This week we feature, Nugeen Aftab, COO at Hatchli. Hatchli is a crowdsourced feedback platform that helps to quickly validate ideas.

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

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Your location: Cincinnati, OH.

Your favorite gadget: My AudioTechnica M50X heaphones.

You start your day with: A cup of coffee and a glass of water.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Python for automation.

Your top blogs you read daily: Violeta Nedkova, StoryNeedle, and KISSMetrics blog.

“Automate everything.”

Describe an average day at Hatchli?

We’re a pretty small team, and we’re in our early days, so the work we do changes day-to-day. We get in around 9 AM, might have a couple meetings sprinkled throughout the day. The first thing I do is get emails out of the way. That includes replying to messages, as well as any outreach that I’m doing. Once that is done, I’m free to focus on engagement, content creation, user testing, or whatever else might be on the docket for the day. We’ll take breaks for lunch, dinner, and the gym, but end of finishing up for the day around bedtime.

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

Automate everything. No, seriously. Hatchli has a very tech-savvy team, so we try to automate everything we can with Python. The emails that users get when signing up to analyzing data. The more efficient we can be, the quicker we can move. Tech is a world that emphasizes timing, so we make sure we’re moving quick enough to be in the right place at the right time.

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 per my responses, automation is my best friend. It’s the biggest stress-reliever and time-saver. It lets me be four people at once.

MixMax: This is a lifesaver. Being able to sequence messages to big email lists, the follow-up emails that come with those, schedule emails (so I can write them at night when I can’t send), and track when people are opening and clicking through emails — these are all incredibly useful for A/B testing copy and audiences.

Hootsuite: Social can be really difficult and a time suck, so using Hootsuite to make sure that we’re sending out content every day that is relevant is big.

Python: Anything we can’t do through MixMax and Hootsuite, we can do through Python. It’s a really flexible language, and there are some awesome courses that can teach you quickly how to utilize it for business purposes.

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

Analytics are so important. Marketing is such a soft skill, and data is really important to understand what’s working and what’s not. Marketing is about more than just user acquisition; it’s about keeping users around. We take a look at the user growth data, see who is sticking around, and figure out how to engage them even further. Analyzing data has been really important for us to figure out what our consumers want.

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

We’re trying to create Hatchli to be as great of a product it possibly can be. By doing that, people naturally want to show their friends, and that creates virality. We’re constantly working on analyzing what our data is telling us, making our product better, and getting people that have passed the threshold of engaged and super engaged to want to tell their friends.

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

It’s easy to get sidetracked with all of the work and various demands that come with the nebulous title of being a “marketer.” Make sure you prioritize what’s the most important. Divide up your day based off of percentage of your time that you should be working on an area (ex: engagement, content, social, PR, meetings) and prioritize within those categories.

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

Managing marketing projects shouldn’t be chaotic — Try Brightpod for free and start focusing on what matters.