Six years of 10up
Jake Goldman on
If we spent our first five years pioneering and staking our claim in the world, in our sixth year we cultivated the organization and culture we pioneered. We rallied around trends and shifts in our industry and redoubled our investment into telling our story.
The initiative to better express our story culminated in a refresh of our company website, prominently featuring a new mission statement, proudly summarized by a promise to deliver “finely crafted websites and tools that make the web better.” We reinvigorated our project case studies, moving to a layout that better celebrates the challenges we’ve conquered with our clients. And we completely overhauled our Careers section, taking deliberate strides to better represent our culture of diversity and inclusion.
All this while growing our revenue by 12%.
Here are some of the ways we adapted to a shifting landscape and embodied our new mission since our last company anniversary:
- Saw four client projects nominated for the Webby “Best of Internet” awards, with one client taking home the gold, and three winning a People’s Choice award;
- Launched more than 60 client projects, including The Undefeated with our long-time client ESPN (Grantland, FiveThirtyEight), Motor Trend, and SmarterTravel;
- Accelerated our embrace of cutting edge technologies and practices by partnering with Joyent to release a WordPress Docker Compose project, leveraging the WordPress REST API for new projects (including the “app-like” WAMU.org), releasing the isomorphic Nodeify WP and Twenty Sixteen React, taking over Microsoft’s Windows Azure Storage for WordPress, and helping Pantheon with their Apache Solr Search infrastructure;
- Publicly launched ElasticPress.io, a hosted service for our popular ElasticPress plugin, after a year of privately providing the service to select clients;
- Speaking of ElasticPress, we had two major plugin updates (2.0 and 2.1), and added WooCommerce support;
- Saw 10uppers serve as release deputy for WordPress 4.5 and release lead for WordPress 4.7;
- Released several open source developer tools and resources, including our accessible Component Library, WP Hammer, and MU-Migration, solving the types of complex engineering challenges we’re uniquely suited to;
- Continued to share our expertise, at WordCamps around the world (including US, Europe, Mumbai, NYC, Lima, Fortaleza, and Columbus), php[tek], Music City Code, Craftpeak Collective, Front Porch, and the streaming Remote Work Conf, to name a few;
- Provided thought leadership on publishing trends and content distribution through panel appearances, presentations at the Nonprofit Tech Conference, and articles about Google AMP, Facebook Instant Articles, and headless CMSs;
- Held our largest Company Summit to date in Atlanta, complete with a team photo scavenger hunt throughout the city.
Here’s to another year of innovation, creativity, and making the web better.