This week we feature, Ed Moyse Founder of Hey Press. Hey Press is a search engine for startup journalists. You search for a keyword, then they scour the net to find the most relevant journalists.

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

Your location: Always moving.

‍

‍

Your favorite gadget: The Roost Stand (lightweight laptop stand — perfect for digital nomads).

You start your day with: Skyping my Co-Founder Harry.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Build less stuff. Most people ship products too slowly and have to make time-consuming changes, or spend a lot of time building features that aren’t needed or creating a beautiful design nobody cares about. We ship stuff fast, and improve only after we know what’s needed.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: Buffer, Baremetrics, GrooveHQ

“ You can learn a lot more from talking to your customers directly instead of quantitatively trying to analyse their behaviour.”

Describe an average day at Hey.Press?

Hey Press is actually a side project of ours. When Harry and I started working together a year and a half ago, we aimed to build lots of products quickly, learn fast, and eventually find something that sticks. Hey Press was the first project we built together — it was incredibly popular among the startup community and solved a real problem that we faced (finding relevant journalists to contact). However, most of our users were startups and didn’t do PR on a regular enough basis to justify a subscription.

Being short on cash at the time and benefitting from our experience with Hey Press, we decided to build JournoRequests.com with the aim of making our first $1000. It was still a PR tool (helps you feature in stories journalists are writing) — but it was aimed predominantly at people who worked in PR full-time. We made it within a few months (you can read about it on Medium here: https://medium.com/we-want-to-reach-1000-per-month/july-1111-67-mo-we-did-it-7ea179fb6c6c#.4dj1ejc85), and now we employ a couple of people to help us.

Not long into JournoRequests, we built a sales tool that worked with LinkedIn — ProfileHopper.com. We didn’t expect anyone else to use it — we originally built it just for our own use, but as we began telling people about it we discovered there was a huge demand. We ended up releasing it as a separate tool, and to our surprise, it ended up growing drastically faster than JournoRequests, reaching $10k MRR within the space of just a few months. Long story short, LinkedIn sent us some legal threats and we decided to shut it down (they don’t tend to play nicely with developers).

We’re now working on our next project, ifnoreply.com, which will be a service for our Profile Hopper customers.

As you can see, we’ve built quite a few things. Mix in the fact we work while travelling the world as digital nomads, and there really is no average day for us.

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

My productivity hack is boringly simple. I work in 1-hour chunks with 5-minute breaks. At the start of each hour I choose “to-do” items I want to achieve, and aim to get them all in the “done” list before the hour is up. Rinse and repeat.

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?

Funny you ask, but we built a custom piece of software for JournoRequests which would send new sign-ups welcome emails, follow up with them a few days later to see how they’re getting on, and again at the end of their free trial if they haven’t replied. It hugely increased our interaction with customers, and was responsible for driving a lot of growth. We’ll soon be releasing this software at ifnoreply.com, so keep an eye out for it.

Shameless plug aside, these are my favourite tools from other companies:

1. Ghost.org (it doesn’t automate our marketing efforts, but it saves a huge amount of time setting up a publishing platform).2. Email Hunter (find anybody’s email address from their name and domain name).3. Sendgrid (beautiful API to send emails to customers).4. Intercom (it does a lot more than chat, but we predominantly use it to send chat messages to customers when they hit particular pages of our website).

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

In the early days, I think you can learn a lot more from talking to your customers directly instead of quantitatively trying to analyse their behaviour. I spend most of my day talking to our customers by email or over the phone — and we use their feedback to build new features, which makes them happy, which drives our growth!

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

We give them a free trial with no credit card required, and offer them a heavy discount if they subscribe in the first few days. You can read more about it here: http://blog.profilehopper.com/equal-opportunity-pricing-why-we-offer-heavy-discounts-but-dont-negotiate/

In my experience, when people first sign up to your product or service they’re mentally prepared to try it out and decide whether to purchase or not. However, in the back of their mind they’ll be thinking that they don’t have to make the decision now, and they could postpone until they have more information or their business is in a better position to use your service, or whatever reason — it’s tempting to procrastinate. Inevitably other tasks interfere and trying out your product or service gets shunted down their priority list. By offering a time-sensitive and heavy discount, they will prioritise trying your service right away and attaining the info they need to make a decision to buy or not.

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

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.