This week we feature, Jake Wetton, Founder of FreeStack. FreeStack is a collection of Free Design Tools & Resources for Graphic Designers.

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

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Your location: Leamington Spa, Warwickshire.

Your favorite gadget: iPhone 6S+ & Workflow.

You start your day with: Catchup on News/Analytics.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Automated Services like Zapier/IFTTT.

Your top blogs you read daily: WarksDesign , Producthunt , DesignerNews.

“We’ve made it super easy for the young startups to find tools and resources to help save them time and money.”

Describe an average day at FreeStack?

Starts with a standard scroll through the latest news/products along with a quick check to see if the site is still alive, yep all good. From there I go about my daily job as a Graphic Designer for a Warwickshire local design studio Ghost Design. FreeStack was a side project of mine simply to collect all my favorite resources/websites together so it’s easier for me to get to rather than just bookmarking certain links. When it comes to working on the site I would dedicate my lunch hour and a couple hours in the evening to update the sites resources and push the content onto a couple of social media sites.

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

Good old fashion lists, but not on paper as you loose them easily! Write a to do every morning of what you want to get done. The satisfaction of physically ticking things off steps up the motivation to do more and before you know it you’re all caught up.

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?

I’m lazy and happy to say, it’s made life a lot easier by finding simpler and quicker ways to do things, we have everything automated using IFTTT & Zapier when we want to send posts or blogs out, not to mention thanking new visitors and followers, this is very important, you’re never too big to not thank your followers, if they’ve given time out to come and appreciate your efforts then you need to give that time back. We use KuKu for scheduling posts and blogs to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and Instagram which is backed up for the next 3 months, this makes it nicer when adding off the fly tweets on the go. It’s definitely worth spending a couple of hours on a down day with a beer just scheduling posts for the next couple of months. Hotjar is another website we use to monitor the traffic, we can add simple polls to gain insight or check a heatmap and watch through videos of real users using the website, we’ve done a couple 24hour long polls which have given us valuable information to improve FreeStack for the future.

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

At the end of the day we’re a website that users will come and use a couple of times then bugger off onto something new, we have an attention span of about 40 seconds and at the rate these collection and resource sites are coming up at nowerdays we really need to step up our game and offer something new. Whilst we have the amount of visitors to the site we’re asking them what they would like to see and how they want to see it, we have a submit button on our website that allows users to submit a resource which gives us nice analytics on favourite categories so we can solely work on particular aspects.

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

At the moment we’re still working from ProductHunt Visitors which has been great but not direct designer related. We plan to add social marketing and guest blog posts to creative art magazines/online websites. Linked with our next build which will be a chrome extension we will push more aggresively when we are happy that designers can come to the site once and instead of ‘bookmarking’ the page, they can download the extension to constantly use the site when they see fit.

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

Checkout FreeStack’s productivity Collection! We’ve made it super easy for the young startups to find tools and resources to help save them time and money. Off the bat I would say get a plan in order and automate as much as possible. Time and exposure is a lot more important than money, save time using automated services like Zapier or IFTTT to better manage your time more efficiently to work on more pressing aspects of the build.

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

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.