Statamic
Upriver
Upriver is an AI data engineering platform, VC-backed and built by founders who spent a decade inside data teams before deciding to fix what was broken. Their product handles the engineering work that used to live inside a single engineer's head.
This project was a ground-up build on a tight timeline, pairing a new design with a CMS their team could finally own.
When Rotem joined Upriver as their marketing director, the website was one of her first problems. There was no editorial workflow, no content management to speak of. The CTO had been handling updates manually in code, off the side of his desk, which worked until there was a marketing function to run. It didn't scale to what Upriver was becoming.
Rotem and I had worked together before, on the Compstak project. So when she landed at Upriver and the website needed fixing, I was one of her first calls. That context mattered. We didn't need to spend time establishing trust or aligning on what "good" looked like. We could just build.
New Build
A Month to Launch
The brief wasn't "here's the design, build it." The design was still being worked out when the project started. That's a common reality with fast-moving startups, and it requires a different way of working: staying in motion, building the architecture and content structure in parallel with the visual decisions still being made, and adapting cleanly when things shift.
The site runs on Statamic, which was the right call for a few reasons. Upriver's engineering team works in a modern stack, so a Laravel-based CMS felt native rather than bolted on. And Statamic's content architecture is flexible enough to grow with a fast-moving startup without locking the team into WordPress's particular way of doing things. More importantly, it gave Rotem and the marketing team a genuine editing experience, where no developer would be required for day-to-day updates, nor tickets filed just to to change a headline.
We launched in a month.
Under the Hood
Built to Actually Work
The page builder was built from scratch, which gave us precise control over the content structure rather than inheriting opinions from a template. Each section type maps cleanly to what Upriver's marketing team actually needed... no more, no less.
Forms handle two distinct jobs. Job applications run through Statamic's native forms, keeping that data in-house. HubSpot handles the marketing side, embedded via their standard scripts and connected to Upriver's existing pipeline.
One last thing worth calling out: the previous site had a cookie consent popup that looked functional but wasn't. Scripts fired regardless of what the visitor chose. The new implementation uses a proper consent gate, so that GA, HubSpot and other third-party scripts (with cookies) only load after explicit consent is given. For a company whose clients include enterprise data teams, that's not a small detail.
The goal was straightforward: give a serious company a site worthy of its ambitions, and give the marketing team the tools to keep it current. Upriver launched on schedule with a platform their team actually owns. Backed by investors including the founder of New Relic and the founder of Great Expectations, they're a company people are watching, and the site reflects that.
Michael and I have been working together for years, and he's my go-to for every website project. I never think twice about who to call! Working with him is seamless, hassle-free, and genuinely enjoyable. He's reliable, easy to communicate with, and consistently delivers exactly what I'm looking for. If you need someone for your website work, I can't recommend him highly enough.
Rotem Eshed Upriver