Less that two weeks ago we moved into a new office and even though we’re in the same building and logistically only moved one suite over we’re really digging the new space. There’s just something about moving to a new place that makes you feel refreshed and ready to get after it.

Just like when you move to a new apartment or house, moving into a new office helped us get rid of a bunch of stuff that we’d accumulated over the past couple years and from what I can tell there’s still a few things looking for their place. But, overall we’re getting settled in very quickly and personally I’m loving the new space.

With only being here for a few days we’re already starting to notice some things that we really like about this office compared to our last one. Here are a few that I wanted to point out along with some pics of how everything is looking at this point.

We’re officially in business now that we have our logo on the door. There are plans to add a larger, more legit sign out in front of the office that will be easy to see from the Caltrain that goes by at least once an hour. Jobvite, who’s in the three suites next to us, will also have a sign out in front, too.

Until we get a receptionist Luigi is the first person to greet any visitor that stops by the office. He doesn’t say a whole lot, but I hear that he’s got a killer golf game. I must say that I really like his style (and his moustache).

Here’s where we get our workout on during the day. None of us in the office like to sit on our butts all day and there’s nothing like some arm curls or pushups to get your blood flowing. There’s also some tennis and basketball courts just a block over in case we’re feeling competitive.

Ahh, the almighty swag corner. This is where we keep all of our t-shirts and other goodies that we give out whenever we’re feeling generous. You can see that it’s all being guarded (and serenaded) by the trololo guy, who now has a place in our office forever thanks to our buddy Al. Do you want an isocket t-shirt? Leave us an awesome comment below and we’ll send one out your way.

We have a good balance of both the force and the dark side of the force throughout our office, although I must say that the life-size Darth is pretty intimidating (when he doesn’t look like he’s riding a big, yellow duck). I’m a big fan of the action shot of Yoda — very acrobatic Yoda is.

The new conference room is nice and roomy and all of us can fit in there at the same time…for now.

One of the coolest parts of this office is that our devs now have their own space so that they don’t have to be bothered by me and the rest of the customer team all day. We call it the “dev cave” and it seems to be working out great so far.

It’s feels good to have all of the moving done and it’s going to be a great 2012 for isocket. If you ever want to stop by and hang at out new digs, let us know — we’re always happy to have visitors (and so is Luigi).

Our small project continues to grow! We’ve had some great wins over the last few months and even though we tried to keep some of them quiet, the cats were sneaking out of the bag…

Please welcome our newest teammate and VP Sales, Ben Trenda!

Ben joins us from the Rubicon Project, where he was VP Marketplace. During Ben’s tenure, Rubicon built what has become one of the world’s largest RTB platforms for remnant inventory, and developed Private Marketplaces for several major publishers. Before Rubicon Ben served as VP of Global Alliances and Agency Partnerships at AOL, and held various roles in Strategic Alliances at Yahoo/Overture before that

This is how we made our offer (love Jordan’s thumbs up face)

We’re super excited to welcome Ben and even in the little time he’s been here we’ve already cranked up the velocity. Say hola to Ben at @btrenda on LinkedIn or ben [at] isocket.

Oh, and some cash too.

I’m also happy to share that isocket has received additional VC funding from a mix of great new investors and all of our existing ones! We’re growing and have lots of awesome stuff coming down the pipe (stay tuned the next few weeks).

Plus we’re expanding our small team to include some additional engineers, a designer, and opening up a NYC office. Do you or someone you know love solving massive inefficiency problems or think advertising is rad? We’d love to meet you (or give you $5,000 for the referral!)

Now we can totally afford that “spa” treatment the team has been asking for

I Can Has Awesome Newz. We’re very happy to share that another awesome person has joined the isocket mission! Todd Sawicki is the Chief Revenue Officer of the Cheezburger Network (one of isocket’s super publishers) and an experienced advertising dude.

Todd is joining our advisory board, helping isocket slay the advertising beast along with great folks like Gokul Rajaram and David Scacco. We also recently welcomed KISSmetrics Founder & CEO Hiten Shah to our Board of Directors.

The official bio:

Todd Sawicki, Chief Revenue Officer at Cheezburger Network. He is an entrepreneur at heart with more than 16 years of experience in online startups, media companies and everything in between. Todd has worked in senior sales and marketing management with many startups at the cross roads of media and monetization including most recently Lookery and is on the advisory boards for Wetpaint and BuddyTV.

Please welcome Todd in the comments or on twitter @sawickipedia!

100 Pushup Challenge – Jason and Jordan of isocket from Jason Shen on Vimeo.

Taking a break from our regularly scheduled advertising announcements to share some cool stuff on our team.

