We have all worked inside the industry
we built 404 to fix.
Every person on this team spent a decade inside organisations that knew how to win a client.
Not how to produce a result for one.
404 exists because that distinction bothered all five of us — separately, before we ever met.
Five people. Each one a decade deep in their discipline.
No account managers between you and the people doing the work.
Digital marketing is not a magic pill. Every channel exists for a reason — and every channel should work toward a defined strategy and a commercial outcome. If you believe running Meta ads is sufficient, that is precisely the mind trap most agencies are incentivised to keep you in. It is easier to sell a single channel than to build the system that makes all of them work. Arthur builds the system.
Fast marketing is bad marketing. Anyone who promises quick outcomes is either incompetent or lying to close a contract. Sustainable commercial growth is the result of a structural approach to business development — not a hotpatch applied to the symptom nearest the surface. Viktorija builds the structural approach — and has spent a decade watching businesses recover from the hotpatches that preceded it.
The best design is not the one the business owner likes most. It is the one that feels instinctive to the user — the one that removes friction so completely that the path to conversion requires no conscious effort. Maxim designs for the person using the product, against the commercial objective the business needs it to meet. Most design briefs only ask for one of those. He works from both.
Most visual systems fail not because they look wrong but because they communicate the wrong thing to the right person at the wrong moment. Liza holds every design decision against the commercial brief — not the brand guidelines, not the client’s preference, not what will look best in a portfolio. The brief. Everything else is negotiable.
Building something that works technically is the baseline. A product that cannot be found by search crawlers, indexed correctly, or cited by AI systems is not a finished product — it is a technical exercise with no commercial return. Daniel builds for the commercial outcome the product exists to generate — because a product nobody can find is a product that does not exist.
The name is not an accident. 404 is the error you get when the system cannot find what it was looking for.
We named the agency after the result most marketing programmes quietly produce — activity without commercial return. The name is a daily reminder of what we are here to fix.
Five people. Different organisations, different disciplines, different years. The same pattern everywhere: agencies signing contracts for the sake of signing contracts. Paid media deployed without a defined audience. Strategies built around the services already on the rate card rather than the problem actually present. Retainers renewed on the strength of activity reports that carefully avoided the one number that mattered.
We did not leave because the work was hard. We left because it was being done wrong by people who had decided that wrong was acceptable. A decade each in this industry is long enough to know what right looks like — and long enough to find it professionally untenable to produce anything less.
Every agency uses the word. Most mean: we will be responsive and pleasant. We mean something with a commercial consequence — that the outcome of your programme is treated with the same seriousness as if the revenue consequences landed on our business. Because the reputational consequences do. We cannot afford average outcomes. We have no interest in producing them.
In practice: we decline engagements where the commercial case does not hold. We restructure programmes when data says the current direction is wrong. We tell you before you notice — not after. An agency that waits for the client to raise a problem before acknowledging it is protecting the invoice, not the relationship.
404 operates from Vilnius, Lithuania. The clients we work with are established businesses with the budgets and commercial ambition required to make a serious programme worthwhile — wherever they are located. Geography has never determined whether a business has a real problem. It has never determined whether we are the right team to solve it.
What we look for: a business with meaningful acquisition spend or the intent to build it, a commercial number someone is accountable to, and the willingness to act on findings — including the ones that make the next conversation more complicated.
It is the problem being solved. Every programme 404 runs is designed around the specific commercial fault the audit identifies — not the services the agency was already planning to deploy. If the audit reveals a problem that does not require paid media, the blueprint does not include paid media. The programme serves the finding. Not the other way around.
Perfectionism at 404 is not a personality trait. It is a professional consequence of spending a decade watching work go out the door that was good enough to invoice but not good enough to be proud of. Every person on this team has made that decision once. None of us are making it again.
If the programme is underperforming, the report says so — and says exactly why, and exactly what changes. If the audit finds a problem we cannot fix, the document names it before the contract is signed. If an assumption in the blueprint proves wrong, you hear about it before the next invoice arrives. Not at the quarterly review. Immediately, in plain language, with a revised plan attached.
We are not the agency for every business.
We are the agency for businesses that have outgrown what average looks like — and know exactly what it has cost them.
If that is where you are, the audit is where we begin.
Not ready to apply? Submit a question and we will respond within 48 hours.