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Operation LiftUp: Welcome Lift UX to 10up

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We’re delighted to announce that after nearly one year of discussion and due diligence, 10up has completed an acquisition of Lift UX: a boutique, distributed, Emmy-nominated agency that specializes in making user experience design driven websites powered by WordPress. The Lift team, including its founding partners, Chris Wallace and Brad Miller, join 10up effective immediately.

Founded as a boutique digital creative shop in 2009, Lift has delivered web projects for clients like Frito-Lay, The Next Web, eBay, GoDaddy, and Disney. Lift earned acclaim when a “second screen” experience built for AMC’s Walking Dead was nominated for an Emmy Award in the interactive program category in 2012. Their work earn a second nomination in 2015 for Mad Men: The Fan Cut. Among their innovations, Lift built and sold a WordPress themes shop (UpThemes), and started a career center for distributed companies, RemoteJobs.com. They recently launched CampusInsiders.com, a project spotlighted by Automattic’s WordPress.com VIP program; the project earned Lift an invitation to become an official VIP agency partner.

As 10up’s President & Founder, I am elated to welcome this outstanding team, award recognized portfolio, and client roster to the 10up family. This acquisition accelerates our growth in Experience Design, adding executive-tier design leadership and enriching our growing portfolio of design stories. It represents a special opportunity for all parties to go further and faster as we partner with clients to make a better web.

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Six years of 10up

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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:
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Meet ElasticPress.io: a hosted search and query engine for ElasticPress

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We’re proud to announce ElasticPress.io: a hosted service that integrates with ElasticPress, our popular plugin, to provide a fast and flexible search and query engine for WordPress.

We built ElasticPress to overcome higher-end performance and functional limits posed by the more traditional, structured (SQL) database underpinning WordPress. Storing content in a modern (noSQL) query engine like Elasticsearch empowers us to produce superior keyword search and related content results, and supercharge the performance of complex queries like a filter on multiple product properties or a location. Smarter and faster content makes for a better web and, not accidentally, is important to search engines and visitor retention / conversion.

While our plugin made it simple for WordPress-savvy engineers to talk to Elasticsearch, the need to manage Elasticsearch hosting added friction and complexity, at odds with the simple user experience 10up strives for. As we prototyped exciting use cases involving private content, we realized that end-to-end security added even more complexity.

ElasticPress.io solves all of that—making it dead-simple to start using enterprise-caliber search and query technology with WordPress. It enables innovative features like accelerated admin performance that require end-to-end control and security.

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Refining our message and design

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More than two years ago, we overhauled 10up.com to reflect the company we had become. Conceived and built entirely in-house, we strove for an experience and aesthetic that would project the craftsmanship we offer our clients. More than two years later, we think the art direction and architecture has more than withstood the test of time.

Over the last two years, our mission, message, and value proposition has evolved, presenting an opportunity to improve the way we articulate ourselves, in content and design. I’m happy to announce a site wide update that highlights our refreshed mission statement and improves the way we describe #team10up.

We think that our own story becomes most tangible when telling our project stories, so we’ve also taken the time to completely redesign our work portfolio. Our user experience and visual design team worked closely with internal stakeholders and engineers to craft a portfolio that is as visually stunning as it is functional, across screen sizes and device types.

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Jake Goldman

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WordPress 4.5 was released yesterday, featuring improvements to content editing, responsive previews, and a handful of under the hood performance and developer improvements. More than a dozen 10uppers made this release possible, most notably Adam Silverstein, who served as Release Deputy.

Thank you for helping make WordPress: David Brumbaugh, Drew Jaynes (emeritus), Dreb Bits, Faishal Saiyed, Helen Hou-Sandí, Josh Levinson, Lukas Pawlik, Pete Nelson, Ricky Lee Whittemore, Ryan Welcher, Scott Kingsley Clark, Steve Grunwell, and Sudar Muthu!

5 Down: 10up’s Fifth Year

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Our origin story is modest: just five years ago, 10up began with a single individual working in the smallest U.S. state and a portfolio containing fewer clients than there were Star Wars movies at the time.

Since then, 10up has matured at a much faster pace than your average agency. We’ve continued to grow our team by ~30%, welcoming dozens of new 10uppers across Project Management, Web Strategy, Engineering, Design, Revenue, and User Experience. Financials also continue to thrive; in the first month of 2016, we saw more revenue than our first two years combined (and more than half of what we did in our third year).

But here at 10up, we value more than revenue and growth statistics—it’s about nurturing the culture within, providing our team the resources to achieve peak performance—a sense of community, a pride of ownership, and material benefits for a team that is building a future together, not merely cashing in a paycheck.

In 2015, we hosted our biggest All Hands Summit, practically taking over a hotel in Boulder for a 10up-only conference with sessions exploring our business goals, emerging and important technologies, and the latest tactics for effective project management, with a healthy dose of team building. We even hosted an awards ceremony: The First Annual Uppies – a tradition is born.

As we continue to strive for the very best consulting experience in the publishing and content management space, here are just a few accomplishments since our last birthday:

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