As we are heading towards our 10th anniversary – Platypus & evolution

2019 Ofis

While our office plant in our past and first Kadıköy office blossomed strongly with our “growth marketing” efforts 🙂

We established Şipşak Dijital exactly 9 years ago, in May 2015, after completing the official procedures.
Since 2003 - 2004, I have been working in the fields of database-based marketing, CRM, loyalty programs, digital channel and product management, digital marketing, IT. And in 2015, I had taken action to fill a gap that I believed existed in the market. I had managed to convince my friends in this direction, with whom we set out together that day.
As a few friends who had spent most of their careers in corporate companies, we were going into business for the first time and setting out to sell services in a highly competitive sector such as the agency industry.
In addition to my personal career, when I consider the development, change and transformation in the field of digital marketing over the last 20 years, I would not lie if I said that I feel a bit like a dinosaur today. However, when I glance back with the excitement of turning ten years old in 2025, I can say that we have gained a wealth of experience both in agency management and individually.
When I was working at Yapı Kredi Bank, I remember like it was yesterday that we imported one-time password generating devices from abroad for the OTP verification that was introduced to our lives for the first time.
When I was working at Garanti Pension, my job title was “web front-end design and content management assistant manager” because the concept of digital marketing had not yet fully entered our lives, and social media channels were just being invented, it was a few years before they were fully included in our daily lives, and social media marketing was not even around.
When I was working at BNP Paribas Cardif, we were excited about the responsive website that the Portuguese team of the company launched for the first time.
There are dozens of examples like this. Today, we are talking about artificial intelligence and how those who use artificial intelligence will gain an advantage in digital marketing. We have progressed from the years when the work done in digital was mostly considered as technical work and not considered as marketing, to the days when the share of traditional marketing concepts and works is much smaller, and everything is considered through digital.
inbound-vs-outbound
When we founded Şipşak Digital in 2015, we observed that SMEs were very deficient in digital transformation and set out with the idea of providing them with cost-effective solutions to grow their businesses in the digital world. We became the reseller of a SaaS platform in order to achieve this goal. Our aim was to offer our customers the opportunity to both produce practical websites and to manage social media, content marketing and SEO channels holistically through this SaaS by using the software as a management panel also.
Of course, the key point of this idealistic business model - besides the fixed cost of the SaaS - was the need for high volume sales and growing cumulative earnings.
We couldn’t reach the numbers we expected with the friends we set out with and who were also responsible for sales. The same business model, which was also tried by some larger and global companies, couldn’t reach the expected potential in the Turkish market.
Even today, when technology is much more advanced, digital transformation is still an important problem for SMEs and especially small businesses. However, our observations about our business model and SMEs at that time should be the subject of another article; let's go back to the journey of Şipşak Dijital.
After our foreign currency-indexed SaaS investments became difficult to manage due to the course of the exchange rate in Turkey, we reached to a decision stage. In line with the developments, the friends responsible for SME sales, with whom we founded the company together, decided to shift to different business areas.
This period of 1.5 - 2 years was educational and instructive for us in many ways. We gained important experiences such as swift decision-making, adaptation, managing negative outputs, and exploring new possibilities pointed out by the lessons learned.
As we updated our itinerary on our journey, we focused on a fundamental question: What mission lies at the heart of Şipşak Dijital?
The answer to this question was quite simple: To provide digital marketing services that are not only creativity-oriented, but also includes an engineering approach on top of that which enables companies to grow their business, sales and marketing in the digital landscape.
We had tried to offer this value proposition to SMEs through using a SaaS. If we removed the SaaS from the equation which is not a viable option anymore, we could continue to support SMEs with alternative open-source software, and with our past experiences in international companies, we could offer the same approach to larger companies.
We redefined and reorganized our services accordingly, and as a result of this reorganization, we renewed our positioning as a “Growth marketing agency”
growth-marketing
Over the course of the years, we have realized projects in many different countries such as Germany, Japan, USA, UK, Canada. As we started to realize more global projects, we launched our registered trademark Platypus in order to facilitate our communication and to better explain ourselves. (You can review the story of Platypus on the “Why Platypus” page on our website.)
Perhaps one of the most conflicting issues on our journey to our tenth year has been the definition of success. I always watch the 1996 movie “Jerry Maguire” starring Tom Cruise with a similar feeling. In the movie, in the highly competitive sports management industry, the main character, who is the best employee in the biggest company in the industry, experiences an inner awakening. Choosing between the brutality of the industry and his conscience, he writes a mission statement, explaining the importance of being people-oriented, of building deeper connections with the people he represents, of not being driven solely by greed for profit and hollow definitions of success.
For this very reason his company and the industry excommunicate him. Only one athlete he represents keeps willing to continue working with him. This relatively old athlete's priority is to get a good contract and a high income at the end of his career. He tells the protagonist that he expects certain success in this regard.
During the rest of the movie, the protagonist struggles with serious difficulties in the industry in which he is left alone, and by making the manifesto he has written a way of life, and by developing much deeper and more humane relationships with people around him and the only athlete left in his portfolio, they all achieve success together.
I think Platypus' journey is a bit similar to this story, and we maintain this perspective when defining success. This is exactly why we define ourselves as a boutique agency. We don't have conventional goals such as aggressive growth and running dozens of projects at the same time. Instead, with a core team, we believe in developing deeper relationships with the companies we serve, learning their business as much as they do, positioning ourselves like an internal team for them, and developing and growing together by also establishing project-based teams when necessary. We pay close attention to provide a qualified service from a very experienced team. For this reason, there are companies we have been serving and projects we have been carrying out for more than five years.
The fact that we are still a boutique agency in our ninth year is closely related to our passion for excellence. Many of the stories that we define as success and feel job satisfaction are different from the general rules of success in business life.
I liken it a bit to traveling in business class, where there are a limited number of seats and everyone who travels there is offered a unique experience. This is the experience we strive to offer to the companies we work with.
Therefore, as we move forward to our tenth year, we continue our journey in a calm and peaceful manner, happy and proud of what we have achieved, grateful for our mistakes that gave us the opportunity to learn. Even though we know the difficulties of the path we have chosen, we have full confidence in the path because we have experienced these difficulties from time to time and overcome them again and again...