Recap: Lab 6 — Breakfast with diesdas.digital

This was it — our last lab for this first installment of /suelabweeks! Our friends from diesdas.digital joined us for breakfast in our office. They brought all four of them: Lars, Max, Harry and Lorenz. Harry kicked off the whole thing by presenting the genesis story of diesdas.digital.

The founding

All four of diesdas.digital have a background in different design agencies such as A Color Bright, Meta Design or Edenspiekermann. At some time, there was this thought of »We can do this by ourselves.« that motivated the guys to found. This was back in 2014, when the idea first sparked — it took until summer of 2015 to make concrete plans and get the thing rolling. During that time they worked on it before and after work, as well as in lunch breaks. This is also how they did their website.

Then it was time to decide who was going to be the CEO. They didn’t rival on that matter but rather randomized it and Lars was the lucky winner.

In the beginning, they had two projects to kick things off. Diesdas.digital was meant to be self-sustained from its first minute of existence.

What’s in a name

A business needs a name. The four guys had several ideas to begin with, one favorit being »Radialimpuls«. In the end, the one question was: What do we do? And the answer was: This, that, and all of it digitally. Enter diesdas.digital!

During that time, they gained some attention through their — mostly Harry-flavoured — presence in social media, to be specific: Snapchat and blog posts. They post weekly recaps on their Medium that try to summarize happenings of each week, whereas on Snapchat Harry takes us with him through his mostly superbusy professional life. By the way, where have those snaps been lately? We sure miss them! 👋

All this action on social media is not only for pure fun — behind it stands the desire to communicate agency life in a more transparent and honest way. After all, I design blogs and Snapchat aren’t media typically consumed by clients. That makes being a little more open than usual not only reasonable, but the clients that do read it, are most likely open-minded, relaxed ones — which is just the clientele that diesdas.digital likes to work for!

This, that, business

A certain culture of improvisation is also found in the company. When there is stuff to do, someone must do it — for example accounting, which Lars took on and made his job for about three months. It is and most likely will remain a very small operation for now. When asked about growing, all four were open to that possibility, but they don’t want it at all costs. The small nature of this agency was one of the motivations to do it after all. And so they didn’t start with much. It was all funded by private money of the four founders, without the comfort of reserve assets or even an investor to back up the financial side of things. By the way, being small helps with decisions, since it’s feasable for everyone to participate — even if you ignore the golden rule of founding with an uneven number of people.

Being a small group of people also helps with communication in projects. They started out organizing things with Trello, but now they just have a single wall of to-dos where they pin a sticker with their face to make visible who is doing what. Now, the team favorite remains Slack with the general idea being: »If you talk to each other, you don’t need a dumb tool.«

Getting there

So, what are the things to take away from all this when you’re an upcoming design student?

First, agencies are a great place to start. You’ll most likely learn a lot and — even more importantly — you’ll get to know the things you want to keep doing later on. Second, being in a small agency leads to a greater variety of tasks for each. With less people to do the work, you’ll get to do so much more of the important, boring and fun stuff. Third, don’t work late. Make no mistake: Being creative after 10 hours of work is a myth that’s weirdly cultivated especially in advertising agencies. You just don’t want to work 15 to 16 hours on something just to come in the next day and think: »What the hell did I do there yesterday?«.

That wraps up our last recap for now. We are already planning the next labs, so stay tuned for that :)!