country — it’s launchpad country. If we can prove it here, we can scale it just about anywhere.

If you run a service-based business — or know someone who does — I’d love an introduction. The more local businesses we help, the stronger Nebraska’s entrepreneurial backbone becomes.