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Adjusting To Remote Work: Tips From A Nine Year Old, Fully Remote Company

10up working remote

When I joined 10up two and a half years ago to lead our strategic and commercial growth across Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), I was not only starting a new position, I was beginning an entirely new remote work experience. Inspired by companies like Automattic and Basecamp, and fueled by the explosion in video conferencing and digital collaboration tools, 10up was founded as a fully distributed digital agency: our entire team, now 200 full-time team members, works from home or in some cases, co working spaces, around the globe.

10up has been featured in case studies, books, ebooks, interviews, and articles about remote work culture, including a Forbes list of notable remote work companies. Our founder and president, Jake Goldman, has guest lectured at universities like Stanford and University of Michigan on the subject.

As a social person who enjoys collaborating with others, I didn’t know what to expect from a work-at-home culture and I wondered how I would be able to collaborate effectively with colleagues located around the world. Thankfully, my nerves were laid to rest quickly as I learned that a remote work culture can operate and even feel very similar to an in-office culture.

Faced with global health concerns and efforts to contain a rapidly spreading virus, many traditional in-office workforces are asking employees to work from home. For many professionals, this will be their first time navigating a remote work lifestyle. With that mind, I thought it might help to share some of the ways we approach remote work, foster meaningful connections, and cultivate a vibrant team culture.

10up Launches AcceleRev, Provides Smaller Publishers Access To Vital Tools

Katie Wilkerson on March 9 • 2 Comments

In 1994, the first website banner ad appeared on HotWired.com, boasting a 44% clickthrough rate. Since then, publishers have been investing in monetization strategies like direct display advertising and sponsored content to boost revenues. Today, distracted consumers, increased competition, banner blindness, and ad blocking tools make website monetization an increasing challenge for publishers.

From our work with clients like The Saturday Evening Post, TechCrunch, and PA Media Group, to our partnerships with The News Project and the Google Local News Initiative, 10up has a storied history of collaboration with news and media organizations around the world. Our Audience & Revenue team works closely with publishers of all sizes to:

Maximize the value of every visitor through digital advertising, reader revenue strategies, and conversion optimization;
Drive up the number of visitors through engagement strategy, content marketing, SEO, and advanced analytics.

10up and Google Partnership

Now, 10up is partnering with Google to offer new services through Google’s Ad Manager 360 platform in support of smaller publishers.

10up Celebrates Its 9th Anniversary

Jake Goldman on February 28

10up Celebrates Its 9th Anniversary

This February, 10up wrapped its ninth year with much to celebrate. The company saw continued team and financial growth, with our most significant expansions across our European division, productized Managed Services offerings, and strategic Audience & Revenue consulting services. We also doubled down on our contributions to a broader open web community, and team culture.

The result: We continued to expand our client roster with some of our most impressive wins to date. In 2019, we welcomed some of the most respected brands and organizations in the world into our portfolio, and expanded existing relationships with industry leading clients like Google and Microsoft.

Consistent Revenue And Team Growth

10up’s eighth anniversary celebrated significant financial and team growth, which continued into our ninth year. We achieved 18% revenue growth and gained 48 new clients across verticals including healthcare, publishing, government, high tech, architecture, and financial services. We’re especially pleased by the increased diversification of that revenue across pillar accounts, which we see as vital to a healthy, sustainable workplace in the services sector. While in 2018, 20% of our revenue came from a single client, 2019 included five seven-figure clients, with the largest accounting for only 9% of company-wide revenue.

The growth of our client portfolio along with our commitment to exceptional client delivery drove the expansion of Team10up to 200 full-timers. This includes two full-time, in-house recruiters and 10uppers spread across six continents and twenty-four countries (tell Antarctica we’re hiring). The executive team also expanded, as we welcomed our first full time Chief Financial Officer, Chuck Barlett, and made three internal promotions:

Sarah Williams, VP, Client Delivery
Phil Crum, VP, New Client Strategy
Martha Schmidt, VP, Account Strategy

Jason Clarke on February 11

Today WordPress powers 35% of the web, yet there are still many myths and misconceptions about using the WordPress as an enterprise-level content management system.

10up is one of four enterprise agency partners featured in the new ebook, Faster, Smarter, Safer WordPress for Enterprise, by Pantheon, a WebOps platform for open-source Drupal and WordPress websites. The ebook shares valuable insights on how enterprises can best leverage WordPress and work with an agency partner. It also addresses common myths and misconceptions about the capability, security, and scalability of WordPress as a platform.

