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.

Over the past few months the isocket office has really been filling up and I gotta say that it’s been pretty nice having more people around. If we hopped into the Way Back Machine (and by way back I mean 3-4 months ago), you might remember me introducing Vinoth (aka the ‘Singapore Sensation’) to the team who was then followed up by our doubling down on designers with Eston and Al (and his dog Cosmo) who also joined the mix. Each of these additions have brought with them so much talent, experience, creativity and quirkiness it’s kinda crazy and as a combined force we have really put together an amazing team. Also I gotta say, since I was the first non-founder hired it’s been really cool to see the team come together. It hasn’t been easy, but we’re really starting to hit our stride.

With all of that being said, just when you think that the isocket team can’t possibly get any more awesome-er I am writing this post to officially let you know that yes, in fact we can and how we do that is by adding yet another talented engineer to our team. The engineer that I’m speaking of is a woman who has been around the world of technology for a long time and who is super excited to help us build isocket into a product that we all envision it can be. The only thing that she loves more than writing code is cooking up amazing food (she loves her husband a lot, too) and although she was a little surprised when she found out we had three office dogs, she now can’t imagine not having them around. Besides that, I’ll let the interview below fill you in on everything else you need to know about our newest addition to the team, Alicia Tang.

1. Hey Alicia, how about we start off with a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how long have you been living in California? Also, when you were first deciding to make the move, what actually made you make the jump?

I was born and grew up in a nice mid-sized city in northeastern China, where it snows every winter. I came to California in the hot summer of 2006 and stayed in L.A. for a year to get my masters in electrical engineering. I initially decided to come to the US because “the love of my life” went to Stanford so I guess you could say that it was love that eventually made me stay. I guess that’s as good of a reason as any, right?

2. I hear that you have an interesting story as far as how you got accepted to the college where you ended up studying. What are some of the details of that story and what college did you end up attending?

Technically, I finished high school in about one year, which basically got me a free pass to any college nation-wide. That year was the hardest and best year of my life so far. I was on the province team (team of 5) and was the first girl in the previous six years that landed a spot for physics Olympia. Little did I know that I would fall in love with my husband during the preparation for the final contest. So, I followed him to Peking University and studied Physics there.

3. Where did you work before you made your way to isocket and how did we track you down? What were your first impressions of the isocket team and what made you excited about working with us?

After 2 years of working at Symantec on their Veritas Server Cluster product I had the chance to meet some people who told me all about isocket. It sounded cool, so I decided to check it out for myself. My first impression was the big hand-draw isocket logo on the whiteboard in the entry room. When I saw that I knew that this was truly a startup.  The business model of isocket is simple and clean, and it only took me about 10 minutes to convince my husband that isocket rocks and that it’s the place for me.

4. When we first interviewed you I remember you mentioning that you built a web app for your husband in your spare time. What kind of app was it and what did you enjoy most about creating it?

The app is for manage/watch all our stock accounts. When it became the first website we both open every morning, I knew that it was definitely worth all the effort I put into it. Also, building this application moved me from system level, networking developer to application level, web developer. I learned java/php/javascript/ajax/mysql all by myself just so that I could build it. And during that whole process is when I really started to love developing web apps.

5. You’re the first female to work at isocket (besides Boomer, of course) – what’s it like working with a bunch of guys?

Ok, I have to admit that I am the second ‘official’ woman to be in the office, right behind Boomer. The female:male ratio at my high school was 1:4, at college was 1:9. So according to my past experiences, it’s pretty good here 1:5(2:7). Also, us girls like to get together. Boomer lays next to my feet once a while and that makes me feel warm and sweet. We’ve actually become good friends very quickly.

6. When you’re not sitting in front of your laptop, what do you enjoy doing? (you do get away from your laptop every now and then, right?)

If I’m not in front of the computer, I will most likely be in the kitchen. Cooking is art and it is what I would love to to do once I retire. Check out pics below for some examples of things I’ve cooked up in my spare time.

