Today,
Website Planet‘s Marko Velimirovic had the opportunity to speak with Alex Jijie, the CEO of Digitalia OPS. We discussed company’s beginnings, its mission, and what separates it from similar websites/companies.
Please present Digitalya to our audience.
Digitalya is a software development agency specializing in healthcare and martech custom software development. We are working with startups and different innovation departments of big enterprises to help them with the digitalization and innovation of their products, processes, and services.
Please describe the story behind the company: What sparked the idea, and how has it evolved so far?
The company is founded by 2 brothers Ovidiu and Marius, who initially had a startup called ShowMeCats. It was a social network for cats founded in UK but unfortunately, it failed to monetize. So the startup shut down and they decided to found another company rather than go the traditional way of employment. So this is how Digitalya has born in the autumn of 2014. The first client was a system for a Vodafone call center, that had predictive dialing, CRM, voice recording, and many other cool features for the 2014 – 2015 year.
Starting from a team of 2 (the founders), then to the first series of interns in the first year, the company grew pretty quickly. Right now we are handling more complex projects, the partners and clients are bigger and the team is more mature, technical wise, but also on a personal, human level.
In 2021, the 2 brothers decided to found another company, called ClientZen.io and they are now part of the board of directors, Digitalya being handled by the Leadership team of the organization.
What services do you offer?
We focus mainly on web development, UI/UX design, and technical consultation. The main part of our projects is end-to-end projects, where we take the idea from the client, have a workshop together with him where we recommend different solutions and approaches then move to the product design phase and next the development and maintenance mode.
We like to consider our clients as partners, rather than clients, and they are involved in each stage of the product development. By having this mindset, methodology, and way of working, our partners have full transparency over the project and are part of the same team. There is no more “The Client” and “The Development team”, we are in this together.
What is the mission of Digitalya?
Our mission is “Help people achieve their dream of being successful tech entrepreneurs” but since the last 2 years, a big part of our projects are from the enterprise world we are in the process of redefining our mission to support more innovation both in Startups and also incorporates.
What separates you from other similar websites/companies?
We actually had some thoughts on this, and we came to the conclusion that the three main things that make us special are the level of expertise and compliance that we have (as a team and as a company). Over here we have developers that are trained to be HIPAA compliant, follow ISO quality standards, and so on.
Then, the second thing is that we work with some of the best experts on the market to help us set some clear communication processes in place, improve our delivery process and make sure we deliver on time and on a budget (a thing that is hard to find these days in the agency world).
If I would be to choose only one more thing that will be the commitment level of the team and the passion that our colleagues have for the projects and for helping each other. It’s often a habit to have a look at a new request from our partners in less than an hour, and for urgent matters to take care of them right away. More than that, the team is self-sufficient and it’s not afraid to show initiative, come up with improvement ideas that bring value to the project, or even growth hacks that generate new revenue for our partners.
What are the plans for Digitalya for the near future?
Although we have more and more projects, and the temptation for scale is huge, we want to remain a boutique agency and maintain our culture. This year we aim to bring 5-8 new colleagues to the team, provide the same level of customer service as we do right now, or even see what is the next step here and to take it, and in terms of new projects, we want to keep focusing on the martech and healthcare area and be in the top 5 experts on these industries.
