10 years on the market. How were they?
Digital Ant was founded in July 2012 out of an entrepreneurial desire. We started like many people in the industry — on a sole trader basis. With no experience, no money, no contacts and in the middle of a recession. We turned my then part-time after-school job into our first client, wrote a business plan and got cracking.
“We will help mid-sized companies design websites that will help them achieve their goals. We’ll come up with the structure, write the content, and let one of the great web studios already on the market do the project.”
We started with this and did exactly two projects, one for our aforementioned first client (implemented by PeckaDesign studio) and the other for my uncle and his construction company (coded by SuperCoders).
But it turned out that not many companies were interested in this service. They wanted a website, but surprisingly not the advice of two guys in their twenties on how to make it as good as possible. But we didn’t want to do classic web design. It seemed to us that this market was already saturated with a lot of people and companies that were doing it well.
Fortunately, we realized pretty quickly that companies wanted help obtaining inquiries from Google, so Stepan quickly started learning about something you probably know under the three-letter acronym P-P-C. We later expanded our know-how and added creative services, which are an extremely important component of successful campaigns. Lesson one: listen to the market.
Breakthrough year 2017
I returned from China, where I had spent a year and a half working in the local Home Credit innovation center, which was at the time the largest non-banking financial firm in the world. It was an incredible learning experience. I came back motivated to work hard and use what I learned. Stepan had finished school and built the company foundation while I was away.
We dove into business full force and in those six years, we’ve managed to build a team of 15 associates and increase sales from €162k to €842k. Last year, clients from the Czech Republic, Poland, Germany, and the USA entrusted us with campaigns worth around €3 787k.
Numbers are great, of course, but how we do what we do is also very important. We have never been focused on extreme growth. We wanted to grow, but we also wanted to build a stable team that grows with the company. We believed that this was the only way we could deliver long-term superior service to our clients, which has always been and will always be our main priority. Quite simply — we wanted to grow, but in a way that kept our people and our clients happy.
That brings us to what we have valued most over the past ten years: people. Apart from the two of us, most of our team has been with us since the breakthrough years of 2017 and 2018. And they’ve grown with the company. A lot of our clients have been with us for years, and we’ve grown with them. And that’s great.
About doing business in two
This is something a lot of people ask us about — how does it work, doing business in two? It depends on who you are and how you approach it. In our case, it’s worked flawlessly for over a decade. It’s critical to have the same values, patience, and most importantly, respect each other’s strengths and weaknesses.
About what keeps us moving forward
It’s the vision of an agile company that supports its clients’ growth and never loses the desire to provide them with the best possible service. It is important for us to work with promising Czech companies, but we have also always been drawn to cross borders and show that even from Prague, it is possible to work on great international projects in the biggest markets. Today, such projects make up a third of our business and we want to double their share in the next two years. We want to apply our international experience to help build successful Czech companies in the next ten years. And that’s what we’re going after.
– Lukáš, Co-Founder of Digital Ant
