Featured BizSpark Startup on Azure - YieldMetrics

Interview with Gabe Gottlieb, CEO of YieldMetrics.

Web site: https://www.yieldmetrics.com.

Tell us who you are and your role in the company :

I’m co-founder and CEO.  The fun thing about working at a startup is that I get to do many things each day.  For example yesterday I talked to some of our customers, worked on our website, and wrote and debugged some code.  Before starting YieldMetrics I worked at Microsoft where I spent my days running a development team on Windows Media Center.

What is your company’s mission?   

The digital advertising world today is full of inefficiencies and lack of information.  For example, many top websites don’t even know who all of the advertisers are on their site, and ad networks don’t know which sites are using which other networks.  YieldMetrics’ goal is to clear away that uncertainty and give our customers a full view into the digital advertising market.

In 140 characters or less, tell us what your company does:

YieldMetrics provides breakthrough analytics products to the online display advertising industry using our PathSource™ technology.

Tell us about your Azure based solution.

YieldMetrics AdRoutes™ is a powerful analytics tool that enables publishers, advertisers, ad networks, and advertising technology providers to optimize their operations and increase their sales by providing real-time, actionable insights.  We answer questions such as which advertisers are buying inventory and via what channels?  Where are advertising exchanges gaining share? How are publishers monetizing their inventory? And much more.

How is Azure implemented in your solution?

We use Azure in many layers of our product, from our data processing layer, to our crawling layer, to our webserving layer.

What were the Azure features that prompted you to decide to build on Azure?

Given my team’s history as Microsoft developers, Azure was a logical choice.  We also appreciate Azure’s PaaS layer so that we worry less about individual boxes and more about the service in general.

What specific value are you getting from BizSpark beyond the technology?

We have appreciated our access to Microsoft evangelists. Their ideas and insight have been helpful when we’ve hit problems or had trouble getting answers to specific questions.

What has been your biggest “aha” moment since founding your company?

I always assumed that companies in the ad space had all of the data that they needed available to them, but after actually working with many of them, I was really surprised at the lack of transparency and information available in the market.

What has been your lowest moment and how did you overcome it?

As a startup, it’s always hard to hear “no” because often you have personally worked very hard on the product that you’re trying to interest someone in.  I try to learn not only from the customers that we have, but the ones that we don’t have.  How can we provide a solution to their problems?  What does their not signing up teach us about the market?  That way, what seems like a negative event actually becomes something very positive that will help the company in the future.

What advice do you have for companies that are thinking about building in the cloud?

Make sure that you have monitoring systems in place for all of your cloud processes.  If something isn’t being monitored carefully, it will likely fail, and usually at the worst possible time!

What is the one thing that you would like readers to take away about your Azure app?

If you are a company in the digital advertising space, either a publisher, advertiser, ad tech provider, or ad network and you want to better understand the market and your competition, hop over to our website and shoot us a mail.  We’ve done a lot of work and thinking about these problems, and likely we can help you not only understand the market, but increase your sales.