It’s amazing how many advertising products and companies out there don’t support their customers… like, at all. Even normal online shopping sites make it difficult to find a phone number – and I’d argue that buying a trinket online is more straight forward than configuring an ad server or a multifaceted campaign.

–> Have you had any awful advertising support experiences? Share some horror stories in the comments!

Hopefully you’ve noticed that not only do we offer support… we barely stop short of throwing it in your face. isocket has a toll free phone number that any customer can call, and if it’s between 10am and 6pm Pacific, we make our best effort to have a real live currently-wearing-pants human pick up the phone.

We love talking with our current, potential, and past customers. We’re here to build an amazing product and company, and the best way to do that is by listening. We’re addicting to helping – so don’t be shy!

New support area + awesome learning guides

We’re starting to beef up our in-product help area. We just released a new support page, including a FAQ with an Ask Jeeves style input:

We also released a getting started guide and some tips about growing your ad sales. For example:

• How to price your inventory
• How to build an awesome .com/advertise sales page on your website
• How to find and reach advertisers
• How to promote your inventory

We’ll eventually blog out these guides and tips to the public. For now, they’re just for isocket users

Getting Started Guide

Once you’ve done the basic account setup, there’s still some work in configuring your ad zones and inventory packages (sockets). We know some publishers are new to the direct sales game or need a refresher – so check out this guide if you need help rounding out your account setup. It includes:

1. Basic account setup, billing, payout, etc
2. Setting up ad zones
3. Installing ad code on your website or ad server
4. Creating your ad packages (sockets)
5. Some isocket policies, like how we handle payments.

Hope they help – good luck!

Our small team is growing! We recently welcomed Jason Shen, our first sales dude / ‘Customer Scout’. And before that was Alicia Tang, our ‘Programming Samurai’.

Make $5,000 While Being A Good Friend

We’ve done the job boards and normal funnels. But we believe that the best people come through trusted networks. So today we’re announcing a new referral reward!

Do you know someone we’d fall in love with and who might love us back? We will pay you $5,000 cash for the introduction if it leads to your friend joining our family. Even if you find us directly and apply to join, pick your favorite friend and say they referred you

We’re not swimming in money, but we wanted the world to know we’re serious about building a world class team. In addition to the bounty, we’ll drop a truckload of good karma off right in your driveway.

(By the way, no contingency recruiters please. Spam = bad karma.)

Now We’re On The Hunt For A “Senior” Backend Web Developer!

Some of the basics:

• You love to build amazing web apps, have a passion for shipping product, and work well with other super people.
• You must have experience building web applications. Bonus points for SaaS apps or advertising products.
• Experience at a startup or similarly agile / fast paced company. You love the startup lifestyle.
• You are very good at what you do (we have very high technical standards).
• You are a well rounded backend web dev. That means template layer through sys admin and schema. But you don’t need to be a JS guru or server specialist.
• We primarily use PHP and the Symfony framework. Experience with either is not required – if you are an amazing Python dev who wants to switch to PHP, that’s fine.

You can see more about this opening and apply on www.isocket.com/jobs.

Happy hunting!

Hey guys – my name is Jason Shen and I’m proud to be the newest addition to the isocket team!

Today, July 12th, is my first official day. But it feels like longer because I’ve been getting to know these guys through interviewing and training.

My job title is Customer Scout. You’ll be seeing more of me if you are interested in working with isocket or at local events. I’ll be playing counterpart to Ryan’s Customer BFF role. He and I are both part of the “Customer Team” – our job is to provide excellent service and help spread the word about isocket.

A little about my past:

Until last month, I was cutting my teeth in advertising as the business manager of The Stanford Daily. I oversaw operations, the ad sales & finance teams and the financial performance for our 118-year old independently incorporated newspaper. I also saw how powerful (and lucrative) premium display ads could be for our organization – which is part of why I’m so excited about isocket.

