My company did not have the traditional start of most other agencies. I don’t have a background in sales or marketing, and I did not start a company to make the most money possible. I didn’t start Tragic with a big client contract to form the cornerstone of our sales, and I certainly did not start with a giant pile of investor money. Nonetheless, over the past 8 years I have been able to grow my freelance consulting career into a sleek digital technology company capable of delivering high-end, custom digital products built cheaper and to higher standards than businesses twice our size.
{Tragic’s Origin Story}
In 2009, after several years working at one of the largest interactive agencies in San Diego, I left the stability of my 9-5 to to strike out on my own. I worked with one of my design colleagues to create a logo for the obscure brand name that I had chosen, and began consulting with large agencies in need of Drupal, Magento, or Javascript help on their projects.
Original Icon and Logo:
As my reputation grew, I hired a few talented developers and a project manager to keep up with the growing workload. Most of our projects came in the form of 911 fires, generally stemming from when agencies ran into issues with other contractors, or overseas teams. During this time, we grew our brand on nothing more than a splash page featuring our logo. In late 2013 we finally built a site of our own, and while it lacked the high-end polish of the work we built for other agencies, it at least allowed us to expand our marketing efforts.
After a few more years of working for other agencies, I began to notice a trend in the lack of accountability and the low quality products that these agencies were delivering to their clients. In 2015 I decided to stop working with all but a select few local design agencies, and instead focused our efforts on providing our expert services directly to the end-client. So we improved our website’s design and re-targeted it to attract more clients. However, our brand and website has never properly showcased the amazing talent we have here at Tragic.
This year we were finally able to take some time to invest in our brand, and to give Tragic the long overdue overhaul that it deserved. The changes made are both inward and outward facing as we have revamped our scoping and management style, our technology stack, our logo, and even fully redesigned and rebuilt our (soon-to-launch) website.
{New Changes at Tragic}
Project Scoping & Management: Since we had our start in the “traditional agency world”, we had always followed a Waterfall project management style. We had our own flavor of it, but both our scoping and management followed the same approach as we had learned from our large agency overlords. Since becoming Hubspot partners in 2016 and being introduced to Growth Driven Design, we had started to approach our projects differently. Not fully agile, but more of our own Growth Driven Design bastardized version of Agile project management. This year we ironed out our approach and are now able to leveraging new tools in our project management system to better manage our schedule of tasks and to prioritize them based on weekly sprints and our client’s needs. Both waterfall and agile project management have benefits and shortcomings, but neither work perfectly for both new project builds and the type of ongoing growth driven support that we provide our clients. Our new style of scoping and management mitigates losses for both the client and the agency, and focuses on building quickly and efficiently, while allowing us to to be extremely agile and pivot our approach as needed throughout a project or ongoing maintenance.
Technology Stack: We have both upgraded and added to our technology stack. We spent the last year and a half sharpening our skills on the latest versions of the technology platforms that we know and love: Drupal 8, Magento 2, and Angular 4. Since we became Hubspot partners, we have helped several of our clients take control of their marketing and sales funnels, as well as have leveraged it for our own marketing and social efforts. We even built our new blog using the Hubspot COS! Additionally, we have continued to improve our expertise with the Google Cloud hosting platform and now have over 15 clients managed on the service.
New Logo: Our new Creative Director Erik Wirtz re-imagined our logo. We wanted our new logo to put more emphasis on the ‘tragic’ as that is how most of our clients have come to refer to us. But we didn’t want to eradicate the ‘media’ as it does center the brand and helps new visitors make some sense of our name. We also wanted something as unique as we are. And what Erik produced is leagues beyond what I ever could have imagined on my own.
New Icon and Logo:
New Domain: We acquired a fancy new domain name, and decided on something a bit more personal than the typical .io. How many companies can say that their brand and their domain are one and the same?! https://tragic.media
New Blog: We decided to separate our blog and our main website. We are growing our blog into a resource center chock-full of information on how to improve the quality and visibility of any company’s web presence. We felt that it should be visually separate from our main site, which is focused on educating new customers about the Tragic brand and shows off how f*&$king talented our team is. Our new blog was launched 2 months ago and we have a lot of great content planned for this year, so make sure you are subscribed to our email list: http://blog.tragic.media
New Website: Finally, we started on the long overdue architectural overhaul of our main website. We really wanted to focus the site on not only showing off our cutting-edge development skills, but also the high-end design treatments that our clients have come to love and expect. The new site is built in the latest version of Angular 4 and is integrated with Drupal 8 for easy content management as well as integrates Hubspot smart forms for all new business submissions. The new site is currently finishing up development and will be launched before the end of summer with continued enhancements planned through the end of the year.
<blatant promotion>If your company's brand or website has become outdated like ours had, contact us for a free consultation to find out how we can help you improve your digital presence.</blatant promotion>
Stay tuned for the exciting launch of our new website in the next few weeks!
