About
Strategy is the most abused word in marketing.
It has been drained of meaning by decks that never touch a revenue line. We spell our name a little wrong on purpose — Startegys, not the polished version — because the polished version is what you get in the pitch and rarely again. What we mean by strategy is narrower and duller: find the constraint, measure against money, and stop when the spending outruns the return.
Startegys started in 2019 because a backend engineer kept being handed SEO reports that recommended blog posts when the real problem was that Googlebot was rendering an empty div.
That pattern turned out to be the business. Companies come to us with a brief — more content, cheaper leads, better rankings — and the brief is usually a symptom. The constraint is somewhere less convenient: the faceted navigation, the conversion definition, the fact that nobody has reconciled the ad platform against the order table in two years.
We take on a deliberately small number of clients at a time and we turn down roughly a third of what comes in, because the honest answer to “can you help?” is often no. That is a strange way to run an agency and it is the only way we have found to keep the work good.
What we believe
Four positions that make us harder to hire.
The constraint is rarely the brief
Clients arrive asking for content and need an architecture fix. Or asking for a cheaper cost per lead when the leads are the problem. We spend the first month finding out what is actually in the way, and we are willing for the answer to be inconvenient.
A number you cannot defend is a liability
We would rather report a smaller true figure than a larger convenient one. Every analytics engagement we run includes a meeting where somebody's past reporting is revealed to have been optimistic. It is never a fun meeting and it is always the turning point.
Slow is a legitimate answer
SEO takes a year. Content takes six months to feel like anything. Anyone promising otherwise is either selling you paid media under a different name or lying. We say the timeline out loud in the pitch, which loses us work.
We are not a growth partner, we are contractors
We do a defined thing for a defined fee and we hand it over documented. Two of our four analytics engagements last year ended because the client no longer needed us. That is the intended outcome, not a churn problem.
Still here?
Then you are probably the kind of client this works for. Tell us what is going wrong.
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