This week we feature Alen Worsoff, CTO at SelfDecode. SelfDecode is a personalized health report service, which enables users to obtain detailed information and reports based on their genome

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

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Your location: LA.

Your favorite gadget: Iphone.

You start your day with: Nootropics.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Delete Facebook.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: neilpatel.com, tim.blog, mattermark.com

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Make a list of activities that can increase revenue, and then order them from best to worst, and do the top one.

Describe an average day at SelfDecode?

I usually wake up between 9am-11am. We’ve got three team members that live in a house together in southern LA. My two other team members wake up earlier at around 8am. I usually make a college breakfast and then head straight into a 30 minute meeting with our designer about everything he has done that day and I answer his questions. He lives in England so his day ends when mine begins. After that I respond to emails about things like investment, Press, recruiting etc. Then I jump into the project I am working on. We are currently building a private members area which I am coding myself, so that work will take me to lunch. I go to the kitchen and make something simple. I order all my groceries on amazon fresh so my fridge is always stocked and I don’t need to leave. Then I am back to work. There’s usually one point in the day where I need opinions from the team, so I’ll gather them in the garage or kitchen and have them voice opinions on some directions or options. We debate a lot because we try to have a “best idea wins” culture. At around 8pm we will sometimes accidentally meet up in the kitchen and chat informally.

As a Founder/Marketer, what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

Headphones: to cancel out ambient distractions.

A soft chair: Allows me to work for longer without getting tired.Nootropics: Galantamine and lions mane work for me.Delete Facebook: I changed my password to something I can’t remember and hid it, so in case of emergency it is retrievable but inconvenient enough that I’ll never do it for leisure.Mind Maps: Make a list of activities that can increase revenue, and then order them from best to worst, and do the top one.

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 buffer, convert kit, lead pages, and google analytics. We also roll our own marketing tools in house when off the shelf tools fail us. For example, we are building our own cross site tracking system, our own intercom.com clone, our own popup system, and survey system. One cool tool we made is an exit intent popup that shows an offer when the visitors mouse leaves the page, but whats unique is that we show the user a sequence of exit intent popups, so if they return tomorrow and we already asked for their email yesterday, we will ask for a Facebook like today. Of course we limit offers per day to not be annoying. We are actually going to release the exit intent sequence to the public for a small beta group (50 people) so if you want to be in the group you can go to http://sly.marketing.

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

We occasionally run surveys to learn about what our customers want and use this to inform the copy we use in landing pages and ads. Joe (CEO) has regular webinars using zoom and private consultations with our customers in order to learn about them where they submit questions, talk directly and learn together.

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

We make very comprehensive posts about relevant topics and post it for free on https://selfhacked.com and http://www.selfdecode.com. We have hundreds of thousands of indexed pages and our traffic keeps increasing over time. We focus on writing posts that the internet is lacking and also update posts regularly when new information is available, which seems to increase traffic as well.

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

When you are overwhelmed with options, ask yourself which 20% of the work will yield 80% of the results. For example, often a blog will have a few wildly popular pages. When a marketer wants to improve conversion of the site they should only do the most popular pages, instead of all of them. Also, focus on conversion rate optimization. A new marketer on a team can impress people by improving the conversion without having to invest in advertising budget and that makes you valuable from day one.

How do teams at SelfDecode have fun at work/ make work fun? OR Describe one fun activity you did recently that energized your team?

We have several small teams around the world. Our LA team went out to play volleyball on the beach the other day. The Ukrainian team leaves early on Fridays. We have a hiring strategy where we build out a team around a good leader, wherever in the world we happen to find one. That happened to be in a small town in Ukraine so we grew that office and we let the leader choose how the team has fun.

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

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.

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