This week we feature Gurpreet Singh, Founder and CEO of Pixpa. Pixpa is an online portfolio website builder for professional photographers, artists, architects,bloggers and creative designers.

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

Your location: New Delhi, India.

‍

‍

Your favorite gadget: My Bose Soundlink.

You start your day with: Going through customer support tickets.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Kept office close to home. This one decision saves me a couple of hours daily as traffic in Delhi can be a nightmare.

Your top blogs you read daily: I don’t read blogs daily. I try and cut out on the noise and only access social media for work. Some of the blogs that I occasionally read are Signals Vs Noise, SaaStr, Hubspot

“Focus on users and not just traffic.”

Describe an average day at Pixpa?

I start my day at office by just getting into work. While the tech, support and marketing teams have a clear task-oriented roadmap, there is no set agenda that I follow. I juggle between different functions, supporting my team in whatever comes our way. Being involved in customer support is the closest to my heart, as that is where I get a real sense of how customers are using our products, the challenges they are facing and the solutions they expect. My job is to synthesize that information and translate it into our product evolution in the short, medium and long term. I focus on tasks that need a deeper attention like UI design or evolving the product roadmap later in the night.

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

Doing fewer things and doing them better with every iteration — I follow the 80–20 rule, that 80% impact comes from 20% of the actions. Its important to be able to identify and prioritise the actions that would result in the most impact.

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?

Intercom is huge for me. Our marketing team relies on Google Analytics, BuzzSumo and Ahrefs.

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

Our customers have been our best ambassadors and evangelists. We get a big chunk of our new users through customer referrals. We use Intercom to monitor, analyse and engage with customers. We focus on providing pro-active support and are continuously seeking feedback from our users.

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

As a bootstrapped company, acquiring traffic through paid CPC mediums has never been our priority. We focus our energy on mainly content and influencer marketing to reach out to our target audience. Getting the product written about by influencers has worked great for us. Our referral program has also been a key driver for getting new customers.

Being a DIY website builder product, providing really fast and effective support to our trial users is probably the most important factors that drives conversion for us. We provide 24x7 customer support and our average response time (resolution time in most cases) is 10 minutes. That is obviously backed by a great product and a comprehensive knowledge base.

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

Focus on users and not just traffic. I believe startup marketing is less about customer acquisition and more about customer engagement, conversion and retention. Startup marketers need to get involved with those processes and metrics, just focussing on generating new traffic may be futile.

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

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.