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Interviews

How Marketers Stay Productive: Ivan Stepanovic of StayIn

April 30, 2019

This week we feature Ivan Stepanovic, CEO of StayIn. StayIn is a free app that will recommend a perfect movie for your mood. The idea was to create a fun, easy and fast app that will pick a perfect movie in less than 10 seconds

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

Your location: Belgrade.

Your favorite gadget: My phone. It is hard to imagine a day without it.

You start your day with: Changing the diapers :)

Your favorite time-saving trick:  Do things without looking back!

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: ProductHunt, Seth Godin. I tend to focus more on books than on blogs.

A picture of your workstation or the view outside your window if that inspires you.

Ivan's Office in Belgrade

Describe an average day at StayIn?

Our main goal is to keep everyone in the team well coordinated. At the moment - StayIn is based in Belgrade, Serbia but we also have people in Australia, Bosnia, and other Serbian cities. So, the most important part of the day is setting up well-defined goals for each member for the day.

Also, we tend to motivate each member of the team to question every decision that is being made. Since we are in a startup business we like bold statements and bold moves. Each member is more than welcome to set up a meeting during the day and challenge the rest of the team with new ideas.

As a CEO what are some of your favorite productivity hacks?

I keep changing them all the time :) I think it is really important to set a specific time to handle something and then stick to that timeline. For every small task I have I imagine a number of minutes in my head and try to reach it - it has become like a mind game for me :)

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?

At the moment we are only using organic growth of our app, so tools like Google Analytics, Google Trends, Search Console are the essence for our business. MailChimp and Hubspot as well.

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

We keep a close eye on our user's behavior and implement new features very carefully. Lean approach has a become a religion for us, so we make sure to run experiments to gain validated knowledge.

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

At the moment we are doing everything we can to promote our project organically. We believe the organic growth is not only good for the budget but also great for idea validation. So - blogs, reaching business partners, ProductHunt and delivering as much valuable content out there as we can.

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

Honestly, I enjoy changes, so I keep changing my routine all the time. There is no one magic formula or advice.
Only thing I can say is - each time you catch yourself you are not at the top of your game during the day, remember you have limited time in life to succeed. There is no time to waste on dumb discussions and irrelevant tasks!

How do teams at StayIn have fun at work/ make work fun?

It will sound scary - but we don't have fun at the moment! :) We only have one thing on our mind - make something awesome. I would say our idea of fun is discussing new ideas that will change the world.

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

Managing marketing projects shouldn’t be chaotic —Try Brightpod for free and start focusing on what matters.



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