Before the Daily, I cofounded a microfinance oriented social venture, got a BS & MS from Stanford University, and spent 10 years as a nationally competitive gymnast. I was proud to be the Captain of the NCAA Div I National Championship Men’s Gymnastics team at Stanford.

I’m super excited to start kicking butt at isocket – we have an awesome team, a really useful product and some big plans to build toward. If you have any more questions about me or know of any publisher who wants an easier way to do direct and self-serve display ads, drop me a line at jason at isocket dot com.

We know many of you have been waiting for access to isocket and believe me, we’ve been anxious and working furiously to get it in your hands!  We consider this the beginning of a public beta (since the product is still a work in progress) – but specific wording aside, the big news is that we’re ready to start opening the doors.

The time that we had in private beta testing was time very well spent. We learned a lot about you, what you wanted and the direction of where isocket will be heading in the future thanks to our early beta testers.

So as part of this launch there is a ton of new stuff going live. Here’s some highlights:

Want To Sell Ads With isocket? Apply Now!

If you want to start selling ads through isocket, we’d love to have you!  Publishers who want to join go through a short application and approval process. The application is open as of today. You can start with the tour or skip directly to the application – it should take about 3 minutes.

Why do publishers apply?

We are requiring this application process to keep the quality of our marketplace high – you’ll make more money if advertisers know what they’re buying is legitimate. Many websites out there aren’t meant for direct sales, either because they are spammy, too small, etc. We’d be very sad to see someone pay for months of isocket service and not sell any ads, so if we really think that will happen, we’ll politely say so.

Want To Start Buying Ads?

If you want to buy ads through isocket there’s no application necessary. You just find the ads you want, and create an account during checkout. We’ll be releasing more features and ways to find inventory in the next few weeks. Check out our new advertisers page to see some of our featured inventory!

Brand Spankin’ New Public Pages

If you previously went to www.isocket.com looking for more info, you were probably dissapointed. While we were getting off the ground it acted as a placeholder and a way to measure interested in our product.  But today we’re launching the first versions of new public facing pages and it’s a big step forward for us – there’s detailed info about what we do, our main features, our pricing, a page with featured publishers, etc.

Be sure to go check it out and let us know what you think in the comments. My personal favorite is the about page, because our team rocks (and of course because there’s a handsome picture of me on there).

Full Redesign

A few weeks ago we quietly launched new designs for the advertiser-facing group, socket and checkout pages. For example, if you visit TechCrunch’s ad sales page, it’s a totally new look. The response has been great so far and advertisers report having a much easier time finding and buying the inventory they want.

Here’s a screen shot of the new socket page:

Versus a screen shot of the old version:

Dashboard and application redesign

Building off of the new design theme we started with the group pages, we’ve changed most of the look and feel of the product. These new designs also went live with this launch. One of the biggest things we wanted to improve was how you moved around the app and how things were organized.

Image of the new:

Versus image of the old:

Preview of things to come

This isn’t all that we’ve improved. We’ll be highlighting some additional features and announcements over the next few blogs posts. Some examples will be:

• A new account setup wizard.
• Custom socket images.
• Our pricing tiers.
• Order fulfillment – placing orders as a seller on behalf of buyers.

Hi! My name’s Al Abut and I’m the other recent hire at isocket. Eston and I are the new design team (my official job title is Startup Action Figure) and I’m excited about the big bet isocket is placing on the power of design to create compelling products. Our investor Dave McClure made waves in the design community recently by writing the article The Value Of Design To Startups in BusinessWeek and I’m pumped to join a team that takes the message to heart.

In fact, I was so excited that I wore a tie to my first day in the office yesterday. Granted, I wore it on my wrist but I’m sure that still counts.

If you see me in person sometime, I’ll tell you all about how John and I met, plus the weird connection to a mutual buddy in Bloomington named Kevin Makice. Let’s just say it’s amazing what a small world it is.

More about my background – I started off my career as a web developer at UC San Diego, working on a range of large websites focusing on science outreach. I launched two redesigns of the UCSD Division of Biology before working as a web developer for an environmental research initiative. I moved to San Francisco in late 2005 as an actionscript programmer making games at Wagerworks.

