Nate Turner is cofounder and CEO of Ten Speed, the US answer engine optimization and SEO agency for B2B software companies that he launched with Kevin King in 2020. He spent more than eight years at Sprout Social, where he was the first marketer and helped build the inbound program behind its growth from $100,000 to $100 million in annual recurring revenue.
The First Marketer at Sprout Social
Turner joined Sprout Social, the Chicago, Illinois social media software company, as its first marketer. According to Ten Speed's about page, organic search was the company's biggest channel for traffic, leads, and revenue, and much of that growth came from a blog that reached more than 1 million visitors a month.
King joined his team in 2014 as head of SEO and led the strategies that scaled Sprout's organic performance for the next five years.
Launching Ten Speed
After Sprout, Turner consulted for software companies on organic growth, while King ran marketing at ReviewTrackers. The two saw that experienced SEO and content teams were mostly available to large companies that could hire five to 50 people, and in 2020 they launched Ten Speed to bring that experience to smaller teams for less than the cost of a full-time hire.
The agency now has 13 full-time marketers working remotely across the US, with a hub in Chicago, and treats answer engine optimization and SEO as one program, since AI tools still pull from search results.