Mobile app developers: Here's an API for user acquisition

CEO David Dundas calls it the “Stripe for mobile advertising.” That might be a little over the top, but the point is made: Decisive is trying to make the hardest problem in mobile development as simple as adding an API.

“Most app developers neglect app promotion because it seems like a black box,” Dundas says. “The API provides app developers with the building blocks to control one of the crucial drivers of their app’s success.”

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Decisive works by integrating multiple ad networks into one API — nothing necessarily new. But then it also offers a full stack of analytics showing developers what’s working or not, and who their best potential target users are. It’s also integrated with existing ad-tracking tools such as AdX, Kochava, and AppsFlyer.

The result, Dundas says, is quick campaign optimization, low and flexible spending budgets, and the ability to iterate marketing at the same pace as you iterate your app.

The company, which is backed by name investors such as Gary Vaynerchuk and is a 500 Startups alumnus, is young and small, having launched in April of this year. It’s currently serving a billion impressions a month (adtech is an extreme volume business, so yes, you have to have very large numbers to show significant scale).

But it’s an interesting idea, and Decisive has already signed up 2,500 advertisers while running 50,000 campaigns, so clearly a decent number of developers are kicking the tires.

Ad networks and exchanges on the platform include Twitter’s Mopub, Yahoo’s Flurry, Google, Millennial Media, AOL, Inmobi, Tapsense, and many others. In total, Dundas says, participating networks and exchanges enable access to over 100 billion impressions per month.

Still, there’s a long way to go before Decisive joins the likes of AdColony, NativeX, Fiksu, Chartboost, Flurry, each of which has user acquisition scope and scale similar to a YouTube or a Twitter.