Meet The Product: How Was AdSwap Born?

It's been a month since AdSwap launched. 🚀 What kind of service is it?

• Hi, I'm Angie from Adrop. AdSwap is a free marketing solution where partner companies exchange ad inventory with each other. Members of the Adrop team have spent over 10 years in the mobile and web app business. We've personally lived through the kind of marketing struggle every startup knows — "Our service is great, but we have no marketing budget." AdSwap is the first solution that distills all of those marketing frustrations and our platform business know-how into one product. Through AdSwap, partner companies exchange ads with each other to reach a broader audience without spending any ad budget.

• Some of you may have done ad exchanges (a.k.a. media barter) with founder friends before. But being close can actually make things awkward — like having to repeatedly check whether your partner is actually serving the agreed number of impressions, or having no neutral party to mediate when promised impressions aren't met.

• AdSwap, on the other hand, serves ads through our own ad delivery system and supports real-time monitoring. You get transparent daily updates on impression pacing and click performance. Plus, AdSwap keeps proposing new potential partners, so you don't need to spend separate time sourcing them.

How much does AdSwap cost?

• AdSwap is currently 100% free. There are two reasons.

• First, it's a Pay it forward decision. The Adrop team received a lot of help from many people as we built our company. Through what Adrop does best — technology — we want to contribute to a community that grows together by driving innovation in the startup ecosystem.

• The second reason is that we have separate paid services in the works. Adrop is preparing a SaaS-style self-serve ad platform that lets publishers of any size own their own ad platform. (Beta launch is planned for Q1 next year — please stay tuned for that one too!)

• Even if we do introduce a paid model to AdSwap down the road, we'll keep it at around 10% of what other paid advertising costs — so it stays a refreshingly cost-efficient ad solution. 🙂

What kinds of partners do you match?

• We match partners with similar potential-customer personas. Not competitors, but companies operating in the same market.

• It really helps when you share specific information about your target users — beyond age and gender, what kind of behavioral traits they have. The more we understand your service's unique user characteristics, the more smoothly we can match you with a partner that creates synergy.

• For example, one pet hospital discovery service explained that their main users are women in their 20s–30s, and that their target persona is very similar to the beauty industry's. The users consume a lot of content and love shopping. In that case, we wouldn't limit partner matches to the pet sector — we'd connect them with beauty and fashion partners popular with women in their 20s–30s, helping them expand reach to new audiences!

• I want to emphasize that the same category isn't always the best match. We once met two founders in the pet sector — one running a training app, the other a pet-care app. On paper, they seemed like a great fit since both target pet owners. But the actual difference was striking. The training app founder said their target users had time on their hands and a hands-on mindset toward training their pets. The pet-care app, on the other hand, mostly served people with busy schedules and frequent business travel. The pet-care app's better partner might actually be a utility app for busy professionals!

• In short, rather than just looking for partners in the same category, we help you find partners that consider your target users' characteristics and open up broader new reach. As many of you know, expanding target reach through paid ads usually means a marketing budget in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. But because AdSwap lets you reach for free, try expanding to new customers without worrying about budget!

How does the AdSwap process work?

• The only thing your developers need to do is install the ad delivery system (SDK or API). Everything after that is handled with communication support from Adrop. AdSwap partners just need to decide whether to proceed with a proposed partner, and send over the ad creatives. Ad setup, performance reporting, and the rest are all handled by the Adrop team.

• When we propose a partner, we also suggest campaign conditions like ad schedule and target impressions. Once you give us your feedback, we coordinate with the other partner and finalize the campaign conditions.

• Ad schedule is usually set within a month, but for your first AdSwap we recommend running it for under 2 weeks. We support the back-and-forth communication between both parties to align on the start date.

• Ad creative guidelines follow our default AdSwap banner guide, but partners with their own brand guidelines can pass them along so the other party creates the creative accordingly. Just keep in mind the production time and share the guidelines during the schedule coordination phase.

• Ad performance is available daily through a dedicated reporting page. Previous day's impression and click data is reported the next morning, with weekend and holiday data available the following business day. The final report — delivered within 7 business days of the campaign ending — also includes unique reach numbers.

What if you don't have a designer to create ad creatives?

• We've prepared default templates too. Just send us your brand assets and copy, and we'll support ad creative production on our end.

If you had to describe AdSwap's core value in keywords?

• #FreeTargetedReach #SafeAdvertising #GrowingTogether

It's been a month since AdSwap launched!

• Over the past month, we did our own cold outreach to recruit partners — but most of our partner companies have been spreading the word voluntarily, saying this is a service that needs to be shared. Some have even emailed startup associations on our behalf, or shared our deck in group chats of fellow portfolio companies from the same investor. Every time, I'm grateful for everyone joining us in building a grow-together community, and I get to feel that pride of knowing Adrop is providing a service the market really needs.

• To share some numbers — in the first month since launch, we secured 2M+ MAU in traffic. We're looking forward to spreading the word about what AdSwap offers to even more people, and building an ecosystem that grows together. We can't wait to make more meaningful connections through the value AdSwap delivers!

Angie's recipe

• Comfort snack 🍫: Chocoheim

• Soul food 🐙: Stir-fried baby octopus

• Song pick 🎧: "A Rose That Bloomed Between Buildings" — "Until this barren city blooms with beauty, AdSwap!"