Early Walgus: Building a Business From Almost Nothing

One of the longest and probably most educational projects in my life (besides marriage and raising kids) has been building Walgus – a small creative business that started during my school years with very little money, experience or certainty about where any of it might eventually lead.

How Walgus Happened

Walgus originally began together with two of my schoolmates from Tallinn Polytechnic School’s media department. Reio and I had already met back in 2016 and started experimenting with small creative projects alongside school long before Walgus officially existed. Later, Erik from multimedia course joined us as well.

2018 promotional cover photo for Facebook: Erik, Erlich and Reio.

By that point, each of us was already naturally drifting toward different creative fields – I was mostly focused on photography, Reio was deeply interested in video production and Erik was studying web design.

During a business class assignment where my group had to create a fictional business plan, the idea was already surprisingly clear: what if we built a small creative company that could offer complete solutions in one place – video, photography, graphic design and printing services. Like a commercial version of the school’s media department itself. Somehow, that school assignment stopped feeling fictional.

Then we also needed a name. Since my own surname already contained the letter W, Reio came from Valga, and all of our fields were in one way or another connected to light (valgus in Estonian) and visual media, the choice gradually settled on Walgus.

The archaic spelling with a W gave it a slightly timeless, almost mysterious character. Somehow it simply felt right and stayed.

May 2018. Back when Walgus mostly existed around my kitchen table in Tallinn. Reio was editing a client video while Erik was carefully writing an email explaining why the project had taken longer than expected.

By the end of the school year, we already had our first real clients and projects to showcase on our website. What had started as a classroom idea slowly began turning into an actual working business.

These days I sometimes joke with my own visual media students at Tallinn Polytechnic School that when they create Instagram accounts of fictional companies for exam projects, they should be careful – because once you put something convincing enough into the world, real clients might actually start requesting the service. That is more or less what happened to us.

Figuring Things Out

Walgus itself was officially registered in January 2018, mostly because we had reached a point where client work and collaborations had become regular enough that we needed a proper way to issue invoices and organise things more professionally.

In reality, the company was still extremely small. During the first year of running Walgus, the entire turnover between the three of us combined was just a little over €1,000 for the whole year. Not per month – for the entire year altogether.

When we were just starting out, I remember Erik saying that one day we'd have enough capital to start buying apartments and reinvesting the profits. We'd keep the money working for us instead of the other way around. As it turned out, apartments cost slightly more than €1,000.

Walking to a temporary office through sleet in spring 2017. Back then, most days looked more like this than anything particularly glamorous.

We also had no established customer base, and I already had a full-time job, which meant most of my work for Walgus happened late at night or during weekends.

I still had to keep that full-time job simply to cover costs while trying to slowly build Walgus on the side. Even our accountant started feeling sorry for us and offered to lower the monthly accounting fee because, from the outside at least, the overall situation looked fairly hopeless.

And honestly, from a purely logical perspective, it probably was.

Maybe You Have to Be Slightly Crazy

Looking back now, I think building something creative often requires a slightly irrational amount of stubbornness when you are just starting out. Especially when you first become deeply interested in some niche skill or field – and then later try to somehow turn that interest into an actual sustainable business, not the other way around.

During those years, I was constantly travelling between Estonia and Romania. When I eventually moved back to Romania more permanently, Erik noticed that I still had a Walgus business card attached to my suitcase. Somehow it had stayed there the whole time. Even back then, I genuinely believed the idea was going somewhere.

Early 2018, Tallinn Airport business card wall. Walgus had already made it there too.

In the beginning, progress is almost invisible. And most of the time you are simply trying to figure things out as you go. Finding clients. Learning communication. Managing deadlines and budgets. Delivering projects. Trying to build trust so that people would still come back or recommend you to someone else.

And then suddenly one day somebody actually does.

Wait… Now I’m a Project Manager?

It was 2018 and as our first serious client requests started coming in, someone also had to consistently answer emails, prepare quotes and keep projects moving forward.

Out of the three Walgus co-founders, I was both the oldest and probably the most impatient, so I wanted to reply quickly and keep things organised. First mostly out of frustration, as I sometimes joke now, but ultimately with more structure and method behind it.

