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Comment by il | Hacker News Reader

I'm one of the founders of MixRank (we're in the YC S11 batch). If you guys have any questions you can post them here or send them to the email in my profile.

The part that TechCrunch left out was that the idea for MixRank started as an Offer HN post(remember those?) where 150 startups asked me for marketing advice: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1839163

I realized that I was giving the same basic suggestions over and over again, and wanted to productize and mass produce strategies for building successful paid traffic campaigns- which usually involves doing market research and figuring out what's currently working in the marketplace.

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With this and other keyword spy like tools I always wonder whether they are at any time likely to get blocked by google. Do you guys have any assurance from google that what you are doing is allowed?

Getting shut down by Google is always a possibility, but I think the chances of that happening are very remote.

Similar keyword tools for search have been operating at scale for years without any trouble.

I think the reason Google puts up with this is that they know that it's very hard for new advertisers to build successful PPC campaigns.

And, ultimately, the end result of people using our software is that they will build larger campaigns that run longer and end up spending more money on Google.

Yeah I use pretty much the same logic for my business, pretty much all through the API although we might have to scrape ad sense down the track, the stats reporting side at least depending on if the api is easier to use now or not.

Google can be counterintuitive with ad related stuff though, went to a great deal of trouble to support OAuth with adwords but as of yet are still missing report downloads which pretty much makes it useless for the vast majority of applications.

I guess when it's business against business, spending more money because of it is always a win for Google. They have shown more and more of late though they are prepared to put user experience before profit by banning low quality ads. I guess in terms of business against business it would take some major advertisers to oppose it before they went down the same kind of path.

How do we know you won't get AcquHired and shut down the service down like AdGrok?

Yes, I'm being snarky but all these talent acquisitions erode my trust that startups are in this for the long haul. Why give you my time or data if you won't be here in 9 months?

We're tackling a very large market, and have big long-term plans. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, it's a very small time investment to keep an eye on your competitors' advertising strategies-- even if you're not currently running ads it's invaluable to know what your competitors are doing.

How you manages scraping this much content from Google?. Which stack of development you use?

Good luck iL, I love the product and I'm one of those who received great advices from you, so I really wish you the best success for this. I have a question concerning facebook, and other ads network such as Microsoft's Ad Network, do you plan to support those as well? Any chance to see facebook allow this?

Congrats on the launch, Ilya. Never realized you were part of YC batch :)

How did you get started on building the actual product? Did you find a technical co-founder?

Yeah! I'll write a more in depth blog post about this, but the summary is that I learned to code well enough to build a rudimentary prototype. Then I met my cofounder Scott at a Hackers and Founders meetup, showed him the prototype, and, after a few meetings, he liked the idea enough to cofound this startup with me. Some time later we applied to YC and the rest is history.

Nicely done!

Following up - one thing I would love to see is the ability to drill down and see where the top performing ads were showing. That would utterly rock.

A friend of mine is working on something similar, and she actually pitched it at a Startup Weekend event in Baltimore. Sadly, the judges, I felt, didn't "get it", and missed the point in general.

If nothing else, you guys just completely validated her idea. Best of luck!

Heard of PPCBully, Google Cash Detective? They have been around for years and do the same for AdWords on search networks, scanning hundreds of thousands of ads a day.

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