This week we feature Peter Anderson, Founder of FrameFish. FrameFish is an eyewear shopping site with a sophisticated virtual try-on system. The site brings together glasses from all over the web, so that shoppers can search, compare, and try them on, all in one place.

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

Your location: Sydney, Australia.

Your favorite gadget: 1969 Honda CB750K0 motorbike.

You start your day with: Pre-dawn rowing session.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Taking phone calls in the shower.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Coding Horror, Joel on Software and Gabriel Weinberg’s blog.

“The b2b side of the business is different, because it is extremely targeted.”

Describe an average day at FrameFish?

At the moment we are working really hard to take improve our virtual try-on product, using the knowledge we’ve gained from user feedback and behaviour. Because I’m an engineer and a marketer, my days are really varied. I can be recording a video or talking to our b2b clients in the morning, then coding or managing offshore developers in the evening. I love the variety but I prefer to spend at least an hour or two on any task… for me, switching tasks too often is a productivity killer.

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

I like to use PivotalTracker, it’s a great agile project management tool that’s also handy for just keeping a team ‘to-do’ list organised. I’ve been experimenting with the Pomodoro technique for managing my time, it’s a fantastic discipline if you find yourself checking emails too often, or if you just need to get out of a productivity ‘rut’. I’m also into the whole standing desk craze… but I do find that I have to sit down to really think deeply about something.

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?

We use MailChimp for mailing list management, and we are active on Facebook and Twitter, but overall we are not that sophisticated yet. However, we are pretty familiar with the web analytics offerings — our virtual try-on website plugin integrates with Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, Mixpanel and Segment.io.

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

It’s early days, but we have some interesting opportunities. For example, our virtual try-on software understands the shape of a users face. Using that data, we might be able to learn how a user’s face shape (e.g. oval, square, round, heart-shaped etc) influences their choice of frames, and use that knowledge to give better recommendations. Having said that, we are very sensitive to user privacy issues. We do not collect or store webcam images unless users are logged in.

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

We really have two strategies, a consumer strategy for our eyewear comparison site, and a b2b strategy for our virtual try-on website plugin. The consumer strategy hinges on building sharing into the user journey, by trying to harness people’s natural desire to try stuff on and get feedback on how they look. Currently the sharing options on FrameFish are fairly basic, but we will be experimenting with some new developments like social polling in the near future. The b2b side of the business is different, because it is extremely targeted. We focus only on online eyewear retailers, and use some paid search, as well as LinkedIn Inmails and other outbound methods to get noticed. Over time we think that the two sides of the business can really reinforce each other. Having said that, our marketing is currently not nearly as sophisticated as some of your other interviewees. Our content creation strategy needs attention!

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

Get help! In the form of mentors, that is. I’ve been very fortunate because some really smart, experienced people in the Sydney startup scene have given me a little bit of their time, every now and again. So make sure you seek out opportunities to access people that are more experienced than you. Even meeting with a mentor for an hour a few times a year can give you a fresh perspective. You don’t need to agree with them or even take their advice, but you will always learn something.

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

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.