This week we feature Cezar Floroiu, founder at Skillmeter. Skillmeter is a testing platform that is simple, fast and intuitive. You can create tests, assign them to your candidates and receive the results instantly. The tests can be timed, scored, with multiple choice or fill-in-the-blank answers.

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

Your location: Paris, France.

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Your favorite gadget: My iPhone.

You start your day with: A strong nespresso and sometimes a 5km run.

Your favorite time-saving trick: I try to set some time apart for reading emails instead of taking them as they come, as this is a massive source of distractions for me.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Not really blogs, but I do read sites like Techmeme, TechCrunch and Mashable almost on a daily basis.

“I rely on the word of mouth from our happy customers.”

Describe an average day at Skillmeter?

I am solopreneur so I need to split my time equally between marketing and development.

As a founder, what is your favorite productivity hack?

I try to stick to my well-defined plan which I build every Saturday for the coming week. The plan is super important to me for two reasons: to make sure that I don’t lose my focus during the day by getting distracted by various things, but also to track the progress I make.

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 tools you use?

MailChimp — email marketing service, Trello — for collaboration, planning, Google Analytics — for analyzing my site’s traffic.

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

Maybe not that efficient as I’d like to. The only thing that I’m interested right now is from where my customers are coming. I don’t care much about the conversion rate or what kind of tweaks I can do on the site to convert them better because I know that fundamentally this is not what matters. What matters is to know which your best acquisition channel is but also to offer a great product/service.

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

I currently experiment advertising on several channels: Google Adwords for search, Twitter ads, Facebook ads and LinkedIn Ads. Apart from this, I rely on the word of mouth from our happy customers.

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

What works for me is to break the high level vision/dream into smaller pieces with concrete goals & objectives. It’s really hard to go from 0 to 1 000 000 all the way but it is easier to go from 0 to 100 and then from 101 to 1 000 and so on. It took me a lot of time to figure this “triviality” but my life (my mood, productivity) has completely changed since them.

Another advice is to have patience. You can read a lot of success stories about founders that released a product and in 6 month it became a hit with sales in excess of $1M. Don’t make this your goal — you are entering a marathon and not a sprint, so be (mentally and physically) prepared for a long course.

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

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