Alex Schupp has been using Duda for almost a decade. Before founding Crowd Digital Marketing, a web design and digital marketing agency based in Colorado, Alex used Duda to produce 100+ websites per month at a prior company.
“We worked with Duda because of its scalability. We could build 100 to 200 websites in a month really efficiently and very quickly – and make our clients happy,” says Alex.
So when he decided to create his own agency in 2017, it was clear that Duda was the right partner to help start and scale his business. Almost 7 years later, the agency grew its revenue 16x, with 70% of that coming from website design and development, and 95% of the work being done on the Duda platform.
Scaling with Duda
Crowd Digital Marketing works with small businesses that have a story to tell but no in-house resources to do it. “We use Duda and a suite of digital marketing tools and resources to help tell their stories and drive business results,” says Alex.
The agency has built about 200 Duda websites and many custom apps and integrations, both for SMBs and as a fulfillment partner for other agencies. They typically launch 2-4 websites each month, and site builds take as little as 2 weeks.
“Duda allows us to cut a lot of design time and development costs. Time and money are crucial resources for our clients. Being able to build out a site either templated or from scratch from beginning to end in a short time period is really important for them, and we're able to use Duda to do this in a really efficient and quick manner.”
Balancing capabilities with efficiency
In the past, Alex has used Squarespace, WordPress, Wix, Weebly, Shopify, and a few others. “None of them came close to Duda in terms of balancing capabilities with efficiency. We are able to accomplish a very wide range of websites from an aesthetic and functional perspective.”
According to him, typically WordPress sites take about 3 times the development hours (and cost) compared to Duda. Sites on Wix, Weebly, and Shopify typically take 2x the time and dev hours compared to Duda. And these sites are also much more limited in terms of final functionality compared to their Duda counterparts.
“With Duda the majority of our design and development work is done in house – and when requirements exceed our capabilities or capacity, we have a handful of Duda Experts that we are proud to collaborate with on projects.”
Easy to connect and integrate
Duda's seamless integrations and connections are crucial for Crowd Digital Marketing:
Many clients use Duda Contact Forms integration with MailChimp and Google Forms. “We store all client form fills on Google Forms for posterity, and they love being able to view and manage past form fills that way,” says Alex.
Being able to use Duda's platform to easily connect Google Analytics is also a huge help for the agency’s team.
The Google Calendar widget comes up very often in sales conversations with businesses that have events.
According to Alex, “The AI SEO Assistant is just absolutely incredible, and really helps expedite that process for clients.”
They use Duda’s API for a handful of custom client apps to pull in site data to Duda.
Dynamic Pages is a really helpful tool for Crowd Digital Marketing, and its integration with Google Sheets has allowed clients to create new pages on demand. They have even built out forms that when submitted generate a new spreadsheet row to create a Dynamic Page.
In 2022, Crowd Digital Marketing joined the Duda Experts program, a network of vetted professionals who offer services based on their areas of expertise. Now they fulfill websites for white label agency partners and have several small agency partners who use them to build their sites and interface with clients on their behalf.
The Duda Experts program is contributing to 30% of their revenue. “Duda has helped us find more clients that are looking for exactly the kind of services we can provide. They are looking for the web design and web development skills that we offer. So that's been really helpful,” says Alex.
“Duda has been a really good partner. There are a lot of technologies, a lot of web building platforms, a lot of companies out there that you can buy resources from. But what I like about Duda is they have provided resources beyond just the technology. Duda Community groups, Duda University courses and different things for us to learn beyond specific functions for a website. So that has been an excellent resource, having Duda as an actual partner to help me and my team members grow and build ourselves beyond that,” concludes Alex.
