Duga Digital is 5!

When I started Duga Digital 5 years ago (3rd February 2021) it was the middle of the pandemic. We'd just been locked down, again. It was a stressful, uncertain and volatile time.

In 2019 I'd take 94 flights working for a global travel company. In early 2020, the world locked down with no real understanding of where things were going to land. In September 2020 I started a new role, another corporate job, this time in insurance.

5 years on and things have been up and down and round and off and on and yes and no and maybe and great and mad and hard and wonderful, all at the same time.

Owning a business isn't something I had every planned or envisaged in my life. It wasn't a dream that needed to be fulfilled, or an itch to be scratched, but it has happened. I have had no idea at some stages and all the ideas (too many!) at others. One of my old bosses once told me that "You can never have a standalone analytics agency without media". Well, here we are.

We've been through the stages of freelancer, consultancy, working with contractors, hiring first employees, losing first employees, retaining clients, losing clients, winning projects, becoming partners with genuinely amazing companies.

Now we have an amazing tech partnership with Google, with Addingwell, and some incredible individual relationships across the industry. Most of our work is won through word of mouth based on excellent testimonies from work done elsewhere. Our tech stack goes from strength to strength. We don't rely on AI - we have "pure" software written in Python that breaks and needs fixing. And it's awesome. We enable millions in marketing spend, and save companies through smart technology use with data at scale.

I spoke with a few people when I started Duga and they said Enjoy the ride, you don't know how long it will last or what you'll do

And they were right.

Working on projects like GA4 migrations, GTM upgrades, consent management setups, server-side mirrors and setups, Data Manager API automations, we serve a lot of different customers and stakeholders but it's a superb ride.

We celebrated our 5th birthday with some wonderful cakes in Budapest at Superweek.

I wanted to say thank you. To everyone who has supported Duga, thought of Duga, worked with Duga, partnered with Duga and offered any sort of advice. It has been a very rewarding 5 years - proving a few people wrong.

Here's to the next 5.

Dan Truman

Founder Duga Digital