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 are six people. We take on about eleven 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.
The team
The people named here are the people who do the work.
There is no delivery team behind a curtain. If you meet someone in the pitch, they are on your account.
Ilmar Vahtra
Founder, technical SEO
Spent nine years as a backend engineer before discovering that most SEO problems are engineering problems wearing a marketing hat. Has migrated four ecommerce platforms without losing rankings, and one with, which he will tell you about at length.
Crawl architecture, log analysis, migrations
Sofia Lindqvist
Head of paid media
Ran acquisition in-house at a Stockholm marketplace through the iOS 14 attribution collapse, which she describes as the most educational eighteen months of her career. Deeply suspicious of any ROAS figure she did not reconcile herself.
Google Ads, Meta, offline conversion modelling
Tobias Reiner
Editorial director
Former investigative reporter at a regional German daily. Treats a client's expert like a source: record everything, verify the claims, cut the parts that only sound good. Has killed more articles than he has published.
Subject-matter interviews, editing, digital PR
Nadia Oyelaran
Analytics lead
Came from data engineering in fintech, where being wrong about a number has consequences. Builds the measurement layer first and has walked away from two engagements where the client would not grant ERP access.
Server-side tracking, GA4, warehouse modelling
Kaspar Mänd
SEO strategist
Joined from a marketplace with 400,000 SKUs, which is a very effective way to learn what breaks at scale. Can explain faceted navigation to a CFO without either party losing the will to live.
Topical mapping, ecommerce catalogues, internal linking
Marta Wilczek
Content strategist
Built the severance calculator that earned Kessler & Roe ninety-four referring domains and cost them a handful of enquiries. Argues, correctly, that the second part is why the first part worked.
Research, information architecture, tools and calculators
How we got here
Including the years nothing happened.
- 2019
Ilmar leaves an engineering job in Tallinn and takes on three technical SEO audits as a contractor. The third one turns into a retainer that still runs.
- 2021
Sofia joins after the iOS attribution collapse convinces her that in-house teams cannot see their own measurement problems. Paid media becomes a discipline rather than a favour.
- 2022
The Kessler & Roe engagement starts. It produces almost nothing for five months and then becomes the case study we are best known for. It also teaches us to say the timeline out loud.
- 2024
Nadia builds the measurement practice after we realise a third of our new clients have arithmetic problems rather than marketing problems.
- 2026
Six people, eleven active clients, and a policy of turning down roughly a third of inbound. The maths works and we would like to keep it that way.
Still here?
Then you are probably the kind of client this works for. Tell us what is going wrong.
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