Autumn 2017. Larger photography projects involved much more than simply taking pictures. Communication and working with people had quietly become part of the job as well.

At one point I even tried hiring a secretary to help manage team schedules, although that experiment did not last very long. It was was becoming my job whether I had originally planned for it or not. This naturally pushed me toward project management and client communication way before I properly understood those roles myself.

"Sõnad ja Hääled", one of the first projects I completed through Walgus as a full creative solution: project management, logo and business card design, UV printing, and product photography of the finished cards.

Also, only much later did I consciously realise that all those different skills were actually connected through marketing. Photography, design, video, storytelling, coordination – in one way or another, all of them were helping people and organisations communicate ideas more clearly.

At Some Point It Started Feeling Real

By 2019, the company's annual turnover had already grown to nearly €13,000 (yeah, finally five digits after an awful lot of work), although the business itself was still not properly profitable. And I know it may not sound like much by business standards, but to us every new client and every three-digit invoice still felt like something worth celebrating.

It finally started feeling like things might slowly be moving in the right direction.

And then…

Bam!

…2020 arrived together with the coronavirus pandemic.

The desk of my home office in Bucharest, Romania, during the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic in April 2020. I spent most days coordinating projects remotely from my living room.

For a moment, it genuinely felt unclear what would happen next. Many creative and cultural businesses were suddenly facing cancellations, uncertainty and financial pressure. Business partners who had previously offered generous payment terms suddenly started requesting payment upfront.

The work keeps changing. Thankfully, so do we. Somehow, despite all of that, Walgus managed to keep moving forward and even continue growing rapidly during that period. As strange as it may seem.

“The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” — Marcus Aurelius

So while many businesses were putting projects on hold and cutting costs, Walgus went in the opposite direction. Instead of reducing cost, I bought used printing equipment at pandemic prices and started a second company called Wari Art.

While Walgus (Estonian for light) continued focusing on business clients and corporate projects, Wari (Estonian for shadow) was meant to be an online shop for private customers and smaller personal commissions that otherwise wouldn't have fit under the same brand.

Even the logo of Wari reflected the relationship between business and personal projects: it was built from the negative space left inside the Walgus symbol.

By the end of 2020, Walgus had already grown past €45,000 in annual turnover and eventually had to register for VAT because the volume of work had increased enough. Ironically, the third year of the business – the year of the pandemic – was the first time Walgus actually started generating real profit.

Another small milestone in 2020, when the Walgus logo appeared in newspapers among the sponsors of TILT Improv Festival. We were working on the event as a paid creative partner, but were kindly given a place among the event partners as well.

Had we given up during the first or second year, most of the later collaborations, projects and opportunities simply would never have happened.

The Office

Around that time, I had also moved back to Estonia with my family and Walgus had a small office in Tallinn where we could meet clients, work on printing projects and coordinate larger jobs more comfortably. The team had grown as well and we had started hiring additional people for different projects and production work.

Beginning of 2021. A late evening at the Walgus office on Türi Street, Tallinn.

Before long, we even had a small van for delivering equipment and printing orders around the city – something that would have seemed fairly absurd just a few years earlier.

The Walgus van, a heavily used 2003 Opel Combo, parked outside our Vilmsi Street office building in Tallinn.

By 2022, the company’s annual turnover had stabilised at over €70,000 plus VAT, which would have sounded completely unrealistic to us back in the kitchen-table days. Well, unless we were discussing becoming millionaires.

And yes, this is what real progress often looks like. Not hundreds of thousands or millions in annual revenue, supercars or palm beach resorts. Just honest work from all team members, steady growth and the satisfaction of seeing something gradually become real. These stories deserve to be told too.

Part of the Walgus print production workspace in Vilmsi office, Tallinn.

Of course, there were also sleepless nights, 16-hour workdays and occasional serious arguments between friends trying to build something together under pressure. But despite all of that, the company slowly kept moving forward.

Finding Your Own Direction

As things started taking shape, our interests naturally began to diverge. My business partner Reio increasingly focused on videography, while I preferred staying a generalist. I also realised I liked building the company itself, not just the individual projects that came through it.