Here at isocket we’re trying to disrupt an industry. And we know that to do that, we’ve got to prepare ourselves physically and mentally. Over the period of a month or so, Jordan and I followed the Hundred Pushups training regiment. This video is the culmination of that effort.

How does it feel to be a champion? It feels good.

Just how much awesome can you cram into one startup?! We’re excited to announce that Hiten Shah, web entrepreneur and contender for the web’s nicest and smartest person award, has joined isocket’s Board of Directors.

Many of you know Hiten because he’s very active in the web community and is the Co-Founder and CEO of the hot startup KISSmetrics. He gives great presentations about Lean Startups and metrics, and has a very valuable twitter feed for those of you interested in these topics.

Hiten started out by founding an Internet marketing consultancy, ACS. He then went on to create Crazy Egg, a popular analytics tool that visualizes the user experience on a website. Now with KISSmetrics he is building a data driven solution for online businesses. Hiten is passionate about helping other entrepreneurs and startup people.

This is the first time Hiten has accepted a Directorship, and we’re honored to have him. He’s already sat in one BOD meeting then jammed out with our product team afterwards – everyone loved it.

Please join me in welcoming Hiten to the isocket family by telling him a joke in the comments or @hnshah!

As the sales dude at isocket, I hear this a lot:

“We’re using AdSense and other ad networks to monetize and the revenues are really low! We want to make more money but we’re not sure how.”

Occasionally these publishers are already selling a few direct deals on the side, most of the time they aren’t but are curious. I’ll tell them more about what isocket is about and they’ll understand *what we do*, but will still be hesitant. As we discuss further the issue I uncover more often than not is: “Why should we pay money to use isocket to offer direct & self serve ad sales when there is no guarantee that I’m going to make money?”

Since I answer this question all the time on the phone, over email and in person, I thought I might blog about it and share it with others.

1) Making real money in advertising is never “passive” or “guaranteed”

For whatever reason, there seem to be a number of folks out there who believe that if they just had “the right formula” they could be making lots of money on advertising without a lot of work. While there is the odd case of this happening, for the most part it is a myth. Negotiating with ad networks, growing your traffic, getting a more targeted audience, hustling for deals, optimizing your ad placement and pricing – these are what the publishers who generate a lot of ad revenue do every day to earn their keep.

> isocket helps you take care of the painful parts of direct sales: payments/invoicing, campaign scheduling/serving, and ad stats & reporting. So you can focus on growing your readership and not dealing with ad servers.

2) Ad networks undervalue your inventory

People often complain about the low payouts from ad networks. The role of an ad network is to bundle up your ad inventory and sell the whole package to big advertisers. The advertiser is buying a pack of publishers wholesale. It’s like buying a box of baseball cards at a yard sale – there might be some gems in there, but the “good cards” are undervalued because they are lumped into the pile. No wonder you’re getting a low CPM from your traffic.

> isocket lets you establish your worth – set your own price and go sell. We have publishers earning CPM campaigns 5x larger than with ad networks.

3) You only need a few sales for premium ad sales to be worth it

We have had publishers sign up with isocket and pay our monthly fee for several months with no sales, and then one order pays back all that and much more. When you do direct sales, your inventory is valued at a *premium* so you can earn much more money because advertisers are paying extra to specifically be on *your* site.

> isocket makes direct sales scaleable. Maybe you’ll put up with processing the first couple ads by hand, but as you grow, you’ll find that having a tool that helps you manage this stuff is invaluable.

isocket was designed from the ground up as a toolkit to help publishers sell and manage their directly sold ads. We have nothing against ad networks – they have a place in the ad ecosystem – it’s just that our focus has always been on premium display. Online publishers today need to start cultivating direct relationships with advertisers or they will continue to be disappointed with their ad revenue.

We deliberately made our pricing commission-free, simple to understand and (in our opinion) very fair. We wanted to create a product that makes life easier for both publishers and advertisers – and we work hard to improve it every day.

Direct sales is not “passive” but you also don’t have to be a used car salesman to do it. Make your inventory easy to find, purchase and execute. Promote the fact that you offer direct sales and set reasonable prices to start off. If you’re serious about making more ad revenue, you need to think about direct sales – and isocket.

We conceived, built and launched a micro-product in 4 hours in a hotel room today! Here’s the story…

I have a confession. Today is me, John and Ryan’s first official day at the 2010 BlogWorld Expo, a conference all about blogging and we started it off by hacking together a website. Now, the whole point of coming to a conference is to meet people and do that face-to-face thing. But we got a really good idea and we had to execute it – what else would you expect from a bunch of geeks at a tech startup?

Ryan and I were talking about ways to get exposure and attention at BlogWorld while adding value to the attendees. What we concluded was that at the conference, everyone would be asking each other “What are you looking to get out of BlogWorld?”. This questions helps us understand who we’re talking to and whether we can help them, or ask them a question or connect them to someone else.