The Google News Initiative Revenue Accelerator

Mike Bal on January 30

Google News Initiative, LION Publishers, and 10up Partnership

The GNI Revenue Accelerator Program is a partnership between the Google News Initiative, LION Publishers, and 10up focused on establishing a foundational blueprint for local publishers to comprehensively optimize their web-based revenue. The pilot program kicked off in September 2019 and will continue throughout 2020.

The conditions for quality local journalism can be daunting. Digital ad revenue isn’t growing fast enough to offset decreases in print ad revenue, even as news organizations need to invest more to keep pace with digital innovation and change. As larger publishers leverage their resources to quickly adopt and integrate new technologies, they attract more readers and widen the gap between large-scale publishers and smaller publishers who lack the same resources.

The GNI Revenue Accelerator Program aims to help local publishers keep pace, by providing technology resources to drive insights, traffic, engagement, and revenue yield. The core solutions and tactics the program offers are focused on universally applicable challenges and relatively easy-to-implement solutions. The goal isn’t to just help the publishers in the program, but to provide all publishers with a data-backed reference point for growing their audience and increasing their revenue.

Ads.Txt Manager 1.2 Further Eases Ads.Txt Management Inside Of WordPress

Jeff Paul on January 23

Ads.txt Manager For WordPress

10up often finds itself immersed in the business of publishing, which includes the configuration and management of the programmatic buying and selling of ad space. Our long-time work in this space inspired the build of Ads.txt Manager, our WordPress plugin that facilitates the creation, management, and validation of a site’s ads.txt whitelist file from the WordPress admin interface. With more than 70,000 active installations, the plugin has helped thousands of site owners eliminate the need to manually upload a new ads.txt file with every change and applies validation to prevent simple mistakes that can cause lost advertising revenue. Learn more about the Interactive Advertising Bureau’s Ads.txt initiative and its benefits in our launch post.

Our latest update, Ads.txt Manager 1.2, adds revision history, conflicting file detection, expanded developer features, better error message formatting, and a handful of under the hood bug fixes and code improvements.

10up Releases Autoshare For Twitter, Our Latest Free, Open-Source Plugin

Jeff Paul on January 21

Autoshare for Twitter is our new WordPress plugin that automatically tweets your posts as soon as they’re published. Once you hit the Publish button, the plugin sends your post’s title, featured image, and link to Twitter, along with a custom message.

Unlike a myriad of other social media, multitool solutions, Autoshare for Twitter is built solely for Twitter. It focuses on doing one thing and does it well, with the code and interface craftsmanship we apply to every project.

Leveraging Elasticsearch With ElasticPress To Create A Porsche-Quality Search Experience

Vasken Hauri on January 9

When Elferspot, the largest marketplace for classic and pre-owned Porsche sports cars, wanted to create a premium search experience on their WordPress site, they turned to 10up’s managed search solution for WordPress, ElasticPress.io.

“I’ve never had such an amazing support experience with any company. I had a problem with how I wanted to use ElasticPress and the support team worked with us to solve the problem together.”

— Alexander Altendorfer

Jake Goldman on December 4, 2019

From New York City, to rural South Africa, to a dozen countries across Europe, our distributed workforce model empowers us to bring in the best strategists, designers, and engineers, wherever they may live—because the best talent isn’t found in a single zip code.

Recently, I had the opportunity to discuss our forward-looking remote work culture with Toggl.

My interview is featured in their new ebook How Remote-Friendly Organizations Can Embrace a Client Roster That’s Not Limited by Office Location, along with insights from other remote work cultures, including Buffer, Gitlab, and Doist. The ebook provides a blueprint for building a successful business while working remotely, including establishing customer expectations, choosing the right tools, and navigating cultural differences.

ElasticPress 3.1 introduces a friendly interface to manage search weighting and ordering

Vasken Hauri on November 20, 2019

At 10up, we think digital innovation often happens at the intersection of expertise in design and engineering. The latest release of ElasticPress represents 10up innovation at its best, bringing together expertise in user interface design, web engineering, and systems architecture. In ElasticPress 3.1, we’ve introduced a simple and friendly user interface right inside of WordPress for managing search result weighting and customized results; a challenge that required Elasticsearch appliance expertise, and advanced WordPress UI and back end development.

From information discovery and filtering to data visualization and mapping, search is the foundation of many digital experiences across the websites and apps we use every day.

Thousands of websites rely on ElasticPress to extend the native WordPress search functionality through an integration with Elasticsearch, a fast, scalable way to manage searchable content in near-real-time. The release of ElasticPress 3.1, that includes weighted search and custom search ordering, moves several popular code-based features into an intuitive dashboard that provides a comfortable experience for anyone familiar with WordPress.