Lucky number 7: 10up’s seventh year

Jake Goldman on February 12, 2018 • 2 Comments

In our seventh year, we built on our investment in culture and storytelling by expanding our team and depth of services, and by redoubling our investments in open source and creativity.

We welcomed more than 30 new clients to our portfolio in another record sales year. We launched new websites along with web and mobile apps for major brands across verticals as diverse as finance, healthcare, academia, high-tech, big media, consumer packaged goods, food and beverage, and fitness… to name a few.

In a milestone event, we completed an acquisition of Lift UX, a boutique, Emmy-nominated agency that focused on user experience for design-driven websites powered by WordPress. Intended to strengthen our experience design expertise and resources, this investment added executive design leadership and expanded our portfolio of design stories.

A renewed approach to our All Hands Summit yielded our largest and most memorable team event to date. Held in Old San Juan, Puerto Rico, our team gathered from around the world to take over a former Carmelite convent for a week of learning, sharing, building memories together, uniting around company goals, and celebrating our successes. Among the conference highlights, we held our first client panel, featuring leaders from companies like Microsoft, McClatchy, and Beasley Radio sharing insights on agency partnerships.

We’re also proud of the major investments we made in open source and the web community in our seventh year:

• Released Distributor—a WordPress plugin that empowers content managers to safely reuse and syndicate content across their websites. We launched a site to tell its story and invite testers, and have accepted dozens of beta applicants who are stretching the product.
• Opened up WP Snapshots, a command line tool that revolutionizes collaborative WordPress development. Engineers push builds to Amazon Web Services, which can be pulled into a complete local setup. It synchronizes the database and files, automatically replaces URLs and paths and even updates the local version of WordPress.
• Other new developer tools included WP Local Docker, our successor to VVV, and Async Transients, which improves the handling of a popular caching technique at high scale.
• Continued to release major updates to ElasticPress, including indexing of popular file types like Word and Excel documents and inline search autocomplete.
• Our New Relic Reporting for WordPress plugin was featured in New Relic Connect, their directory of recommended integrations.
• Launched Ads.txt Manager for WordPress, making it simple for publishers to add or edit ads.txt (an emerging standard), with smart validation that prevents costly mistakes; in just 2 months, it has garnered 500+ active installations. Speaking of our ads, we also experimented with treating ads as blocks in Gutenberg, the future WordPress editor.
• Released a major update to Restricted Site Access for WordPress, making network (multisite) implementations a first-class citizen.
• Presented at and sponsored major events like Web Summit 2017 and FUSE Media, emerging events like WPEngine Summit for Digital Innovators and the inaugural WordCamp for Publishers, and some smaller communities like Klein News Innovation Camp and Syntax Code and Craft Conference. We continued our strong local presence at local events and WordCamps around the world, including Jakarta, NYC, Austin, Cape Town, and Phoenix.

We were also featured in Time.com Money’s “10 fully remote companies that are hiring.” Joining team 10up means that—with reliable internet access and a drive to serve clients—you can work from anywhere in the world. Join us, and become a part of our story, as we march toward our 8th anniversary.