GLAD
In brief
50 Women Under 50 opens
GLAD's first annual list launches with one profile published and forty-nine places open. Nominations are being taken now.
A sourcing rule, stated up front
Company results stay labelled as company results. No firm's performance gets folded into one person's record.
The rising cost of a customer
Why acquisition spend keeps climbing, and what that does to the arithmetic of a consumer brand. Reporting under way.
Owners, not employees
On the gap between a senior title and an actual stake, and who crosses it. Interviews being scheduled.
The Maryland Co-Owner Turning Clicks Into Revenue
At 47, Paraskevi Tsatsopita sits on the advisory board and co-owns ConvertPolo, a conversion agency that has run more than 1,200 experiments across 140-plus websites. She opens GLAD's 2026 class of fifty.
Most people never notice the work Paraskevi Tsatsopita does. It hides in the half second before someone adds a product to a cart, in the sentence above a checkout button, in the version of a page that quietly outperforms the one it replaced. Conversion rate optimisation is an unglamorous trade, measured in percentage points rather than headlines.
It is also, increasingly, the difference between a consumer brand that survives its own ad spend and one that does not. Tsatsopita, 47, has co-owned ConvertPolo and sat on its advisory board since August 2023, working from Maryland while the firm's operating team runs out of India.
The agency works on a single question for its clients: of the people already arriving at a website, how many can be persuaded to act, and what exactly persuades them.
The index
From the desk
GLAD is a new paper with one beat: the people doing the work, and the parts of that work that never make the press release.
It opens with a list rather than a manifesto. Fifty women, fifty profiles, published one at a time as each interview is done.
Nominations and corrections: hello@glad.casa.
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New issues go out by email. Write to hello@glad.casa with "subscribe" and you are on the list.
Business
Section 2 · Margins, spend and the mechanics behind a growth number
Inside a conversion agency's numbers
1,200 experiments, 140 websites, and a partnership with the platform its own work runs on. What ConvertPolo publishes, and what it means.
The rising cost of a customer
Paid acquisition has grown more expensive every year that consumer brands have existed online. The follow-on effects are the story.
Agencies that carry a stake
Service firms taking equity instead of retainers, and what that changes about who they work with.
People
Section 3 · Operators, owners and builders
Paraskevi Tsatsopita
Co-owner, ConvertPolo. Ellicott City, Maryland. On owning a stake in the trade that decides whether traffic pays for itself.
To be announced
The next of the fifty. Nominations for the remaining places go to hello@glad.casa.
To be announced
Profiles publish one at a time, as each interview is completed, rather than as one package at year end.
The List
Section 4 · 50 Women Under 50, 2026 edition
Fifty women whose work changed something measurable
Operators, owners and builders, each under fifty on the date their profile publishes, chosen for what shipped rather than for the size of the logo behind them. Every figure in every profile is attributed at the foot of the page.
See the 2026 listOpinion
Section 6 · Arguments, clearly labelled as arguments
Against the round-number list
Why an annual list is worth publishing only if the selection rule is printed next to it.
The press-release beat
Business coverage that reprints announcements, and what gets missed while it does.
How we pick, and how we source
The selection rules for the list, and the line GLAD holds between a person's record and their company's.