This week we feature Alan mortis CEO at Yack.net. Yack.net is a simple and flexible collaboration instant messaging service enabling all types of business conversations with integrated speech to text transcription.

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

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Your location: Newbury, United Kingdom.

Your favorite gadget: My favortie gadget is my Apple Watch because it tells me when ever anything happens and I never need to use cash in a shop.

You start your day with: Cup of tea and chat with the team.

Your favorite time-saving trick: Recording my calls on Yack.net.

Your top 3 blogs you read daily: https://www.theverge.com/, https://blog.usejournal.com/, https://techcrunch.com/

Describe an average day at Yack.net?

I always start the day with a cup of tea, catch up with my colleagues in Newbury and check my emails. Yack is a new product which we are still actively developing so we have a daily call over with the technical team in Rzeszow, Poland. We review progress with ongoing development tasks and discuss any bugs or failures that might have cropped up and. Next, I’ll also check new signups and marketing progress. We work very hard of perfecting the user experience and I’ll spend time with Venetia, my product manager and Antony, my designer working on the next idea. We are currently working on new features including screen sharing, recording and transcription of physical meetings and integration with phone calls.

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

My favorite productivity hack has to be using Yack.net for all my calls — both internal external. Yack.net records my calls and then automatically generates a transcription which I can view and search. The transcription makes it really easy for everyone on the call to locate the point in a call where a commitment was made or an action was agreed. I can use this to remember what I promised. I can also use it to remind other people about commitments they made during a verbal conversation.

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 MailChimp to contact our customers, Moz to monitor our SEO, Hotjar to track the user interaction with our website and Hootsuite and Talkwalker for social media.

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

Yack.net is a tool for talking, so our users are generally pretty vocal. We offer users one to one help with setup and monitor social media. We are planning to reach out more in the future to allow the user base to influence the features that we will be adding.

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

We are currently concentrating on optimising the customer experience as prospective customers arrive at our site, find out about the our unique call recording and transcription features. Once they have discovered what we offer, they can sign up for a free trial to test the product themselves. We offer new users a call to help them get started but we know that we need to do more work to improve the experience once they sign up and we are planning to produce a series of videos to guide a new user through the process of creating an organization, populating with co-workers, then making their first calls on Yack.net followed by viewing and searching the resulting transcription.

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

We started work on the Yack.net public website early in the development timeline but chose to keep the site private until we had finalised the product and were close to launch. With hindsight, I’d start publicising the site earlier in order to build interest.

How do you make use of your downtime? Any hobbies, out of work interests that rejuvenate you?

During the summer, I teach kids sailing at my local club. Its great to do something that doesn’t involve the internet!

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