Hidden Gems: Meet Tetiana Zotova of TRYPILLIA DIGITAL AGENCY

Today we’d like to introduce you to Tetiana Zotova.

Hi Tetiana, please kick things off for us with an introduction to yourself and your story.
I’m from Ukraine, and my life there took a few turns. I started as a singer and made it to the live shows in the final stage of the first season of X Factor Ukraine. Singing live on national television taught me more about nerves and discipline than anything since. After the show I chose a quieter path and went to study history. At the same time I was flying with Ukraine International Airlines, so for years my days were split between archives and airports.
I went on to finish doctoral school in history, but the war came before I could defend my dissertation. That chapter is still open, and I haven’t let go of it. For a long time my work was about how cities form, how people settle, and how a place gets its character. That turned out to be better preparation for marketing than it sounds. When you study how communities grow, you learn to pay attention to what people trust, what they pass along, and why some places become known while others stay invisible.

After moving to Los Angeles I started over in many ways. I went back to school to work on my English and I took on in-house roles where I did a bit of everything: Google Ads, Meta campaigns, Shopify, SEO, CRM setup, B2B outreach, and a lot of content. Small businesses rarely have a separate person for each of those things, so I learned them side by side and saw how they connect. I also saw how often business owners pay for marketing they can’t see into with tracking that doesn’t work and reports that don’t mean much.

That is what pushed me to start my own agency. In 2026 I founded Trypillia Digital Agency in Burbank. The name comes from the Trypillian culture, one of the oldest proto-urban settlements in Europe. For me it’s a reminder that every lasting thing starts with a small, well-built foundation, and that is how I think about a client’s online presence.

Each client gets an individual approach, a person who actually knows their business, and work they can understand. We also build a lot with AI tools for video and content, but always with a human eye on what goes out under a client’s name.

I’m still a historian at heart. I write about art history and philosophy on my own pages, and I think that curiosity is the most useful thing I bring to the work.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
Not really, and I think that’s normal when you start over in a new country.
Language was the first challenge. I had an academic career behind me, but in English I felt like I was starting from zero. I went back to class and practiced every day until I could sound like myself again.

My background also didn’t translate easily. Nobody in LA was hiring a historian, so I learned ads, analytics, SEO and e-commerce on the job, often all at once and with no one to ask. In one in-house role I saw how much goes wrong when a business trusts the wrong people with its marketing: reports that look good and mean nothing. That experience shaped how I run my agency now. Clients see exactly what we do and why.

And then there’s the usual founder stuff: no big network at the start, family and work to balance, and doing sales, delivery and bookkeeping myself. It’s a lot, but every client who stays makes it worth it.

Great, so let’s talk business. Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
Trypillia Digital Agency is a Los Angeles digital marketing agency based in Burbank. We work with small and mid-sized businesses whose owners are too busy running the business to also run its marketing. Most of our clients are in real estate, home services, construction and remodeling, and luxury residential technology.

We cover the full picture: websites, Google Ads, Meta advertising, SEO, and a newer field called GEO, which is about making a business visible in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI answers. We also produce content with AI video and image tools, which lets a small business put out polished, consistent visuals without the budget of a full production crew.

What sets us apart is that we keep the client list small on purpose. Every client gets an individual strategy, not a template. Before we run a single ad, we audit what’s already there: tracking, website structure, past campaigns, what Google actually sees. More often than not, the biggest gains come from fixing what’s broken rather than spending more. I’d rather tell a client their money is leaking than sell them another campaign on top of the leak.

How do you think about happiness?
My family. Los Angeles makes me happy. I still notice the light here. A couple of weeks ago I started a project that combines all of this. It’s called LA LA CAT. Los Angeles is a big ginger cat: soft and wild, tidy and messy, and a little bit magical. Through this character I tell the local history of the city and the surrounding areas. These are real stories about neighborhoods, streets and places people drive past every day without knowing what happened there, and I check every fact before it goes out. It’s fun, a bit silly, and it lets me be a historian and a storyteller at the same time. Every new episode makes me happy.

Contact Info:

• Instagram: @trypilliadigital
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tetiana-zotova-647146298