We're digital geeks who love what we do

Tragic Media is a San Diego-based digital technology agency, focused on creating intuitive software experiences that scale across all devices.

We are a small, high-performance team that takes pride in our innovative solutions, and long-term support plans built to help our clients grow.  Our strength is in working collaboratively with internal stakeholders to strategize, design, develop, and scale innovative solutions that drive real business value.

Whether you are interested in modernizing your existing infrastructure or starting a new company, we can help. Don't let your next software project turn into a tragedy!

A Tragic History

Tragic Media was founded in 2009 by Rich Rudzinski after leaving his job at a large national agency in San Diego. Rich saw a growing gap in the digital service landscape. Existing marketing and design agencies were ill-equiped to scope and manage the growing complexity of emerging technologies.

He saw the "tragic" way that client projects were treated at these agencies, either being outsourced and poorly built overseas or hobbled together by under-skilled internal resources. Ultimately the solutions that were delivered were riddled with technical debt, and not built to scale.

Initially Tragic served as a white-label resource for other agencies, helping to save them from their own development tragedies. Slowly, the company pivoted to bring trusted, reliable software development services directly to businesses.

Over the last decade, Rich has built a team of technical experts - and more importantly a brand - focused on providing expert technical support and solutions for companies of all sizes.

Partnerships and Associations

  • Drupal Association
  • Clutch Partner
  • Google Cloud Partner
  • Avalara Partner

Leadership Team

Teamwork makes the dream work.

Mug Shot

Rich Rudzinski

Technical Strategist | CEO

Mug Shot

Todd Budzinski

Lead Engineer | CTO

Todd Budzinski

Lead Engineer | CTO

Todd is the backbone of Tragic. A back-end wizard, he has more than 15+ years of experience in programming enterprise websites and applications, specializing in languages including PHP, Python, and Node; frameworks like Drupal and Laravel; and has extensive server experience building lean cloud-based infrastructures in GCP and AWS. Todd spends time keeping up with the latest advances in digital technologies and back-end frameworks to ensure Tragic is always leveraging bleeding-edge tech to produce modern, high performance applications and infrastructure.

Todd has been in software development his whole career, but his skills reached new levels working at Digitaria (now the global agency Mirum), where he gained exposure working with large brands like Taylor Guitars, Qualcomm, SAIC, and Petco. After Digi, Todd  became one of the most valued engineers at Business.com before leaving to work as a consultant for local agencies in San Diego. He first started working with Tragic as a consultant in 2011, and was extremely impactful in our early growth. After several years, Todd came on-board full-time to grow Tragic's engineering department.

Todd is an avid video gamer and can be found playing games on Steam or Battle.net. He also likes to travel the world and has visited many countries including Thailand, Singapore, Laos and Malaysia.

Don't let your project turn into a tragedy.