Drugi jezik na kojem je dostupan ovaj članak: Bosnian
This is what a headline would read today about a small creative agency, founded on the start-up principles, celebrating a great jubilee – 25 years of business. How did AgitPROP, as a small entrepreneurial business that created big projects for large companies and institutions, won a slew of awards, and survived a quarter of a century on the small, frantic Serbian market?
Exploring this rare occurrence in the history of communication, the (non-existent) Department of Archeology of the Serbian Communications Museum found that in September 1993 of the new era, AgitPROP was founded in Singidunum, a manufacturing company for (then existing) marketing and PR and (then non-existent) Internet. In the area of the latter, AgitPROP is active since the early Stone Age of the Internet (the so-called netolithic), which started in Serbia in 1997 of the new era, and archeological remains of their websites still exist to this day.
But how it all started, and how to explain to younger readers that there was a start-up life even before the early digital age (so called facebookolithic)? Two friends (from the Paleolithic kindergarten) decided to establish their own creative agency without any initial capital, based only on enthusiasm and new ideas. At the tender age of 27, they realized that working for other agency owners wasn’t cutting for them, because in the hyperinflationary 1993, a salary of some 250 then Deutschmarks, for example, was worth only 50 DEM by the time it was funneled through the banks (by the way, this DEM is not some abbreviation for Digital Electronic Money).
Complete archaeological findings, based on preserved antique hard & compact disks and printed artefacts, can be found here. It’s a story of how to muster courage and sail into entrepreneurial waters, and get it out of your head that there are some bigger and smarter people, whom everyone knows and who can do everything better only because they were destined for great things since birth. It’s a story about creating something out of nothing, even when you don’t even have the proverbial “garage to start a business.” When the entire initial “capital” was a single computer and a printer. And some talent and courage to recognize certain things, and do them before the others…