Week 26: Six months ago we founded this new digital agency — a status update.
It’s now been half a year of diesdas.digital. Time to answer all your questions about our progress. 🤔
Hey there, I am Harry and six months ago I founded a new agency for branding, design and development with my coworkers Lars, Lorenz and Max. We called it diesdas.digital and since its inception we have been writing weekly summaries of what happens to us and what we learn along the way, here on Medium.
This is the 26th edition, marking the half-year milestone and we decided to not just look back at this week, but also zoom out to see the bigger picture. So here’s a fictional interview with all the questions we frequently get (and those we wish we’d get). Enjoy!
Let’s start with a hard one …
Guys … it’s 2016! Isn’t the concept of an agency kind of outdated? Why did you found another one?
We know, we know. Startups and making your own products gets all the hype, while the agency model feels a bit outdated. After all, successful digital products are never finished and need continuous iteration and refinement. That’s tricky within an agency setup when you do client work in contained projects. But that’s also not how we want to run things.
We want to be a partner for our clients that they can rely on and if we launch a website or an app we merely see that as the first step. Our ideal setup is an iterative one, in which we quickly design/build something, put it out there, see how it’s received and learn from that. Forming one team with the client, transferring knowledge. That’s our vision for how we want to work and we have at least two projects that are set up like this.
Admittedly though, often there is also a fixed budget and the client wants you to do X, Y and Z within a given timeframe. Fair enough, we do that too (albeit asking lots of critical questions in the process).
In any case: don’t believe the chatter, agencies are far from doomed. However, they need to change and adapt their role.
Okay. Fair enough. When did you first plan to found this company? How much preparation went into it?
We had the first plans in 2014 when I was leaving Edenspiekermann, but back then it didn’t feel right to start our own business yet. I went on to work with A Color Bright instead, but in the summer of 2015 Lars and I met again and decided it’s now or never. 👊
Max also pondered quitting at that time and Lorenz had just started a new job. We got together, made plans, set up a Slack, talked to our lawyer and potential clients. The ball started rolling. We lived a secret second life, meeting each week at 8am, before our usual work days started [😴], then again in the evenings or during lunch breaks. In hindsight, astonishingly, everything fell into place easily, but it took almost half a year of careful preparation and a lot of dedication.
I checked out your website. It’s all text. Where are your projects?
That’s a tricky one. We had a real website in the works, with projects and colorful tiles and photos and illustrations and everything, but we couldn’t quite agree what it should look like, because our visual identify evolved at the same time, mainly through building the site. The undertaking was growing too big and bloated, and at some point I just canceled the efforts and wrote the text you see on the site now. Keep it simple, stupid.
A lot of effort went into the tonality and refining it over the course of weeks, keeping it free of buzzwords, explaining how we work and what we want to do. After launch we got a lot of positive feedback and quite frequently clients tell us they read our website and they liked it because of its simplicity and easy-to-grasp text.
That being said our site is basically an announcement blog post and it will need to change eventually. We don’t think that it’s crucial to our business though: Projects mostly come in through recommendations and our social media channels do a good job of giving us visibility. Having a huge website that shows everything about the company feels like a dated approach to me, as nobody wants to sift through all that. We will probably build a more elaborate version at some point, but with everything else going on I really couldn’t care less at the moment.
Seriously though, projects! What did you work on so far?
Quite some stuff really, very different things regarding scope and topic … I’ll try to compile a list:
- A website with Alphabet Type, to be launched later this year.
- Starting a web style guide for a huge corporation in collaboration with another agency, which was unfortunately scrapped halfway into the project.
- A memory game for an online publication.
- Taking over maintenance work on another set of online publications.
- The website for TEMEDOS, working on their social media efforts and marketing, even designing print flyers and a cinema spot.
- Building and designing the website and branding for the Internet Economy Foundation with Susanna Dulkinys.
- Strategy and marketing concept for a startup.
- Complete rebranding of an existing web service, website to come later this year.
