It is not so easy to manage a distributed team keeping in mind all the small tasks and maintaining maximum transparency in the team especially if the company is at the beginning of its journey. Today, the founder of SEO Alive, David Kaufmann, will tell us how they manage to do it with Standuply.

SEO Alive is a Spanish search engine optimization agency. It has assembled a team of SEO experts who have been working in their field for seven years with several international companies.

Now SEO Alive provides SEO services for medium and large companies. The main team goal is to integrate with them becoming part of their team and try to maximize their power.

SEO Alive is a Spanish search engine optimization agency. It has assembled a team of SEO experts who have been working in their field for seven years with several international companies. SEO Alive now provides SEO services for medium and large companies. The main team goal is to integrate with them becoming part of their team and try to maximize their power.

The SEO Alive team follows the maxim ‘less is more’. “Right now, we have around 20 clients based in Spain and in the United States. We don’t work with lots of companies and provide small help to them,” David explains, “We prefer to have a smaller client base and then be able to provide much support on the fly but be much more helpful to them.

The team is not particularly large, as the company officially began its remote journey 6 months ago. Right now it consists of six people full time but the team is growing along with the success of the company, and they are trying to make the team stronger in 2020.

Marta Adell and David Kaufmann
Co-founders of SEO Alive

Slack is an essential tool, especially for remote teams. It’s not just a tool – it’s a remote office for the team. And Standuply, like a little robot assistant, simplifies the team life, helping to optimize the tasks and goals which they had to keep in mind before.

David confirms, “It allows us to do almost everything in our project management like document sharing, our main communications, meetings. I mean Slack is really our main place for work.

David explained, “We have a lot of endless integrations, alerts, and notifications all the time, so we had to check hundreds of tools to find the one that allows us to do everything.”

In particular, David is pleased with the opportunity to receive clear and accurate feedback: how people feel, how focused they are and how projects are going.

Before Standuply I was manually checking all the reports and feedback every Friday. And now I have basically automated everything.”

David Kaufmann
CEO & co-founder at SEOAlive

David explains, “I can run all the reports weekly, monthly or whenever I need and completely forget about asking the team myself. They know they will receive my questions automatically and I will receive results. You also have these different options like starting a thread or just reporting to the client channel. And for us it is amazing to see all the impact it has on productivity and communications.”.

Since the company literally infiltrates customers’ teams, they use different project management tools, it’s dependent on the client. David explains, “Every client has a different budget for management tools. We look up to them. So we use everything from Jira to Trello and Asana. Like for example Ahrefs, Sistrix, and many more.”

David Kaufmann
Co-founder of SEOAlive

Time is the most valuable resource (after people, of course). For successful work, it is necessary to be able to distribute it correctly to allocate priorities. Otherwise, it will seem to you that it’s not enough.

David shares, “You have a ton of challenges but at the same time, you have to make sure that communications are fluent and the team is aware of everything. I wasn’t always getting enough time to check things with the team both personally and professionally.”

David says, “Now it has completely changed to 100% perfect! Also, the interface is very clear. Integrations work really smoothly. We have like 50 integrations already made with Standuply and we didn’t have any issues.”

“From the painful manual check of everything to having a hundred percent of demand. Once you have this ready, you get a fully automated process.”

David Kaufmann
CEO & co-founder at SEO Alive

Reporting improves team communication, and it changes for the better. David confirms, “We have a workflow of reports which helps the client to prepare for weekly or monthly reports. Standuply makes this process super simple and transparent.”

At the beginning of the company’s path, you need to spend a lot of time building project management processes, including defining how you want to integrate everything with Slack.

So the team has come to realize that they need a separate tool for daily check-ups. “While searching the right tool, I checked some similar tools, but the truth is that Standuply has the best comparison between quality and price,” David said.

“What I like about Standuply is that it’s the kind of startup that moves on. It’s very agile.”

David Kaufmann
CEO & co-founder at SEO Alive

David noted, “I often saw Standuply featured its projects on Product Hunt, and I thought it’s the kind of product where you can make out the process in a small team. And when the team is small and agile, you can constantly make changes and improvements. That’s probably something that doesn’t happen in big corporations where you need to have hundreds of processes.”

David shared with us what the top two features are that SEO Alive use right now:

  • Daily Standup. It’s the most used feature because it goes daily at SEO Alive. Every morning team members get a daily standup, which basically asks them what they did yesterday (for a specific project), what the plans are for today, and if they have any blockers. It’s like very basic questions, but it allows them to monitor everything to see how things are going.

David explains, “It’s not just about the personal aspects of our project so as to have to like everything and the percentage being fine.”

  • Mood Report is also David’s favorite feature. He says, “We have personalized it with what we had before. These are questions about how people feel and what we could improve to make their job better.
  • The team is also trying to incorporate analytical summaries so as to have a weekly overview.

You can see from the screenshot how often SEO Alive runs their reports. We blurred our customers’ names, but you see that we run reports every week mostly by Tuesdays.

“Productivity is first for us.” David said, “There were times when we missed a specific date for a report or maybe an action that needed to be delivered, and we were not on time because of lots of manual work. Now with Standuply, we can make sure that the info is delivered on time absolutely automated.”

He also notes, We all have a lot of work. And if you have the same problem, Standuply reminds you that it needs to be delivered on this specific date and time.”

But time management is really important too, and Standuply does improve it a lot. “Standuply helps with the alignment of the goals and makes sure that your team receives what you’re expecting.”

David shares, “Communication is always transparent otherwise your team could misunderstand something. But thanks to Standuply, you can make sure that every day you can check to see what the goals are and which projects are the most important.”

With Standuply, the chances of not missing any detail are a hundred percent higher than if you need to be reminded of everything or make notes and always keep things in your head.

David Kaufmann
CEO & co-founder at SEO Alive

Most Standuply customers are remote companies because each feature simplifies the workflow of remote employees and even contractors. David confirms, “Office teams where people see each other every day can possibly do personal check-ins that are different for them. However, I would also recommend Standuply for teams with offices. But I think for remote teams it’s essential.”

David concludes, “Your team may have the right goal, but one way or another, you still don’t speak much with each other face to face. So it’s very important to have fluent communication to make sure the team is aligned with you and have the same goals. And no one will ever be left without help.”


Standuply and SEO Alive have a thing in common: “Productivity first”. For us, it is extremely important that all Standuply features work correctly and quickly.

And that’s why Standuply allows SEO Alive team to keep in good shape and not worry about missing any details.

Anna Vedishcheva

Content Creator at Standuply. Travel and photography addicted. You can contact me on Linkedin, also contact me via email.

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