7. What do you think about the isocket dogs? Have you gotten used to them yet?

Dogs are part of isocket culture. Having them around makes all of the hard work here more relaxed and it also makes the office feel more like home. More importantly, dogs were born to be our companions and help us have fun and that’s just what the dogs here do.

A couple of weeks ago, hot on the heels of the trolololo meme, Al realized that listening to the song while he was working actually increased his productivity exponentially. Of course, he didn’t want everyone to know about his secret to achieving his incredible increase in Internet working capacity, so we were forced to record him when he wasn’t paying attention.

Here’s the video that we ended up getting of him giving away his secret — feel free to use this method yourself, just be ready to never get this song out of your head. Never.

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!

Any founder of a newly-funded startup will tell you that it’s always a good idea to save as much money as possible when you’re building out your product. However, sometimes trying to save a buck can go from economical to borderline fanatical, which is what has happened with one of our founders, Zak. I know that he has nothing but good intentions as far as trying to stretch a dollar as far as he possibly can, but in this particular situation he might have crossed the line over to crazy. But don’t take my word for it, read his story below and feel free to come up with your own thoughts and opinions.

Zak vs. The Printer
We have an average laser printer that you would find in most offices, which means that the printer, when bought new, comes with a ‘starter cartridge’ that’s filled with like 30% of the amount of toner that is found in a normal, brand-new, off-the-shelf (and fairly expensive) cartridge. I’m not sure who came with this jank idea, but for some reason it’s become standard practice throughout the printing marketplace.

If it had been up to the printer gods, our toner cartridge would have needed to be replaced like 2 months ago when we first got the standard “LOW TONER WARNING” that displayed proudly on our printer’s LED screen. But, thanks to Zak’s ingenuity and deep-rooted hatred of the ridiculous premium that we all are forced to pay for new toner, he used his MacGyver-like skills and figured out a way to trick the printer into pretty much using up every single drop of the toner that was left in the starter cartridge. I must say that this was pretty impressive, but even his electronic trickery couldn’t make it last forever and today was the day that the printer officially screamed out “No more!”. The time Zak dreaded most had finally arrived. It was time to change the toner cartridge.

Zak Gives In
Even after the printer gave off an error that literally read “Toner Life End” (as seen in the image at the beginning of this post), Zak still had to give the starter cartridge a few more shakes just to make sure that we weren’t wasting anything. You could see the defeat in his eyes as he finally realized that he’d been beat. I swear that he got a little teary-eyed as he started to reluctantly rip open the silver packaging that contained the brand-new toner cartridge. “You’ve won the battle”, he thought to himself, “but you’re not going to win the war.”

As Zak shut the toner’s access door and the papers started printing out again I began to think that it was only going to be a matter of time before I saw this scene unfold again. However, if Zak has anything to do with it, it’s probably going to be a while.

Looks like you’ve won this time, printer.

After moving into our new office space we quickly noticed that there just weren”t enough whiteboards to go around. When you pair up all of the ideas that are popping into our heads with the fact that we now have 50+ feet of wall space (on just one wall), it only made sense for us to find a quick, easy and hopefully cheap solution to cure our whiteboard woes.

To solve this problem we first took a look at buying really nice whiteboards that would last forever and that were so beautiful and pristine they looked like they belonged in some type of art-deco museum in Paris. I think that they were actually magnetic and made out of porcelain. Yeah, crazy stuff. This route would have cost us several thousand dollars, which basically blasted us right out of our acceptable budget.

After we ditched that over-priced idea (we are a start-up, you know) we decided to take a more economical route which consisted of us buying several sheets of white shower board and a bunch of brackets from Lowes near Burlingame. This option was MUCH cheaper (only $11/ 4×8 sheet) and even though we will probably have to replace them in a few months it’s still better than biting off a huge chunk of change for the other, fancier option.

Check out the video below or over here on YouTube to see some sweet of the sweet whiteboard action and keep your eyes open for cameos made by Boomer (the dog) and our cleaning crew (it was getting late).