20 questions with Berto Macario, founder of Gluuer

Gluuer is a small product with a very specific job. It was built in Australia around the idea that sharing something useful online, and getting to know the people who want it, shouldn't require a weekend of setup. Berto Macario, the design director behind it, has spent most of his career making complicated things feel easy for other people. We asked him 20 questions, most of them serious and a couple less so, to get the story behind the product in his own words.

1. Let's start with the obvious. What is Gluuer?

The shortest answer is that Gluuer turns a file or a URL into a shareable lead magnet in about ten seconds. You bring the resource, and we wrap a simple email gate around it. Once the person who wants it confirms their email address, they get access and the contact is saved in your account.

You skip building a landing page, and there's no form builder to set up either. It feels much closer to sending someone a link than launching a marketing campaign, which is exactly what I wanted.

2. Why did you build it?

Mostly out of irritation. Whenever I wanted to give something away online, making the actual resource was the easy bit. The painful part came afterward, when I had to put together a page, connect a form to an email tool, figure out how the file would be delivered and then test the whole chain to make sure nothing broke.

I kept spending more time on the plumbing than on the thing people actually wanted. At some point it felt silly to accept that as normal.

3. Was there one specific moment when it clicked?

There wasn't a single dramatic moment. It was more a quiet, repeated thought of "why am I doing this again?" I work in digital every day and I know these tools well. If someone with that background still finds the process tedious, I figured most people outside the industry must find it close to impossible, or they simply give up and paste a Google Drive link instead.

4. What did you do before Gluuer?

I've spent most of my career in design and creative direction, much of it inside advertising agencies and on digital products.

I'm Brazilian-Australian, and a big part of my job has always been taking something complicated and turning it into an experience people understand without needing a manual. Gluuer is really a continuation of that work, just pointed at a problem I personally had.

5. Is Gluuer an email marketing platform?

No, and I'm quite protective about that. If you need detailed segmentation or enterprise CRM workflows, there are excellent tools built for exactly that job, and Gluuer connects with several of them.

Gluuer handles the moment before all of that. Somebody wants something useful from you, and we make it easy to give it to them while remembering who they are. If you later want to move those contacts into Mailchimp, Klaviyo, HubSpot or Brevo, you can.

6. So is it a file-sharing tool?

Not quite. A normal file-sharing service gives you a link to a file, and once you've sent it, you have no idea who opened it. A Gluuer link does the same job while quietly building your audience, because every person who asks for the resource leaves a verified contact behind. That difference is basically the whole product.

7. Why verify emails?

Because without verification you end up with a list full of nonsense. People are clever, and if typing a fake address gets them the PDF, some of them will do it. That leaves the creator with a contact list that looks healthy but can't actually be reached.

When someone confirms their email before getting access, you know the address is real and that the person on the other end genuinely wanted what you made.

8. Why are you so fixated on "ten seconds"?

Speed is the point. Plenty of products can get you to the same result eventually, after enough configuration and a couple of tutorials. I wanted Gluuer to feel almost suspiciously quick. You add the file or paste the URL, give it a title, and you're holding a link you can share. If that ever starts taking minutes instead of seconds, we've lost something important.

9. Who did you build it for?

People who already know useful things and share them regularly. That includes designers, consultants, coaches, photographers, agency owners, founders and plenty of creators. What they have in common is that they give away helpful stuff all the time without realizing each of those moments could also be the start of a direct relationship with the person on the other side.

10. What counts as a lead magnet, in your view?

Almost anything genuinely useful. A PDF counts, and so does a template, a rate card, a private video, a Notion page, a slide deck or a small calculator someone built over a weekend. People tend to overcomplicate this. If someone would happily trade an email address to get it, it's a lead magnet.

11. What makes a bad lead magnet?

Usually it's something made only because a course or a guru said you need one. You can sense that right away. It's forty pages of general advice that nobody asked for, padded out to look substantial. I'd take a one-page checklist that saves me twenty minutes over that every time.

12. Where does AI fit into all of this?

AI makes producing useful resources much faster, and I think that's fantastic. I use it a lot myself. The flip side is that the internet is about to fill up with far more content and far more automated messages than we've ever had to deal with. When everything becomes easy to produce, the human part of the exchange starts to matter a lot more.

13. Is that why Gluuer doesn't push big email sequences?

Yes. I think we've gone a bit too far with automation. You download one PDF and suddenly you're stuck inside a fourteen-email nurture sequence that someone wrote six months ago for a completely different audience. Sometimes the better follow-up is a short, real message from the person who made the thing. That's why the follow-up option in Gluuer is a single plain note written by the creator, which you can switch on or leave off.

14. So you're against automation?

Not at all. I use AI and automation every day, in the business and in my own work. The question I keep asking is where automation genuinely helps and where it starts making everyone sound identical. My rule of thumb is to hand the tedious parts to software and keep the relationship itself in human hands.

15. What surprised you most while building it?

How many edge cases hide inside something that sounds simple. Think about what should happen when a creator replaces a file, or when the same person requests several resources from one account. Then add storage, permissions, plan changes and security on top of that. The simpler something feels on the surface, the more thinking usually went on underneath it.

16. What's your favorite feature?

Swapping the file or link behind an existing Magnet without losing the leads you've already collected. It sounds dull until you remember that the link might already live inside a LinkedIn post, or on a QR code printed on flyers that are already out in the world. Being able to update the resource without breaking any of that is just sensible, and it saves a surprising amount of stress.

17. What do you hope people feel the first time they use it?

I'd love the reaction to be "oh, that was it?" A little bit of surprise that there wasn't more to do. That's the dream response for a product like this, because it means the complicated part stayed hidden where it belongs.

18. Where does the name come from?

The product is about making interest stick. Someone sees a useful thing and asks for it, and normally that moment of interest disappears the second the file downloads. Gluuer keeps a connection there, so you can reach that person again when you have something worth saying. Glue felt like the right idea, and the extra letters made it ours.

19. What are you trying to avoid as Gluuer grows?

Bloat. Software has a natural tendency to keep adding features until the original idea is buried somewhere under settings menus. Every time we consider something new, I try to ask a single question: does this make the core job easier? If the honest answer is no, we probably don't need it, even if it would look good on a pricing page.

20. Finally, what does "Happy Gluuering" mean?

It started as a joke that made me laugh, and now I'm quite attached to it. For me it sums up the whole idea. Make something useful and share it with people, then get to know the ones who actually care about it. So yes, happy Gluuering.