Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey (Part 2)

Sramana: You started developing software for real estate during the real estate boom. How did you handle the crash that came shortly afterward?

John Ramey: We knew that the real estate market was going to tank coming into 2008 and had decided to start developing software to address the problem of finding and buying premium advertising.

Sramana: How did you know the market was going to tank?

John Ramey: The fundamentals were not correct. When a market is being overinflated based on speculation, crashes happen. When you look at the stock market before the crash, you will see that people were leveraging their debt 35 to 1. You can just look at the fundamentals and know that it was headed for a crash. We divested all of our hard assets. We sold off our last property in 2007. I feel bad for the people who pulled those properties from us because they must have gotten hit hard later.

Sramana: Were you transacting in real estate?

John Ramey: Yes. In addition to the tools we gave to other people, we ate our own dog food. We were the only group doing those foreclosures and flipping in our town.

Sramana: Tell me a bit more about what was going on in your head that led to isocket?

John Ramey: Part of the process we worked on in our real estate business involved traditional marketing such as direct mail to homeowners. It just highlighted how difficult the marketing process was. I had dealt with digital marketing with my prior company as well. I became fixated on the problem of the inefficiencies that exist in marketing and I deeply wanted to solve that problem.

I did not drop out of school right away; rather, I let the idea germinate a while. TechCrunch had their first TechCrunch20 conference. On a lark, we submitted an application. We did not even have a prototype. We submitted the equivalent of a napkin sketch. To my surprise, it was picked as a semifinalist. My concept was on that list, which was the first legitimate validation outside of Indiana that I had.

I also had other validation points come in. For example, the CMO from General Motors heard about what we were working on who felt there was a market for our product. Combined with the timing, I felt that the window of opportunity for isocket was open. That is when I dropped out of school.

Sramana: At that point, what had you identified? What did your napkin sketch contain that got so much attention?

John Ramey: I was coming out of real estate, so in some ways I had equivalent to the MLS in real estate. I was thinking of an MLS for any kind of ad inventory. Why was there not an infrastructure where anyone who had ad inventory could list it for buyers to purchase? I was interested in the technology that would sit in the middle to enable those transactions which could help eliminate the one-to-one manual permutations that existed.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Helping Publishers Monetize Premium Ad Inventory: isocket CEO John Ramey
1 2 3 4 5 6 7