How an Estonian Startup Manages 100K Clients With Taskworld
Revolutionizing web ads is no easy business, but the Estonian tech company, Adcash, makes hockey-stick growth look easy.
BY JESSICA ZARTLER
The numbers are staggering — 200 million unique users per day, 5.2 million conversions per month, 750,000 app installs per month.
When a small team in Estonia with an algorithm and a dream started Adcash in the kitchen of a 40 sq.m. apartment, they could never have anticipated the growth that was to come.
“Our story started like any other tech start-up — with nothing. Now, after nine years we have grown to a global advertising network with over 100,000 clients being served on daily basis.” -Liis Ristal, Head of Marketing
And the company’s success is turning entrepreneurial heads. Adcash has been nominated for Most Competitive SME Company two years in a row along with a dizzying list of other accolades, such as Most Successful Company 2015 in the Aripaev Top 100 and Innovator of the Year 2015 Enterprise Estonia.
What is Adcash?
The tech company is a real-time advertising trading platform delivering maximum and targeted exposure for advertisers and a simple, effective way for publishers to make money off of web traffic. The Adcash AdApt engine, as its called, combines a decade of industry expertise with cutting-edge algorithms.
In simpler terms, it is kind of like Google Adsense, with a more targeted approach. The traffic that runs through Adcash is the cleanest in the industry, attracting premium advertisers focused on quality, not quantity. The platform also offers easy and customizable formats for publishers that engage people, instead of driving them away.
With top entertainment companies like InnoGames and its biggest international client, Alibaba, Adcash has the conversion stats to prove it is a force to be reckoned with.
Managing an International Team Across Four Offices & Runaway Growth
From a team of just a few, Adcash has grown to a team of 200+, including 18 different nationalities speaking 15 languages. Today, the startup has offices in Tallinn (HQ), Barcelona, Sofia and Paris.
The diversity of teams mixed with a rapid growth in traffic, clients and business has created quite a big challenge, to say the least, for project managers across departments in the company. Collaborating on this scale required the team to find a tech solution that allowed the four offices to work together across time zones, manage a knowledge center of files and information, chat in real-time and keep an eye on the big picture with an overview of tasks, projects and timelines.
“As a tech company we must be agile and effective across all teams. For that we needed a proper project management tool. As the nature of this business is very versatile — from SEO to expos and development projects, we needed a tool that was not only simple to use and robust, but flexible. Taskworld is perfect. It meets all of those requirements and much more. ” — Ristal
Being a data-driven company, Adcash relies on empirical results, and soon after it adopted Taskworld to manage its workload, Ristal and her team started to see measurable results.
“The share of overdue tasks has decreased to close to zero. None of the tasks, no matter how small, disappear in the information clutter. There are so many handy features that save time — from bulk task creation to workload overview reports, synced emails and calendar — it is so much easier to evaluate performance and the team is far more productive.” — Ristal
And productivity is increasingly important as Adcash continues to expand its client base and team. Now, with replicable project management practices the startup is prime for scaling even further.
From a small Estonian kitchen, to four countries, to the world, Adcash is a testament to the fact that you can never dream too big.
A special thank you to Liis Ristal for sharing her team’s story. To learn more about how you can optimize your web advertising or to connect with her team, head to the Adcash website.