I have often wondered whether it's better to specialise or to stay curious about many different things. I still don't think there's a single right answer. Reio chose to become exceptionally good at one craft (making videos). I preferred connecting different disciplines and helping projects move from idea to finished product. Naturally, not every idea made it that far.

The Defeatem *Cut the Wire* project from 2021 shows how our roles complemented each other. Reio created the album design and shot the band's music videos, while I photographed the finished CD and wrote articles about the project for the Walgus blog for marketing.

Just as important to me was helping other people become known for what they did well. Whether that meant photographing their work, writing about it or simply giving it the attention it deserved.

The team kept evolving. Erik, one of the original founders, gradually stepped away from day-to-day work, although we continued collaborating on projects for several years. We took on interns and, during the uncertainty of the COVID years, were able to offer work to friends as well.

Summer 2020. Carl had joined the team by that stage. Here he is preparing a wide-format print at the Türi Street office in Tallinn.

At the same time, other designers, photographers, developers, illustrators and writers became part of different projects. I realised I didn't need to do everything myself. Sometimes the best contribution I could make was bringing together the people who could. This is what the business came to mean to me: creating something that carried more weight than all of our individual work put together.

“An Award-Winning Design Agency”

You know those short films that open with a row of festival logos and little award trophies? After one project, we could technically have done that too.

Sten was a member of Walgus with quite literally award-winning work. The Estonian Association of Literary Museums' Tähtteose kiirkursus ("Crash Course in Great Literary Works") received the Muuseumirott 2021 award in the Museum Education category.

Walgus had been commissioned to produce the creative animation based on scripts and source materials. I coordinated the project, while our design intern Madli helped prepare the visual materials for animation. Sten brought everything to life.

For this photograph, we staged him working in the Walgus office, although most of the animation was actually created from his bedroom workstation.

Within a few years, Walgus had grown from small experimental freelance-style projects into a creative business working with cultural organisations, educational institutions and commercial clients across design, photography, video and print. In many ways, it is still evolving.

Looking at It Differently Now

So what actually makes creative work work? At first, I mostly thought it was about making things well – designing visuals, editing videos or taking photographs. And yes, this remains true.

But over time, I realised that a large part of creative work actually happens between people.

Nobody Builds Anything Alone

Some of the people who contributed to Walgus in its early years – from designers, photographers and animators to print specialists, technicians, office assistants, delivery and installation staff.

Of course, you can build a business by interviewing people and hiring the best talent you can find. Walgus grew differently, from the ground up. It was more about discovering what each of us was good at and finding ways to turn those different skills into something we could create together.

Good collaboration has a compounding effect. When people genuinely trust each other and move towards the same goal, the result becomes something no individual could have produced alone.

Some of my Walgus colleagues after a late evening meeting outside the office in Tallinn, 2022.

How can you tell if you can rely on someone? Trust is built through many small interactions from one year to the next, rather than one impressive project.

Managing expectations. Keeping communication clear. Solving problems calmly when something goes wrong. Or learning how to politely remind a client for the third time that the invoice still has not been paid. Okay, and what if they still don’t pay, then what? Call the police?

Explain It Better

Another lesson was that people rarely see things exactly the way you do. Does it seem obvious in your own head? Great. But have you actually explained it to anyone else? Or did you leave too much room for interpretation? Well then... why are you surprised when things don't go your way?

Expecting people to understand your intentions without explaining them clearly is usually a recipe for disappointment. Communication begins with the person who has the idea.

Nobody really teaches you those things. You usually learn them the hard way.

Not every business decision turned out exactly as planned. With today's knowledge, I would probably make some of them differently. But that's easy to say with years of hindsight. You make the best decision you can with the information you have – and hope for the best. Some of these decisions work out just fine, others become expensive and valuable lessons.

Then You Get Back to Work

I also began understanding how important consistency really is. Not every project was exciting or creatively fulfilling. Sometimes you are tired. Sometimes a project drags on for weeks longer than expected. Oh, and then a worldwide pandemic appears in the middle of it all. Sure, plenty of reasons to complain.

In the end, you simply have to sit down at your desk and finish the thing properly anyway. Replying to people. Staying reliable. Delivering what was promised. Continuing even during uncertain periods. Especially then. Those things turned out to matter just as much as technical skill itself.

The story of Walgus continues.