This week we feature, Michael Piddock Founder and CEO of Glisser. Glisser provides interactive presentation software that pushes slides to audience devices and integrates voting, questions, and feedback.

In this interview, you can read more about his work at Glisser, favorite marketing tools, productivity tips as well as his advice for budding marketers.

Your location: London, UK.

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Your favorite gadget: iPhone — I have to charge it twice a day though…

You start your day with: Another idea.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Inbox Zero: Delegate, Do or Delete.

Your top blogs you read daily: I don’t have any favorites, but read one or two that land in my social media feed.

“Momentum is really important — staying positive and keep pushing hard even when you have tough days.”

Describe an average day at Glisser?

As you’d expect at a startup no two days are the same. However, my day often involves conversations with clients to better understand the objectives of their events and how we can best support them, conversations with our development team to understand progress against our ever-growing roadmap, and conversations with the rest of the Glisser team to help guide their efforts. Overall, lots of tiny decisions, and a few big strategic decisions, to keep us on course for our ultimate goal.

As a startup founder, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

I often hear of people needing to dedicate time to focus on one activity, but I’m the complete opposite. I like to dip in and out of different things with small bursts of high intensity activity, switching regularly. It’s amazing how quickly you can knock out a blog post if you give yourself a really short time-frame to get it done.

As a person who is well-versed with online marketing/ inbound, I’m sure you rely on a few marketing tools to automate your efforts. What are the top 3–5 tools you use?

As team we use Streak for CRM, Mixpanel and Google Analytics for our data and automated email flow, TawkTo for webchat and Slack for all team communications — all effective tools with good free or low cost plans.

Your company has a growing community of users. How do you use this treasure trove of customer insight to power your marketing efforts?

Our users are always suggesting new ideas or refinements to the product, so our job is to prioritise them, and develop our software in that direction. By continuing to make the product better, we give ourselves a stronger platform from which to market. We also see the way our customers are using the product at their events, and this creates a huge library of great ideas which themselves are great marketing content for other potential customers.

What is your strategy for getting people to your site and then converting them to a customer?

We’re constantly testing lots of acquisition ideas and doubling down on the ones that work. At the same time we’re using more ‘traditional’ marketing approaches to build a trusted brand in our industry, generating word-of-mouth both on and offline. At our website, we try to keep things simple and encourage visitors to try the free product — we know the quality of what we’ve built is our strongest asset.

Is there any advice you’d like to give to budding startup marketers to help them work smart and stay productive?

Momentum is really important — staying positive and keep pushing hard even when you have tough days. Don’t be afraid of taking a break and going back to things afterwards with renewed energy.

A big thanks to Michael for taking the time out to answer these questions! If you haven’t already, we highly recommend that you check out Glisser.

The ‘How Marketers Stay Productive’ series asks marketers their tips & strategies for staying productive. Every week we’ll feature a new guest and the tricks that keep them working smart. Know someone you’d love to see featured? Email Us.