It started witha kid watchinghis friends scroll.
Most agency about-pages are a wall of adjectives. This one is a story, because the story is the whole point: we didn't learn this in a course. We learned it building.
The first TikTok ads agency in Italy
Francesco De Giacomo was sixteen and watching every friend he had disappear into a single app. Where everyone else saw teenagers wasting their afternoons, he saw something specific: an enormous pool of attention that nobody knew how to buy yet.
TikTok didn't even have a mature ads ecosystem. So he built one of the first agencies in Europe to run ads on it — the first in Italy — from his living room, before most brands knew the platform existed.
One channel got brands to a point — then stopped. Clients kept hitting the same wall, and it was rarely just the ad account. Sometimes it was the ads. Just as often it was a slow site, a weak offer, emails nobody sent, creatives nobody felt anything about.
So DegBoost went across the whole funnel. Offer, creative, landing pages, retention — the entire D2C machine. Paid ads, with Meta at the core, became the flagship. But never in isolation, because isolation is exactly what stops brands from scaling.
One channel never scales a brand
A university founded in 1224 asked an eighteen-year-old to teach marketing.
Università Federico II — the world's oldest public university — invited Francesco to lecture, making him one of the youngest people ever to do it. Eight hundred years of institution, one teenager at the front of the room.
A new base, the same obsession
The agency relocated to the Netherlands and set up inside Titaan, a busy international innovation hub in The Hague. Around it, Francesco built a team of eight A-players — one specialist for each stage of the funnel, from media buying to creative to CRO to retention.
€15M+ in managed ad spend. 30+ brands. €60M+ in ARR generated for clients. And, quietly, our own brands — because we spend our own money on ads too, not just yours.
Small on purpose.And staying that way.
Every agency wants to grow. Most of them grow in the one direction that hurts clients: more accounts per person, more layers between you and the people doing the work, more of your strategy decided by whoever has a free slot this week.
We cap our roster instead. It means we say no to good brands. It means we grow slower. It also means the person who knows your P&L is the person answering your message — within hours, not in a quarterly review. That trade is the entire business model, and we're not interested in trading it back.
How we got here
- 2020 — Naples, age 16
It starts with an app
Francesco watches every friend he has disappear into TikTok. Everyone else sees an addiction; he sees an underpriced attention channel. He starts the first TikTok ads agency in Italy from his living room — one of the first in Europe.
- 2022
One channel is never enough
Clients start asking us to fix their sites, their emails, their creatives. So we go across the whole funnel — in-house creative studio, CRO and CRM specialists. Paid ads become the flagship, but never in isolation.
- Age 18
A 1224 university asks a teenager to teach
Università Federico II in Naples — the world's oldest public university, founded in 1224 — invites Francesco to lecture on marketing. One of the youngest people ever to do it.
- ~2023
The Hague
The agency relocates to the Netherlands, based inside Titaan, an international innovation hub in The Hague. New city, same obsession.
- 2023–24
Eight A-players
30+ brands, eight figures in yearly ad spend, a hand-picked team of eight — one specialist per stage of the funnel.
- Today
Still founder-run, still capped
Same founder, same capped roster, judged on one number: profitable revenue on your P&L. Not vanity metrics, not a slide deck.