“You don’t just submit an application and hope for the best. It needs to be an all out, multi-pronged and sustained assault,” says Eliot Hirsch, AdYapper’s CEO and one of its three co-founders. He and his team found out this week that they’d been accepted to TechStars NYC’s 2013 class and Hirsch insists it wasn’t luck that got them there. Of the 1,700 applicants this year, only 11 made the cut, which works out to an acceptance rate of 0.6 percent.

Getting his ad transparency startup through the door was no easy task and, in fact, Hirsch and his team were so aware of the probability of not making it that they prepared for that scenario. Having bootstrapped for more than a year before and recently closing a bridge round funded by some Chicago angels, TechStars, mentors, friends and family, the AdYapper guys were ready to keep doing it themselves, if it came to that.

After several years in the advertising industry, Hirsch (a UX designer) recognized the inefficiencies in terms of transparency, data and time—as well as the money lost as a result. He teamed up with Wojo Wietecha, now CTO, who previously founded Poland’s largest social network, then one of its largest ad networks. They were joined by SVP of Media Products Kal Patel, a former startup founder and senior executive at large brands. Hirsch describes Patel as “a light of positivity that never, ever goes out.”

Read more about AdYapper’s approach to getting into one of the country’s most competitive incubators, TechStars, by clicking here.

Related

• TechStars NYC 2013 Class (techstars.com)