A day in the life of… Nick Mason, CEO and founder of Turtl

Turtl is content creation software that lets marketers easily create interactive content such as reports and handbooks.

We caught up with Nick Mason, founder and CEO, to find out what skills he needs in his role and if he has any advice for new marketers.

Please describe your job: What do you do?

I am the CEO at Turtl, a digital-first content platform.

In my role, I am responsible for setting the direction of the business, evangelising about the product and company, and overall performance of the business. Luckily, I have people to help me with all of these things!

Whereabouts do you sit within the organisation? Who do you report to?

Technically, I report to the board and ultimately to our shareholders. But in practice I see myself as reporting to the various parts and people within the business who need information and context on a regular basis to keep pushing us in the right direction. Which is just as well, because that’s what I enjoy.

What kind of skills do you need to be effective in your role?

That presupposes that I am successful in my role!

So much of what I do concerns making sure people understand and buy in to what we’re trying to achieve, so being articulate and clear with communications is very important and a constant challenge.

Beyond that, I find the place where I can make the biggest difference is in coming up with ideas to move projects forwards, or in providing alternative viewpoints.

I still play a role in product development, and this is probably my favourite part of the role. I love going in to speak with customers and prospects, understanding their problems and challenges and coming up with possible solutions. This requires a combination of problem solving and creativity.

Other important skills revolve around understanding business performance at a high level, how we’re tracking and spotting opportunities.

What do you love about your job? What sucks?

I love the variety, the constant challenge and working with the exceptional team that we’ve managed to pull together.

I dislike leaving the house before 6am. And the large number of spreadsheets I seem to collect.

What kind of goals do you have? What are the most useful metrics and KPIs for measuring success?

For us, its very simple: we need to grow and retain customers who pay us on our subscription model.

In terms of metrics, we look at percentage growth year-on-year, cost of acquisition and the lifetime value of our customers in aggregate as these are the metrics that really track what we are achieving as a SaaS (Software as a Service) company.

Beyond this, looking at weighted pipeline and weighted pipeline growth helps us understand what we can expect to close in the coming months and how successfully we are building demand for the future.

Of course, I also look a lot at how our content is performing. How well we are converting readers into leads, and how we are doing at creating a high-quality digital buying journey is a measure at the core of the company.

What are your favourite tools to help you to get the job done?

Slack is great, as is Google Suite. We use Trello a lot and I’m a recent convert to Evernote.

And Turtl itself of course! The idea of going back to PowerPoint to do a presentation, or Illustrator / PDF for a piece of content is anathema to me. I was actually forced to use PowerPoint for something the other week and I cannot believe people still have to use that thing. Honestly.

How did you end up founding Turtl, and where might you go from here?

I started Turtl by foolishly writing a few lines of code to see if we could apply psychological principles to content and content marketing. And here we are five years later!

From here, I would love to see Turtl make a splash in the USA (work in progress) and go on to take its rightful place as the go-to software for marketers looking to achieve more with their content.

Which marketing or experience has impressed you lately?

I saw booking.com’s “Be a Booker” for the first time on a trip to the States last week and thought it was brilliant. In such a commoditised space, coming up with something like that which is inspirational and uniquely ownable by the brand is excellent. I’ve never booked a holiday in my life but I almost felt compelled. Almost!