Startups are where my passion lie though and since 2007, I’ve specialized in designing for a wide range of early stage companies. One of the more interesting projects I’ve done was designing a retirement fund analyzer for Cake Financial. It was featured in the Wall Street Journal and Walt Mossberg commented that “I found the service clear and easy to use” as well as “simple, clear and relatively quick”. Cake was subsequently acquired by E-Trade. Other recent gigs included designing marketing pages for paid premium products, redesigning complex web applications and running user testing sessions.

Ok, enough of the boring stuff! I can’t rap like Eston but I have an awesome new puppy and he’s also an addition to the office ranks, so here’s some pics of Cosmo.

Here he is in my hometown of sunny San Diego.

And ham that he is, here’s Cosmo doing the tourist thing at Pea Soup Anderson’s, complete with closed eyes.

Last Friday I got a DM from Hup asking me to “whip something up for the blog by Monday… to give a sense of my skillz and personality.” After my initial confusion (thinking Hup wanted me to redesign an entire blog in one evening,) I realised what he meant: a blog post. “Feel free to flex your creativity a bit,” he said.

Shit. I’m getting ahead of myself here. Let’s start over.

Hello. I’m Eston Bond. I left my job last week to come back to the startup fold after absurd amounts of relentless harassment a gentle coaxing by my friend John Ramey. Previously, I was a relatively early Product Designer at Facebook, the original creative director and game designer of Twitter game Spymaster, a consultant for various social gaming companies, and most recently Principal Interaction Designer at MySpace. I’m really, really excited to be working in a fast-paced environment again on product design for a demographic I haven’t worked with yet, so expect to see more from me and my fellow designer (I’ll let him disclose himself) on this blog about the challenges we face in iterating on isocket’s product and UI. There’s really nothing like working on the ground floor of a startup.

Christ. That was boring, too. I’m sorry.

Given the climate at MySpace at the moment, I’m going to have to take down my little nerdcore track for now just to be safe. Sorry guys!

Eston Bond is isocket’s new designer, with the official title of “Mad Hatter.” He challenges all geek rappers to leave some rhymes in the comments below.

If you didn’t know it yet, we’re hiring 3-4 awesome PHP developers/engineers and 1 amazing front-end developer/CSS/Javascript ninja here in the very near future and we’ve been getting after it to find the right people.

Since we’ve quickly figured out that most people who are thinking about interviewing with isocket need this type of information anyway, we thought that it would make sense to post all of it here on our blog for the world to see. So, allow me to present to you  the 10 most common things that interviewees want to know most about isocket, answered by our co-founder and CEO John Ramey.

1. What are the co-founder’s backgrounds (for John Ramey)?

I’ve been a techie and entrepreneur for as long as I can remember. isocket is my third legit business. I used my 12th birthday money to buy my first domain name back in the late 90’s to launch a foodie social network (it failed). In high school I started a service business called Lythargic Media, helping local SMBs “get on the intertubes” – we built brochure ware, CMS’s, etc. In college I started Maven Ventures, a product & service business around real estate marketing. We started thinking about isocket due to the pains of that last business, eventually spinning off and going full time with what has now become a great startup =)

2. What is the vision for isocket and why does it matter?

We believe that it’s still way too hard to find, buy and execute most forms of advertising. For all the “advancement” that’s been made in the last decade, that fundamental problem still exists. We believe that the approach of the last ad wave was… misguided. We believe that by bringing the open web and transparency to advertising, we can finally make real progress for both buyers and sellers.

3. What is the stage of the product, who are the current customers and what is the potential market?

isocket is still very much an early stage product and company. We are “release early” type guys – so when TechCrunch came calling early in our development, we were happy to oblige. We took the company out of stealth and went live with TechCrunch as our first customer in Summer of 09. We’re now ramping our private Beta, bringing in many of the publishers who have signed up to join (you can request a beta invite here).

