As a fast-growing startup with limited personnel and resources it's absolutely essential we make the best possible use of our time as possible. And since we are building integrations for a number of web apps we've had the opportunity to test many different tools.
Here's our list of the apps we have found essential for running a small startup and team.
Office Tools - Google Apps
The Google suite of products is about the best bang for the buck you can get. We are constantly using Gmail for email, Google Docs for documents, spreadsheets, and ad hoc surveys and forms, and Google Calendar for keeping track of events and calls.
Email Marketing - Postmark & MailChimp
The life blood of any early stage startup is their launch list. Understandably making sure emails get delivered reliably is a big deal.
Postmark has been great for sending automated notification emails from our app and they do it for just a buck fifty for every thousand emails.
For bulk marketing messages it's hard to beat MailChimp. They have a great free plan that supports 2,000 subscribers and 12,000 sends a month. Why use MailChimp over Postmark for marketing messages? MailChimp comes with a pretty solid analytics interface that lets you track and AB test your campaigns.
Special Mention: since building your email launch list is so important, it makes sense to have a landing page to collect emails as soon as possible. We found Kickoff Labs to be an excellent tool for doing that. Plus Josh and Scott provide amazing customer support.
Hosting - Linode
Our application is built on Django so that narrows our choices for hosting. We choose Linode even though it is a little more expensive than something like WebFaction. Though for root access to your machine and the extra flexibility and security that users won't take us down - it's worth it. For a startup this is definitely not an area to skimp.
File Sharing - Dropbox
Dropbox is the no brainer here. It doesn't get much easier than sharing documents with Dropbox. We use Dropbox as a repository to store, share, preview and edit documents that the company uses.
Payment Processing - Stripe
For any startup being able to collect money from your users is important. If you are developer, the Stripe API couldn't be easier to work with.
It makes it really simple to collect money from your users and send it to your bank account. Plus, you can easily generate subscription plans, one time payments, and just about any payment plan you can imagine.
Customer Interaction & Support - Olark
Most of the tools in this category aren't cheap, but for us it was worth having Olark on the site even before we had a product. Simply having it on the site has lead to more interaction with customers and early sales.
Not only has Olark made it easy to chat with prospects and customers it's also created the opportunity to talk with investors randomly visiting our site, vendors wanting integrations, and potential partners looking to expand business. Bottom line - Olark makes us money.
Social - Twitter
As primarily a B2B company we've found Twitter to be our users social network of choice. A significant portion of our customers hang out on Twitter to talk shop so it makes sense for us to have an active presence there.
For most startups it makes sense to go where your users are. So if that's Facebook, then go there.
Analytics - Google Analytics
One of the most important things a startup needs is users and that means getting people to your site. Keeping track of that is important and the free and power packed Google Analytics makes it easy to keep track of traffic, where it's coming from, and gives you ideas for how to grow your site.
After all, if you aren't measuring you can't know for sure how to improve.
Integrations - Zapier
At Zapier we take our own medicine and use Zapier to integrate a lot of these apps, make all our processes better and to have a little fun too. Some of our favorite integrations are:
SMS notifications for new customers through Stripe
IM notifications for new signups through MailChimp
Add new customers from Stripe to a MailChimp mailing list
Add new customers from Stripe to Highrise
