This summary was created by viewer, Daniel Kuperman.

Insights from Interview with Dmitry Dragilev

About Dmitry Dragilev:

Dmitry Dragilev is the Marketing Lead at ZURB an interaction design firm which helps people design better products & services for people through consulting, their own products, tutorials, writing, training and events. Since 1998 ZURB has helped over 100 clients including: Facebook, eBay, Yahoo, NYSE, Zazzle, Playlist, Britney Spears among others.

1. Want to learn from someone or get them to help you out? Then first thing to do is to help them out, be proactive and offer something they need without asking for anything in return.

2. Get more traffic to your site or blog by writing blog posts for others.

3. How to get noticed: be an assistant to your favorite blogger (find out what problems he/she has and help out), this could be tipping off about a breaking story, pointing them to a great resource, etc.

4. Following from the last point, help them succeed and they will want to reward you.

5. Learn everything you can about the person or company you want to partner with (create a relationship with)

6. Develop the relationship over time, but don’t be pushy or ask for something. If you provide value, you will receive value back.

7. Expand your network, the more people you connect with the more opportunities you’ll have to talk about what you do but more importantly, the more opportunities you’ll have to learn about what other people are doing and learn from them.

8. Action item for today: make a list of people you want to connect to. Then learn what you can about them and find ways to help them.

9. Find people’s pain point, then try to solve their pain.

10. Improve your product by talking to your customers, add a personal touch instead of canned email templates.

11. Give something free to your users to demonstrate value and get them interested (e.g. Bounce is the free version of Notable)

12. Give customers “instant delight” when they use your product so that they will remember it.

13. Make it easy for people to spread the word about your product. Key thought: Why would people want to share it? Needs to be or do something really great. Also, take advantage of social media tools and give users a reason to share your app.

14. By helping others, you will end up learning how to improve your own product/service.