UpCity CEO Dan Olson Listed as One of Crain’s Notable Entrepreneurs in Chicago

Chicago, IL — UpCity is excited to announce that our CEO and co-founder, Dan Olson, has been nominated and selected as one of Crain\’s 40 Notable Entrepreneurs in Chicago!

Crain\’s list of Notable Entrepreneurs includes 44 men and women who have identified needs and opportunities in the market, organized and run companies, and taken on greater-than-normal financial risk. 

Methodology

The honorees did not pay to be included. In order to be considered for Crain\’s Notable Entrepreneurs list, one must be nominated by a colleague, peer, or member of the public.

Each of this year\’s honorees were submitted and accepted after a review by the Crane\’s Chicago Business editorial team. To qualify for the list, nominees must be based in the Chicago area and fit the definition of an entrepreneur as a businessperson who organizes and operates a business. In addition, this list only covers those companies with revenue or funding between $500,000 and $10 million.

Learn More About Dan\’s Journey & UpCity\’s History

We recently interviewed Dan for our From the Ground Up series to give our partners and readers a glimpse at what it\’s been like building UpCity from a startup into one of the most trusted names in the B2B services space. 

Our mission really hasn’t changed since those first days: how can we help business owners evolve their marketing with the times. – Dan Olson, CEO, UpCity

The small excerpt below is taken directly from that interview. Read the full interview here.

We knew it was going to be tough, but we launched in April of 2010 as DIYSEO. Our mission really hasn’t changed since those first days: how can we help business owners evolve their marketing with the times. At that time, we created a DIY software to let business owners handle their own SEO. There was a lot of frustration, confusion, and tactics that worked and some that didn’t. Ultimately, our biggest takeaway from that was that it was getting more and more complicated to figure out things like SEO, social media, local, all these things, and from a tactical perspective, it was just overwhelming for business owners. They need help; they need providers who can come to them and help them get these things figured out, so we started thinking about the channel and agencies and marketing providers in general, and started to rework our software around that. That’s when we rebranded to become UpCity.