But there are tons of people at these things and you won’t get a chance to meet all the cool people you’re looking for. So we decided to create a site where people could post what they were looking for and find others based on stated interests.

And that’s when WhyICameToBlogWorld.com was born.

In about 4 hours we:

• bought the whyicametoblogworld.com domain name
• created a self-hosted wordpress installation
• registered the twitter handle @whyicame2bwe
• discovered & implemented TweetGrid, a real-time twitter search tool
• crafted the viral loop we’d use to get attention & share our message
• figured out how to run javascript on wordpress via the inline plugin
• experienced and recovered from a couple bug/failure issues
• and launched!

Ryan and I are customer facing guys at isocket but we both have technical chops too. I’m proud to have hacked together this site with him – how many sales guys do you know who could pull that off? =)

We eventually went down to the panel and met some folks interested in monetization – including the very cool Darren Rowse of Problogger who said his readers would be pretty interested in isocket.

I’m going to call that a good day.

Last week isocket flew out to New York to give the East Coast some love. We attended Pubmatic’s Ad Revenue Conference – where people were talking about hundred million dollar ad campaigns. It was exciting to see what major players in the industry were up to and what trends to capitalize on.

But we also know that there is a huge opportunity to work with publishers who aren’t getting a bajillion pageviews or working with 10 ad networks. That’s why we threw a meetup up for some of our favorite folks – the smart, savvy and kick-ass bloggers of Brooklyn.

These folks are at the cutting edge of hyper-local news. They’re writing compelling content that’s informed by their involvement in the community – and they’re finding ways to monetize that content. Here at isocket, we firmly believe in creating tools to empower publishers to take their financial future in their own hands.

Some of the awesome peeps we got to meet:

• Nicole - the founder and editor of Brooklyn Based, she puts out an email 3x a week that reaches over 13,00 subscribers.
• Hide - the multi-talented man behind DumboNYC (an isocket publisher!). He generously donates his ad dollars back to Brooklyn art community.
• Nicole and Colleen – the two gals who run Brooklyn the Borough, a beautiful webzine-like site that covers Brooklyn culture.
• Eric – the graphic designer of the thoughtful and fun creature that is Gelf Magazine (an isocket publisher!).
• Trevor - the cofounder of neighborhood platform NearSay – among other things they’ll aggregate a bunch of NYC “daily deals” into a single email.
• Claude – one of the editors at Brooklyn Heights Blog (an isocket publisher!). Their team has put more orders through our system than just about anyone.
• Jennifer - an ex-NYTimes consultant turned researcher at CUNY who is working with Jeff Jarvis (who we also met) to develop a sustainable hyper-local news community in Brooklyn.
• Ning and Kael – the guys who power the tech for Brownstoner (an isocket publisher!) We salute the geekery they’ve built over at BlankSlate.
• Shane – the mustached managing editor at the beautifully designed OVERFLOW Magazine – where print still draws breath!
• Chris - the happy recipient of an isocket t-shirt who runs The Skint and sends out a daily email of awesome and cheap things to do in NYC.

Thanks for showing us a good time New York! We’ll be back but meanwhile, keep being awesome!

So excited – John and Jason are visiting NYC this week for an ad conference and to meet some of our East Coast beta testers. We started off thinking “hey, let’s invite a few of our great publishers for a drink”, then it snowballed.

So if you’re around Brooklyn this Friday night, come out to say hello and let us buy you a drink! It’ll be informal – just some good company and free isocket swag! We may be joined by some special guests as well

Who: Anyone! Definitely stop by if you’re interested in isocket, ad sales, blogging, whatever – but anyone is welcome.

When: October 8th, 7pm – 9pm (show up any time)

Where: Rebar – 147 Front St, Brooklyn. Yelp link. We’ll be hanging out in the general bar area.

Why: Why not? You all are amazing – please let us meet you and absorb some of the awesome. Hopefully it will rub off.

When we launched our public beta in July, we started to promote our features and pricing for the first time. Since then we’ve made isocket more flexible and powerful, while bringing on many new publishers. We’ve listened to questions & comments we got from our customers and based on that feedback, we’ve updated some of our public pages.

The new pages state our mission more clearly: we make advertising suck less. They also succinctly lay out some of the top reasons for joining isocket.

We also split off an independent page about pricing – check it out. We simplified some of the tiers and used our awesome office dogs to add some personality (as you can tell, we love our dogs!)

For example, you can sell/serve up to 5 million ad impressions per month for only $99. Publishers switching from commission-based services are literally putting thousands more in their pocket each month, just by switching.

We think you’ll find these new pages to be clear and compelling. Take a look and let us know what you think in the comments or on twitter at @isocket!