10Clouds – Let the Evolution Begin!

There are many stories like this, but this one is ours. In 2009, two Ph.D. students at Warsaw University of Technology – Michał Kłujszo and I – hijacked a study room and converted it into the office of our first business. Time flies and here we are, August 2016, celebrating 10Clouds’ 7th year in business.

I would love to share a few words about how we’ve managed to grow a business that combines satisfied clients, outstanding teams and visionary products. I promise you won’t fall asleep halfway through. Let me start with the origins of our brand name. There are two versions of this story: the one for PR purposes and the real one. Which one would you like to hear? I’ll make a guess.

The real story behind 10Clouds

There’s usually some inspiring story behind the companies’ names. Something related to their values, visions, people and places. In our case, well, these things came later. You wouldn’t call us the masters of branding, but we were more into coding than the marketing mix. Let me be honest with you – the name 10Clouds is the result of casual brainstorming and random domain search. Our first plan was to build cloud computing solutions, so we started by checking free domains “8Clouds, 9Clouds”, and that’s how we ended up with 10Clouds.

It seems like there is no coincidence in life since the clients came up with their own understanding of what’s behind 10Clouds, and their understanding is something we can be proud of. One of them came up with an interpretation of 10Clouds as something better than cloud 9 – equal to Nirvana. I must say it appeals to our challenge-loving spirits. I couldn’t be happier when I heard an opinion like this based on someone’s actual experiences with a project team at our company.

To be honest, at one point I wished I hadn’t spent some more time thinking the company name through. I thought it sucked. I was perfectly sure that we’re going to change it, but in the end it worked out great. I guess Apple Computers wasn’t a very carefully chosen company name either, so we could even say we followed in the footsteps of the industry leader.

Years passed, the team grew, and we’ve found one more way to explain what 10Clouds stands for. We incorporated this interpretation into the pillars of our recent rebranding. It’s strongly connected with our company’s evolution, specifically with the moment the Design Team was created.

10 represents code and the binary system.
C stands for creativity and design.
Nothing more, nothing less.
Our new logo is a metaphor of the two worlds’ coming together: the tech/programming world and the design world.

10Clouds now and then

Evolution takes place both inside and outside the company. Your business scope changes, the team count grows, projects expand, and all of this should be reflected in how your brand presents itself to the rest of the world. Our time for a brand makeover came after introducing a more complex offer for clients who wanted to leave their product in good hands both in terms of code and design. In the last two years, we have created a very strong design team that is now at the core of our company.

Design is one of our key assets now, so we decided to present it in our branding as well. My feeling is that 10Clouds as a brand has gained much more focus on visuals and aesthetics. The new branding brought more colours, patterns and structures corresponding with both development and design services.

Since we started off as PhD students, many things and changes have happened – we’ve relocated our offices several times and expanded into more cities. The number of clouds, as 10Clouds’ team members call themselves, has grown from 2 to 80 (and counting), working on projects for clients located across the world.

I suppose we wouldn’t have grown so fast if it hadn’t been for our business motto we’ve stuck to all this time.

10Clouds Evolution – to be continued

Now more than ever, these words hold true. After the rapid growth in 2015, we have decided to focus on making 10Clouds a lean dragon. Fast, agile and invincible.

My words are just a brief summary of what has changed inside the company since its beginning. Soon, our team members will tell you more about the different aspects of running an evolving IT business in terms of project operations, team growth or establishing a new service in the company offer (in our case – design). Stay tuned and I hope you’ll drop by soon!