- A website + online shop that we also cannot mention specifically.
- An ongoing collaboration with TypeMates on their new website and online shop, launching later this year.
- Designing a hardware installation for a large fashion brand, in collaboration with their lead agency.
- A service design project together with Baumgardt Consulting, gathering new ideas for public transport across Germany.
- Some collaborations with FontShop.
- + numerous other small projects.
Oof, that’s a lot of stuff for four people. How do you divide the work among the four of you? What’s your process?
Our process is called common sense. Every project is different and therefore how we approach each one is different.
We also don’t like putting people in boxes and abandoned fixed roles, such as “you’re a designer and you’re a developer” … it’s all rather fluid. We try to keep everyone at least a little bit in the loop about everything, doing daily stand ups to structure the days for example. Each project usually has one person coordinating what happens, but everyone else can also jump on it when needed. So far this controlled chaos approach works, but we’ll see how that goes when we grow beyond four people.
You explicitly state your daily rate on your website. Why? Do you actually get those 800€/day from clients?
If SpaceX can tell you upfront what it costs to put a satellite in orbit, then surely we can name our daily rate? I never understood why agencies make such a huge deal out of what their work costs. Ridiculous, really.
We wanted to give potential clients a ballpark number of what they can expect a project to cost, sparing us some discussions about completely unrealistic budgets. We also don’t like to divide our work into disciplines like “design” or “development”, so we charge the same price for everything. It’s transparent and it’s a simple system to work with. And yes, we usually get that money, after explaining what we do and why our work has value.
You must be getting rich.
Not really and that’s not the primary goal anyhow. Right now we’re playing it safe, leaving as much money in the company as we can, building a financial safety net. We do pay ourselves decent salaries though, similarly to our employments before. All in all I gotta say though that it’s a pretty tight calculation since a lot of time is spent on communications and internal tasks that aren’t billable to clients.
At times we’re also slow to finish projects, dealing with all the overhead of running a company and working on multiple projects in parallel. That’s gonna change though, when we get more people in.
And lastly, after having billed a client, most of them take 30 days to actually send you the money, so it’s not like you can pump something out and immediately reap the benefits.
Now for something entirely different … what’s up with that name?
Oh right, that must be confusing to a lot of people. It sorta happened by accident, like all the best things usually do. We originally had a slew of other names on the table, but at some point we had a pivotal conversation, which went something like this:
“I can’t stand all of these pretentious names … can we make this more simple? More honest?”
“Can we pick a name that reflects what we do?”
“No idea, what is it that we actually do?”
“Umm. Well. This and that, as long as it’s digital?”
“ 😳 ”
And there it was, all of a sudden. It’s simple, it has a nice ring to it in German, it’s honest, it’s a bit ironic with a twinkle in the eye. And most people who hear it once memorize it immediately. Admittedly, it’s still weird at times to say “I’m Harry from diesdas.digital”, but hey, self-irony is great, isn’t it? 🙃
Also, the name equals the domain for our website, which is a nice touch.
Sounds like honesty and humility is important to you … any other goals like that?
Glad you asked, haha. In January we accidentally made this slide as part of a bigger presentation, but I liked it and I’ve been refining it ever since. I wouldn’t call it a manifesto, but it does set the tone for how we operate. Take a look:
What about social media? How’s that working out? Time is money, so surely there’s a business goal behind all of your activity?
Not really. I always looked at other agencies, their website and their social media channels and most of them are pathetic, frankly. And at the same time they sell exactly that kind of work to clients for a lot of money and pretend to be experts in it. This disconnect always bothered me, so when we founded our company I knew I wanted to do this differently.
Also … it’s fun? 🤓
Anyhow, you be the judge if we’re doing a decent job. There is no big strategy behind it, other than conveying a feeling of what it would be like to work with us, be it as an employee or a client.
Additionally, these posts on Medium, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and Facebook give us visibility and people are reminded of us when they hear about a project somewhere. Most work comes in through recommendations, so yeah, some of it seems to be working.
