I woke up at 5.30am today, starting my day with the intention of having a better day than yesterday. I listen to a guided meditation by Dr. Joe Dispenza for 20 minutes before I sit at my home office and start writing the things that I’m grateful for on my gratitude journal. I’ve been doing this practice since 2014 and it has helped me a lot to keep myself to see the brighter light in life.

When I finally open my laptop, it’s to do a lot of reading. I read news and articles related to literature, entertainment, technology and marketing industry at Feedly, while eating 500gr of my assorted fruits. I also listen to conversations across social media in the keywords that I watch closely for Storial.co. I read some business and lifestyle magazines from Magzter to feel and empathize with our target market. If I get inspired and found new ideas, I’ll take down some notes at Google Keep to explore and expand later.

I am a check list person, so I start making my to-do list of the day on my paper notebook. I start checking emails that are mostly related to approving something (press releases, storyboards, campaign ideas, etc) and make connections with potential partners.

At 8.15am daily, I receive automatic email reports on the things that I want to measure like number of new registered users, active readers and writers, number of chapters written and bought, I cross-check the data with Google Analytics and our own admin dashboard. From the data, I check marketing effectiveness by channels, I find out that our organic traffic has grown 402% in the past 6 months, but I still think that we need to double that number. I’m sending email to remind our tech team to implement the SEO strategy I’ve sent them the day before to help us increase our organic growth. I can also have a sense of trend that’s happening in the platform that I can discuss with product team to develop better user experience and the editorial team to highlight the best contents for higher conversion.

I get ready to go to a morning meeting, 2 hours before it starts. I took shower and do my hair and makeup while listening to an Audiobook at Audible. The latest book that I listen to titled, ‘This Could be Our Future’, a book by Yancey Strickler, Co-Founder of Kickstarter. I like this book for it’s offering a concept to build a society that looks beyond money and toward maximizing the values that make life worth living. I took a cab and read a book on Kindle on the way, this time, it’s a spiritual book by a Russian quantum physicist, Vadim Zeland. I like to have a strong positive start in the morning with good books.

I arrived on time for the meeting, it went well, but because there’s a fire drill at the building of our meeting, I need to walk down the 5th floor emergency stairs in my high heels. Not so bad as an early cardio!

At the office, I had a meeting with my team, updating the status of current campaigns and review the success as well as planning for our next campaigns. We’re in the business of supporting our writers to get exposure to more readers. We believe that everyone should have a chance to express themselves in writing and be rewarded for the effort they make in creating their stories. Our Premium Chapters feature have enable writers to generate income from the otherwise idle stories. We have specific growth tactics to implement inside our website and also run test ads to check if the stories can connect with wider audiences.

We’re having lunch with our investor reps slash mentor. We’re updating him our 3x growth of revenue this month, our partnerships line ups and our plans for 2020. As a good mentor as he always been, he never throw us any compliments, just an ‘almost compliments’ like, “Not bad, la!”

I am recruiting a new leader in my team, and I need to do some interviews. I am looking for someone who has analytical thinking as well as creative mind to help me out. We have strong candidates and just need to discuss with my CEO to decide the next step.

We’re perfecting our email distributions and I have approved the new email flow to maintain our users. I’ve discussed with my content team to write the most compelling messages in the emails that can inspire users to click and get back to Storial.co.

At 3pm, we had a call with a foreign investor to pitch to them. Most of the time, we get great feedback of what the industry needs and expects from us. My CEO and I usually can take 1 or 2 initiatives executed after these calls.

I got an email saying that our proposal has been approved and Storial AudioStory will be played in a cafe chain at their selected spaces all over Indonesia. I feel excited at the possibility of having more young Indonesian fall in love with local stories through this AudioStory.

In the afternoon, I go to the gym using the brand new MRT. I enjoy my time pondering while walking at Jakarta’s sidewalks and grateful for new developments in Jakarta. Strolling in front of Indonesia Stock Exchange, I saw a big bright screen with stock prices and imagine Storial to go public and going to be on the screen as well. At the gym, I do yoga, cardio or some lifts to shape up. While I’m on the treadmill, I continue listening to my Audiobook and make a little progress, as I never run more than 10 minutes.

I’m into supporting a cause related to youth, women and refugees in Indonesia. I visited refugees learning centers in Jakarta to see how can I help more in their facility. Refugees in Indonesia can’t work and can’t go to school. They need more volunteers to teach refugees kids some Math, English, Bahasa Indonesia and basic skill to use computer.

At night, I hang out for dinner with my best friends who are mostly entrepreneurs. Our conversation topics would be around fundraising, growth strategy, reaching KPIs, managing team, juggling personal life and staying sane in the process.

I try my best to sleep around 10.30pm, while reevaluating my day, what and how I can do better that day, I listen to any random guided meditation on Youtube and fell asleep.

I guess, a day in life of a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) sounds like a normal day in life of another person, it’s just sprinkled with tons of empathy, curiosity, patience, Excel sheets, PowerPoint presentations, a mess of data on her plate. Bon Appétit!