Why I started Webtopia

Founder Jessie Healy

In my career running digital advertising in-house for Etsy, RealPlayer and Trinity Mirror, I had hired and fired agencies, spending millions with Google and Facebook. The agencies never delivered on their promises - putting inexperienced people on the work, who didn’t have life experience or strategic marketing knowledge. I knew there was a better way, but I just didn’t quite have the guts to take the plunge and start my own agency. Not having worked in an agency myself - it seemed like a crazy folly to think I could start my own.

But then it happened. Three years ago, my employer, a unicorn startup in the Ad Tech space, called our team into a meeting room and told us the company was bust, our jobs were over. Investors’ money had been spent on private jets and supercars for the founder. They had no money to pay us our final month’s pay, redundancy or maternity pay. I was 7.5 months pregnant.

It might sound crazy, but I am so grateful that it happened. If adversity hadn’t forced me, I would never have taken the risk of going freelance, and I would have never started this agency.

From freelancing my vision of creating an agency blossomed. My agency would be different form all the agencies I had worked with. We would hire experienced people who had lived and seen the world, as well as grown brands. We would treat our client results as our own. We would be partners to our clients, obsessing about their results and helping them succeed - going deep to understand their business.

And so Webtopia was born, and things took off. It turns out that vision was the something that a lot of people wanted to be part of.

As I write this we are in the middle of the Covid 19 lockdown. We are all in for a bumpy ride now, but my journey here has taught me we will get through this and come out the other side stronger, smarter and more connected! And having our family of loyal clients is keeping us motivated - we are in this together.

Keep believing in what you do. Stay true to that and things will come right in the end.