4. What isocket’s funding situation? Are you going to be around in 3 months and who are the investors?

Unlike most early stage groups who have a handful of people, we’re going to be around for a while. We raised a $2M seed round from some of the best early stage investors in the world. As a well capitalized seed company, we have the runway to build the company correctly and for the long term. You can rest assured that if you join now, we’ll be around in 3 months

5. What type of work would I be doing, who would I be working with and what’s interesting about it?

You would work with the founders and everyone else on the team (an advantage of being small) to execute on the promise and vision of the company. You’ll wear many hats and learn a wide range of new stuff. But obviously, there’s work to be done – so if you’re a backend engineer for example, you’ll be responsible for the end to end process of planning / building / launching / testing our product. Picture being part of a 5 person company in a garage trying to change the world. That’ll be your job.

6. Where is your office located?

We found a great place to work in Burlingame, CA. There are two other startups in our building (Brightkite and Jobvite). We definitely wanted a place to be comfortable, so standard office parks were off limits. High ceilings, natural light, open space, funky colors, and two awesome dogs. We’re also less than a block away from the Caltrain station, which makes getting around a cinch.

7. What types of interesting technical problems would I be working on?

Trust us – we’ve got a lot of very interesting technical problems and challenges to work on. And they’re not all your typical “how well will our MySQL scale” problems. isocket is taking off because of our vision for the future, which is rooted in our tech. So we can’t share much more publicly – if you want to find out more, I guess you’ll just have to come in and talk to us =)

8. What’s your office culture like?

Although it’s cliché, we work hard and play hard. Joining a venture backed high growth startup is a lifestyle choice, not a job choice. The benefits of that lifestyle are working in the type of environment / culture that you daydream about at big companies. Fun, open, communicative, no politics. Smart, passionate people working together to build incredible value and change an industry. Even more importantly – you have the freedom and support to impact and build our culture the way YOU think is best. Feel free to check out our insideisocket Twitter account and our videos on YouTube for a better look at what it’s like to work here.

9. What are the benefits of working at isocket besides working on the product? For example, is working at isocket going to help me get better connected in Silicon Valley?

There is simply nothing in the world like being part of the original team behind a company that changes an industry. The ability to think of a plan, do it yourself, and directly see the rewards. Friendships and brotherhood that is the civilian equivalent of going to war. You’ll meet the best people in the Valley and around the industry. Investors, advisors, the guy who engineer the Sony AIBO, etc. It’s all possible.

10. What technologies are you using to build the isocket product?

isocket is primarily built on the LAMP stack, using a PHP framework called Symfony. As a web app, we obviously use HTML, CSS, Javascript / AJAX / libraries, server stuff like memcache, MySQL, etc etc. Some of our platform uses other tools like C, Java, and Python. However – we are “right tool for the job” type guys, so we’re always open to experimenting and using what’s best.

Well, there ya go — if you’re interested in learning more about who we’re looking to hire go to isocket.com/jobs and let us know!

I’m not sure why, but for some reason when John and I saw the Pez Museum as were walking back from lunch last week, it was something that I just couldn’t seem to get out of my head. So much, in fact, that I kept on thinking about ways that we could incorporate the newly discovered ultimate mecca of all things Pez into our company culture here at isocket.

You see, creating a fun and creative work environment is something that I plan on putting a lot of my own personal time into and is also something that both John and Zak feel is very important to the overall success of our business. I know that creating a great company culture isn’t all about doing not-so-ordinary things with museums that are dedicated to bite-sized candy, but it does give us some great stories to tell in the future.

With all of this in mind we decided to make a scheduled stop at the Pez Museum so that we could get some shots with the it’s biggest claim to fame — the world’s largest Pez dispenser ever made. We stopped by after a tasty team lunch to say goodbye to our super-intern Toh Hong Pang (HP) as he is heading back to his home country of Singapore here soon, so we thought that it was only appropriate he be the first recipient of the monster-sized Pez snowman.