Do you find it hard to run a company? Are you working crazy long hours?
We never do nightshifts as we don’t think that’s time well spent, both physically and mentally. Working late is usually a reaction to mistakes that happened earlier in a project, so we try to be well prepared, make smart decisions and set ourselves up to finishing everything in time. We come in at 9am and we leave between 6pm and 7pm, also working remotely from time to time. So far that’s been working well.
Especially here on Medium you read a lot of posts from “founders” who preach that every “entrepreneur” needs to dedicate their whole life to the success of the company, especially in the first year, that it’s a big hustle which will impact your private life dramatically, might ruin your relationship, but that it’s all worth it somehow, yadda yadda. No thanks, all that crap wasn’t an option for us.
Work is obviously a big part of our lives, but it cannot consume everything. Similarly, not paying ourselves (and the people who work with us) a decent salary is unacceptable, as well as working long hours. We always said that this new company must be sustainable from the start, both financially and personally and we would stop if that wasn’t the case. Well … we’re still here, alive and kicking. 😉
You could also create your own products instead of doing client work. Did you ever consider getting investors in and venture capital?
Nope. We founded a company to make our own decisions, not to report to investors. At the same time, as a consulting/service business we admittedly had very low funding costs — not everyone can make that decision. Anyhow, our goal is to create a profitable company and having fun while doing so, instead of being stressed about spending other people’s money. Not everybody needs to be a unicorn company; we’re playing the long game and we’d rather do client work and be profitable than work on a throw-away idea that is VC backed. That being said, we have nothing against startups and obviously enjoy working with nimble, pragmatic and tech-savvy clients.
However, if we get the chance to build a product of our own at some point, with our own money, that’d obviously be great. But I don’t think we’d give up doing client work altogether, because we’re good at it and we like the variety it brings, working with different people, from outside our bubble.
But if you reject outside capital … what’s your growth strategy?
Duh. We know that at some point we will need more people, but we’re not growing for growing’s sake. Rather we’re approaching this cautiously … working with freelancers and employing a new person later this year. Even hiring one person is a big undertaking because it comes with tremendous responsibility that we take very seriously: after all somebody is basing their life on the success of our (and then also their) company, so we better be well prepared to live up to that trust.
In general, are you satisfied with these first 6 months?
Isn’t that pretty obvious? 😅
Did anything go super wrong so far?
Not really … I believe our approach of being cautious, but not afraid and asking for help when necessary lets us avoid many mistakes. Sure, there are some projects that didn’t make sense financially in hindsight and trying to do all the accounting ourselves probably wasn’t a smart idea either. But we also learned a tremendous amount from these undertakings and I wouldn’t change anything, even if I could.
Cool. And how’s the outlook for the next 6 months?
We set a financial goal for the first year and it seems like we might be reaching it early, so that’s great. We get to hire the first person. We have a full pipeline of projects. There’s a shit-ton of stuff to do, but that’s how it should be! Bring it on, we’re ready! 💩
And beyond that? Where do you see this company in three years?
We had this discussion internally and it yielded interesting results, showing that our individual ideas for this company aren’t as closely aligned as we thought, but that’s a topic for another post. For now, let’s focus on the present, shall we? 😇
Lars but not least: How long will these recaps continue?
My goal is to cover one year, then print a mega-expensive book with all 52 posts and give it to everyone who supported us in this first year. We’ll see if we get there. 😅
Cool, and it’s a wrap! Thanks for asking + reading + supporting us and hopefully you’ll also join us on our journey in the upcoming months! If you have any additional questions or feedback — shoot us a message, we’re happy to answer!
In any case, take care, have a nice weekend and a relaxed start of the week! Until then, best regards from your friends at diesdas.digital! We had a blast so far and we intend to keep it that way!
Mit fetzigen Grüßen,
Lars, Lorenz, Max and Harry 💚
