From TDA to Spona: A Snapshot of Our Journey

If our name change is news to you, or if you’d like to learn a little more about our journey from one name to another – and how some things have changed completely while others are as they’ve always been – grab a coffee and read on.

From little things, big things grow 🪴

Since its founding in 2018, TDA has been dedicated to connecting digital service providers from around the world with businesses that need their services. Making it easy for this to happen was no mean feat – it involved tapping into the media contacts of our founder and CEO, Goran Deak, and then slowly, but methodically, building a global network of over 10,000 agencies while also cultivating our relationships with businesses that needed the services of these agencies.

Hard work pays off, as they say, and that same year we were one of the winners at the Spark.me startup conference in Montenegro, a key gathering of startups from across southeastern Europe. To consolidate our position, the following year we ran a record-breaking crowdfunding campaign on the Funderbeam platform, an achievement that coincided with Startup Grind, the world’s largest startup community, naming us as one of the top 50 startups for that year – a feat we repeated the following year.

Not an agency but more than a platform

In spite of these accolades, resting on our laurels was never an option. Continual improvement was – and still is – part of our DNA, so we sought to better understand the needs of our clients and member agencies. One of the key outcomes of our research was the impression among many agencies, when they first encountered us, that we were a digital services agency.

“We were always getting mistaken for an agency ourselves, so we were trying to circumvent that misconception,” says Spona COO and CTO, Lehady Sani-Agatha. “So while connecting businesses with a top digital agency was certainly one of our services, being mistaken for one was not one of our goals.”

Another point that made us question who we really were was the ever-changing landscape of digital marketing and advertising. Digital services are increasingly being managed as projects, which can make digital project management tools particularly handy. But there are many tools on the market, and this can make it tricky for businesses – especially those that don’t regularly manage digital projects – to find the right tool. To help our agencies and clients manage their projects more conveniently, we developed our comprehensive but easy-to-use End-to-End Project Management tool and then built it into our platform.

Clearly, we’d never been an agency; and our business had grown into something more than a platform connecting agencies and businesses. To better reflect our services, we needed a new name. But what name could that be?

The search begins…

Choosing a name for your company isn’t as simple as it may sound. The name obviously has to reflect the company’s products. But it also has to have meaning beyond the products it promotes, while also being easy to pronounce and remember – a tall order for just a word or two! So TDA’s leaders came together and set the priorities because, as Sani-Agatha noted, “we couldn’t just write names on pieces of paper and throw them in a bowl and just pick. We said ‘Let’s do this correctly’”.

Being a platform for digital services, we assumed the role our clients often take and contacted Studio Size, a Zagreb-based branding agency, for guidance. We outlined the changes that had occurred in our company, as well as how we wanted to position ourselves in the market, and the Studio Size team walked us through various candidate names and corporate personalities.

Spona: keeping it together

In the end, we agreed that the word ‘Spona’ would be the best fit for who we had become. Meaning ‘connection’ in Croatian, the word perfectly encapsulates our role as a bridge between businesses and agencies, but the appropriateness isn’t just semantic. The fact that the word isn’t used as often as other Croatian words meaning ‘connection’ alludes to the distinctiveness of our services, while its easy pronunciation is a nod to our global outlook.

Our global presence also encouraged us to consider a slogan that would go with our new name, just to help convey its meaning. In the end, we chose ‘keep it together’, which succinctly expresses what we do: keeping agencies and businesses together as they collaborate on projects. As for our visual identity, we decided to replace our ‘TDA’ logo with an @ symbol-like logo in the form of the letter ‘S’ and a corresponding color scheme.

In contrast to these changes, our organizational culture has remained the same. As was the case when we were founded as TDA, we will continue to be the down-to-earth yet enterprising company that has made inroads in the B2B digital services market. Transparency, pride in our products, and placing our clients at the center of what we do will continue to guide our work.

To see what we’re talking about, visit spona.io.