Of course, the world’s largest dispenser of Pez doesn’t just give out those tiny, little candies. Instead, it dispenses a numbered and certified snowman Pez dispenser that properly commemorates the special moment. Here are some pics we took during our first (but not last) trip over to the museum, including the official Guinness Book of World Records certificate for being the biggest Pez dispenser in the entire world. Enjoy.

HP makes isocket history with the first official Pez pic

Yes, it actually works…

The Kodak moment for HP

Getting up close and personal with some Pez

John strikes a pose


Zak cheeses it up real nice for the picture

Nick looks a little confused

Even John’s dad got into the Pez spirit!

In case you didn’t think that it was legit

Fresh off the heels of our funding announcement, we’ve just posted a new jobs page and some descriptions of what we’re looking for. We look forward to meeting and getting to know as many of you as we can!

Who We Need

Many startups pay lip service to the importance of the team and who they hire. We couldn’t take it more seriously. We believe there are exceptional people out there – maybe they’re already exceptional, maybe they haven’t had the chance yet – and we want them.

Many startup job postings talk about “Ninjas, Rockstars and Jedis”. We don’t want to use gimmicky words, we just want to work with the best people we can. It’s rewarding for everyone involved, and it’s the best way to build the best company.

We’ve tried to frame our job descriptions around “what the right candidate will be like” rather than the traditional “here’s a list of 20 tasks you will do every day”.

Because of this strategy and our size and stage, the actual job titles and descriptions are flexible. In general, we need people to build / execute our product and people to care about / work with our customers. If you or someone you know could be a great fit, but aren’t sure if you fit a specific posting, say hello anyway!

Open Positions

• Senior Inside Sales
• Director of / Lead Engineer
  
• Senior Software Engineers
• Senior Platform Engineers
• Front-End Designer / Engineer

What about Junior-level positions and internships? If you think you’re a fit and up to the challenge, email us ( join at isocket dot com) and tell us why.

Why You Should Join

In our job postings, we talk a lot about what we bring to the table. Bottom line: this is a unique opportunity for the right people. There are very few places in the world other than Silicon Valley where you can enjoy the startup lifestyle and all it can reward you with.

We’re excited to announce that isocket has closed a $2 million round of seed funding!

We’ve been quiet recently. The isocket team has been very busy since the launch of our private Beta with TechCrunch earlier this summer. In addition to working with new customers and working as fast as we can on product development, Zak and I have been looking for ways to grow the company so we can scale.

We know many of you are itching to try out the service – now we can ramp things up and get the product into more peoples hands, faster.

The A-Team

We are honored by the investors who have lost their minds believe in what we’re working on. These people are awesome:

• Tim Draper and Joel Yarmon for Draper Fisher Jurvetson
• David, Bruce and Bipul for Blumberg Capital
• Jeff Clavier for SoftTech VC
• Dave McClure for Founders Fund Angel
  
• David Cohen of Bullet Time Ventures and TechStars
• David, Lewis and Marc for Metamorphic Ventures
• Alexander Lloyd for Accelerator Ventures
• Marcus and Andy Ogawa for Quest Venture Partners
• Steve Gurasich, Co-Founder and CEO of the ad agency GSD&M IdeaCity
• Plug & Play Ventures
• Willem Schutte, David Weisburd, Hon Wah Chin, and Arjun Sethi

Please join me in welcoming them to the project. We are excited that such a great group of people believe in isocket and will be contributing to our growth. We look forward to working with them!

The Starting Line

Raising capital is one of the hardest and biggest hurdles for startup founders. As a result, many entrepreneurs make funding the goal – in other words, it becomes the finish line.

But for Zak, myself, and all the new team members who will be joining us – this is the starting line. We now have the resources we need to start growing isocket into what we know it can be.

We’re Hiring!

isocket is hiring. We just announced a bunch of open positions at our (future) office in San Mateo, CA. Engineers, designers, sales – you name it, we probably need it.

Are you or someone you know incredibly talented and passionate? Want to join one of the few newly funded companies in the Valley? Say hello.