It’s a STAT rewind party!

Please keep your hands and arms inside the STAT-mobile — it’s time for our year in review.

Good golly. We did a lot this year.

From new product releases and events that took us around the globe, to team outings, winning an award, and new additions to the team, our elite squad of geeks came, saw, launched, crawled, and completely conquered 2017.

But all of this wouldn’t have been possible without one important factor: you. So, before we get into the highlights of the year, we wanted to give a five-second shout out to our awesome friends and clients that comprise our warm, fuzzy community of data lovers. Thank you.

And now, without further ado, someone hit the rewind button — it’s time to take a look back at what we got up to (spoiler alert: it was a lot).

We’ve multiplied!

Our goofy team grew a bunch this year — in two-legged members and four. By our count, we now total 44 really cool people, roughly the equivalent of a football team.

In Client Success, we welcomed Brian, Deneece, and Antonia. Darian and Igor joined our product team. Dev grew by a total of six with Jim, Bayan, Mike, Andrew, Carlos, and Ahmed, as well as our wonderful interns, Erik and Corbin. Scott joined Operations. Nicole, Jeff, and Charlotte were welcomed by Finance. And the marketing squad grew by four with Tyler, Aaron, Kirsten, and Eric.

Phew! That’s a lot of extra bodies warming our office, which celebrated its first anniversary this spring and got a pretty sweet mention by Techvibes.

Our office doggos also grew in number! We welcomed Ollie, our resident Fun Police; Seth, a benevolent, magical cloud; and Gus, who, like most humans, does not like it when you stare for a prolonged period of time.

When these woofers and borkers aren’t helping us hound the SERPs for clues on what Google’s up to, they’re fetching nose boops and reminding us there is more to life than keywords. There are also squirrels and bacon and ping pong balls.

Think you’d make a stellar member of the STAT-mobile? We’re constantly adding to our team of cool people. Check out our career page and get at us with your deets. We like coffee, weird music, memes, and quoting obscure movies.

Oh, the places we’ve been

We’ve been extremely fortunate to do a lot of travelling since our conception, and 2017 definitely takes the cake — in just 365 days, our team racked up a total of +47,000 kilometres.

Our travels took us to Mozcon in Seattle, where our CEO, Rob, took to the stage with the 411 on search intent. We also jetted across the pond to London for SearchLove and not one, but two City Crawls.

Speaking of City Crawls, we organized five of these data-filled micro-conferences in four different cities. And you all loved them so much that we decided to up the ante next year — SIX of these micro-conferences are already teed up for 2018.

Our first leg of the 2018 STAT roadshow will be in Austin, Texas on February 22. See you there?

STAT’s stay-action

We also did a ton of cool stuff right here in our own sandbox.

Among other adventures, we tubed at Cypress Mountain, ate multiple office lunches, threw axes, attempted to curl, and watched the Whitecaps run around and kick a ball really hard (yay, team! Go sports!).

It’s cool to be kind

We’re big believers in giving back. Which is why every month of 2017 saw us donating $1,000 to a different charity, hand-picked by one of our team members. And, as promised, we selected one charity, Save the Children, to receive a $12,000 donation.

Here are the charities we helped this year:

MS Society of Canada
Human Rights Watch
Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation
BC Cancer Foundation
The Good Food Institute
4 Paws for Abilities
Dr. Peter Aids Foundation
Education Without Borders
Heart and Stroke Foundation

We also joined Vancouver’s tech community for the TechPong tournament, which raised a whopping $69,119 for youth and STEM education. We didn’t make it very far on the table tennis-front, but our team raised and contributed just over $2,000 to the pot. And that makes violently flailing our limbs around in front of large crowds completely worthwhile.

Every little bit helps. Which is why we worked in concert with our friends at Startups Care and ended this year with a donation of $2,330 to the Greater Vancouver Food Bank.

Product releases galore

It truly was the year of the SERP feature. So we doubled down on feature tracking — from PAAs and related searches to video carousels (look-ee here), and, of course, featured snippets. We’re not obsessed with SERP features — you are.

And what better way to track Google’s favourite SERP trimmings than in our shiny new SERP Features dashboard.

But we didn’t stop there — just this week, we released the ability to surface the keywords that win SERP features (and the ones that have yet to snag them).

And the topper? Our new dashboard won the US Search Awards for Best Innovative Software. Super-duper! Neato! Way to go, team!

We kept STAT weird

Each year, we take a vote for our STAT holiday, an extra day off in the calendar year for our entire team to enjoy. We had a whole schwack of suggestions, but in the end, we chose to honour our inner nerd and celebrate Alien Abduction Day on March 20.

And we kept busy

Not that we’re keeping score or anything, but if our stats could talk, they’d say: holy guacamole, chill out, and slow the heck down.

23,205 cups of coffee
Unknown amount of beer and wine kegs consumed (read: we know but we aren’t prepared to disclose that info)
2,500 naked people clothed in STAT swag
1,500 lanyards worn by conference attendees
147 words that rhyme with STAT (unless we include slant rhymes)
21 new STAT-ers
15 blog posts
14 sponsored events
12 languages spoken at HQ (dog not included)
9 team lunches
6 stages we’ve spoken from
5 City Crawls
1 stellar year
…and a partridge in a pear tree.

Look out, 2018, here we come!