This week we feature Patrick Dodd, President at Blinksale. Blinksale is a web platform and application that allows users to send invoices.

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

Your location: San Diego, California

Your favorite gadget: iOS devices

You start your day with: A shower and a trip to Bay Park Coffee.

Your favorite time-saving trick: FancyHands: has saved me days worth of time on tasks (calls to insurance companies, doing the busy work I don’t have time to do)

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: I love: http://kottke.org/, http://sethgodin.typepad.com/, & https://signalvnoise.com/

“Without our users, we are nothing.”

Describe an average day at Blinksale?

I think that internet company = company which probably doesn’t have an average day. :) Average days for Blinksale are a little harder to pin down. We’re focused on hitting goals and growing our user base, but what we do to achieve those benchmarks changes daily. Right now, I’m working on getting a great content marketing company spun up on Blinksale.

As a founder, what is your favorite productivity hack?

For me, my workflow greatly benefits from staying organized in Evernote + Things. Integrating the two of them with emails and workflow makes me feel like I have (almost) total control on everything that comes through my inbox. Things also serves as my weekly checklist: it incorporates work things, personal things, and everything else. Also, I need to get out at least once every day either to run while listening to an audiobook or to surf. That helps me unwind and disconnect for a bit.

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 tools you use?

- Google Docs & Basecamp are the places where progress is really started.- Customer.io has been a new email marketing tool we have really enjoyed getting to know recently, and will import our lead nurturing into that platform soon.- Buffer has been a huge help in the social media spectrum. We were using another tool until recently, and just made the switch. I’ve been well-pleased.

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

We ask for feedback from every user we interact with it. We also ask them to tell their friends about Blinksale! Without our users, we are nothing. We have found that they are usually ready and willing to help if we simply ask.

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

We haven’t actually done a ton of marketing recently. We have some marketing plans that kicked off a few weeks ago, but really we just have a great word-of-mouth reputation and it has been encouraging to see steady traffic. However, at the end of the day we just have to offer a great product that keeps invoicing really simple. That’s what keeps our user base.

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

Nobody said it was easy, so don’t expect it to be easy. It’s easy to look at all of the awesome things on the internet and feel like what you are doing is not enough. Truth is, it’s probably not, but you have to be creative in how you approach the game. Just keep your head up, keep working hard, and be kind.

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

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.