1. Hello Alina, Thank you for giving us such a great opportunity to interview you. Could you please briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
Alina Clark is a highly experienced digital marketer, entrepreneur, tech enthusiast, and sustainability activist. I’m the Co-Founder and Growth Manager at CocoDoc. I believe that every investment should be done not only for financial goals but also in aim to help human lives be better.
Before getting into entrepreneurship, I worked in several digital marketing firms. To put it simply, I know all things digital marketing. However, I’m into organic SEO marketing. Beyond my job as a marketer, I’m also a fun, outgoing person who enjoys engaging with fellow marketers on how to make our businesses better.
2. Please share something about CocoDoc, when you started and what are your plans.
PDFs are among the most used document formats around the world. They’re simply everything. However, editing a PDF in its original, without needing to go through multiple copy and pastes is a real concern for document users. CocoDoc was created out of the realization that handling PDFs needed to be made easier. As such, we went out of our way to create an easy to use tool which allows the users to edit PDFs on the go, without losing the document format.
3. What challenges did you face initially?
Starting the business was the first challenge. Even though we had the idea nailed down, getting the right team to work on the product was a challenging, and exhilarating experience at the same time. Most people simply didn’t understand our vision, or how we wanted our tools developed. It took us a while to get the right time in place.
Moreover, the fact that the business exists online portends another challenge. There is a lot of competition in the SEO world. As such, building a business that depends on SEO rather than going all out on Google Ads and other marketing strategies means that we took longer to grow.
The COVID-19 pandemic was also a huge challenge to our business. We had to change the approach to marketing, and how we interact with clients in order to make the tools we have better for the customers. This required finances, which were tight during the period. Besides, the fact that we had to work remotely means that our productivity levels received a slight jolt in the beginning.
Fortunately, all the challenges in our way have been lessons for us. We’ve learned how to manage and run the business better. We’ve learned how to convert and keep customers for longer, and how to create tools which will actually help our customers. The challenges, in some way, became catalysts to the business.
4. What makes your product better than your competitors?
First, CocoDoc is a cloud-based software solution. As such, one can access the tool from any device, and from anywhere.
The variety of usage options on CocoDoc are also special to use. One can unlock a PDF, merge or compress, replace texts, insert timestamps or even instantly share the PDF from the same platform. We have also invested a lot in ensuring that our software is secure and that our users handle their documents with utmost privacy. This is why we have password security as a primary tenet of our file protection system.
Our e-sign feature is our main edge over other document tool providers. Our tool allows the users to sign on to the pdf directly. This reduces the need to use other digital signing costs, and to rack up usage costs too!
5. As we all know that every company’s target is to make their customers/clients happy. According to you what are the best ways to improve Customer Experience and improve Customer retention?
Customer experience highly depends on optimal interactions between the customer and the business, at all points of the transaction process. One needs to look at the customer-business interaction in wholesome- from one end to the other.
At CocoDoc, we believe that creating a personal connection between us and the customer is the most important part of the customer experience journey. Treating each customer as a person with needs works better than treating them as mere numbers on the analytics board. We build such relationships through consistent engagement with the customers and using live-chat tools to see our customer feedback in real-time.
Also, customer experience often comes down to what customers have to say about your business. Apart from engaging with the customers, we have also tried our best to ensure that customer issues are resolved. Our average churn times for typical customer issues stand at 4 minutes today. The inclusion of AI through chatbots in our customer experience systems makes the system even better.
6. How do you manage to balance your work and personal life?
I’m currently working from home. Even though remote work is great from a working perspective, it doesn’t work well with a work-life balance. Extricating your work from your personal life is hard if both exist in the same environment. However, I try as much as I can to stick to scheduled work hours in order to leave some time for my personal life. I use numerous scheduling tools for this.
On the side, I also ensure that work issues don’t creep into my personal time. This means that everyone knows my hours. I don’t pick work-related calls in my off hours unless it’s an emergency. I also don’t handle work-related emails during my off-hours.
7. What motivates and inspires you. Would you like to name a personality that you follow and has been your role model?
My main motivation in business is to make life easier for everybody. I have to say that I also draw a lot of motivation from the simple fact that working in the tech field as a woman is a challenge.
In terms of mentors, I’d say that I admire Richard Branson, for his business acumen. He’s the best definition of a serial investor if there ever existed something of the sort.
8. One piece of advice that you would like to give to those who aspires to become an entrepreneur.
Start as soon as you can. Don’t wait for the right time, because there’s never a right time or wrong time to start a business.
A business plan is also a crucial part of entrepreneurship. Develop one as soon as possible. It will guide you through the challenges, and show you whether the business idea is valuable. While developing a business plan, you should also be willing to change the business plan at some point. Be flexible. A rigid approach to entrepreneurship will take your business the Kodak way.
Finally, entrepreneurship is risky. You might make mistakes, but you should always be ready for the mistakes. Your earlier mistakes will teach you valuable lessons in the future.
It was such a pleasure talking to you and thanks for giving us your time. Requesting to Dailyscrawl readers please do follow Alina Clark on LinkedIn and Twitter.
