Emanuel Cinca

Emanuel Cinca is a former poker player turned marketer and entrepreneur. Originally from Romania, he now lives in the city with the highest quality of life, aka Vienna, Austria, together with his wife and his 6-month-old puppy.

Emanuel is the founder of Stacked Marketer, a daily newsletter read by over 60,000 of the world’s top marketers from companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, Snap, Klaviyo, Semrush, HubSpot, and more.

Since its inception 5.5 years ago, Stacked Marketer has evolved from a single newsletter into a multi-brand business:
– Stacked Marketer is where everything started, the free newsletter with news, insights, and actionable advice for digital marketers, delivered every Monday to Friday with over 60,000 readers.
– Psychology of Marketing is a free newsletter that every Thursday brings you one psychological effect and three examples of how you can use this in your marketing and business. Read by over 28,000 marketers.
– Tactics is a free newsletter read by over 7,000 marketers who want to get two actionable tactics they can implement into their business before the weekend ends. Delivered every Saturday.
– Stacked Marketer Pro, a paid educational library and community that delivers in-depth industry reports, guides, and courses by marketers, for marketers.

What is your typical day, and how do you make it productive?

To make my day productive, I mainly organize my to-dos. The main things are nothing extraordinary or unheard of but ensuring that I have a to-do list organized by priority, along with any meetings and appointments set in my calendar.

I split my day into 3 usually:

– Mornings are for checking any important emails that either need an answer or could be turned into a to-do for the day, checking newsletter scheduling is going as planned and dealing with any possible urgent things that could have come up overnight.
– Afternoons are usually for going through my to-dos.
– Evenings are sometimes for calls (I’m based in Europe and many of our partners are based in North America, so that’s a convenient time for calls), wrapping up and reprioritizing my to-do list.

How do you bring ideas to life?

I’m generally someone who can be a bit of a jack of all trades, so I’m quite hands-on with any initial idea.

I like to try things myself to understand the details of any new challenge, then put together a plan where there’s more collaboration happening.

I feel like I can do the MVP stage of most ideas faster when it’s just me involved, or there’s minimum involvement from others, and it’s a benefit of being a jack of all trades to some extent.

What’s one trend that excites you?

The progress of generative AI in 2023 has been very exciting to see. From no AI in our workflow in 2022, we now use it basically daily for certain tasks.

Sometimes it’s to make things faster, sometimes it’s to make things better.

Either way, it’s very helpful already and there are still things that are likely to improve in the near future.

It’s exciting to see how much businesses can become better with the help of AI.

What is one habit that helps you be productive?

Writing things down, and scheduling so my present self doesn’t have to worry about remembering things or prioritizing. I’m always thankful to my past self for planning things out.

What advice would you give your younger self?

Strike while the iron is hot. When something is going well, double down, invest in it, and reap maximum rewards.

In other words, if you get an opportunity, make sure you maximize it, because it’s unlikely it lasts forever.

Tell us something you believe almost nobody agrees with you.

Ad networks for newsletters are not a magical solution to monetization that so many people pitch them to be.

The strength of newsletter ads is the fact that they are highly customized and use the newsletter’s voice and persona.

Ad networks take this strength away and turn newsletter ads into rather generic ‘native ads’ that you already see all across the web.

What is the one thing you repeatedly do and recommend everyone else do?

Clean your email list.

People chase the vanity metric of ‘subscribers’ but what matters is real people with real intent.

People who don’t clean their email lists are lying to themselves and it will hurt them in the long run.

You only benefit from not doing this if you plan to lie to other people as well to make yourself seem more successful, which is the preferred approach by some ‘experts’ in the email and newsletter space.

When you feel overwhelmed or unfocused, what do you do?

Take a step back and rest. Sometimes that means taking a nap regardless of the hour of the day, sometimes that means a few days away but it’s always helpful to take a step back and relax.

That helps me reprioritize things and recharge to tackle what’s important.

What is one strategy that has helped you grow your business or advance in your career?

I don’t know if this could be called a strategy but generally being reliable, and doing my best to deliver on what was agreed is what I think helped me the most.

Especially in the marketing industry, there are a lot of over-the-top characters who over-promise, under-deliver, and generally unreliable.

I’ve tried my best to be transparent, reliable, and trustworthy, and I think that is something that pays dividends over the years, even though it takes time to prove these qualities.

What is one failure in your career, how did you overcome it, and what lessons did you take away from it?

I don’t know if this is something I would call a failure, but it was an important challenge that I had to overcome.

Back in 2015, the software development company we were running ran into team issues where one of the co-founders and key people wanted to make certain drastic changes that would make things unfeasible.

In the end, we decided it was best to part ways, and we had to pivot the company on the spot.

We had to scour through ideas, test things, and also had financial pressure because we had an empty office to pay for.

That pivot was going into affiliate marketing, and in the end, it worked out well but only by grinding 16 hours a day for a month or so to get profitable.

When looking at how others in that period wanted to get into the industry, they would do 1-2 hours a day of work, so I was doing 8x the work in a day, which meant in a few weeks I had tons more experience than the average newbie in the industry.

What is one business idea you’re willing to give away to our readers?

I’m a fan of newsletters in general. I think it’s never been easier to start a newsletter and turn it into a business.

So, I can share some ideas for newsletters that I think could become good businesses if they create an entertaining and witty writing persona, similar to what Morning Brew, The Hustle did, and what we do at Stacked Marketer.

1. WordPress-focused newsletter. News, trends, tips, and actionable advice for one of the most popular platforms out there.
2. Shopify-focused newsletter. Similar to WordPress but focused on the Shopify ecosystem. There are some out there but they end up going into the marketing side of things rather than focusing on the Shopify ecosystem of apps and services.
3. Dog training and care newsletter. The only one that is not B2B on my list of ideas but because there’s a strongly growing market of dog owners who are willing to pay to take good care of their pups.

In general, newsletters are a great way to connect with an audience. So, as long as you have expertise on a topic, you can consider a newsletter as part of your strategy.

Sometimes, the newsletter is the main business. Other times, a newsletter can support your other business.

But I’d recommend most readers to look into this possibility of starting a newsletter.

What is one piece of software that helps you be productive? How do you use it?

Google Keep. It’s where I keep my notes and my to-dos.

What is the best $100 you recently spent?

Long stainless steel shoehorn, something like this: https://euroleathers.com/wp-content/uploads/shoe_horn_chrome_59cm_V1.jpg

Way cheaper than $100 but saved me so much time, effort, and even some finger bruises.

It’s not something I bought recently but the quality of life increase for the money spent on it has been some of the best in my life.

Do you have a favorite book or podcast from which you’ve received much value?

The Social Animal by Elliot Aronson and High Output Management by Andrew Grove are two books I’d recommend to entrepreneurs.

The Social Animal is the one book on social psychology that covers almost everything other books cover, so rather than reading 3-4 other books, you just need to read the ‘original’.

High Output Management is a great book for when you reach the stage where you need to hire people and create systems within your business.

What’s a movie or series you recently enjoyed and why?

South Park. I enjoy their humorous takes on current events, where no ‘side’ is off limits from being part of the joke.

Key learnings:

• Building trust and being considered a reliable partner takes time but it’s a strategic advantage in the long term.
• Being a jack of all trades has benefits, especially when testing new ideas quickly. It can help you build that MVP quickly by yourself rather than relying on other people to bring your idea to life.
• Productivity doesn’t need special hacks. Just being organized, prioritizing your tasks in written form, and taking a rest when you need it goes a long way in terms of productivity.