We did a lot of investment in Mixpanel, but it doesn’t work one third as well as advertised. It works well for templatized products, which we are not.
We use Streak because our business development team is intense, in terms of inbound requests. But we’re not using anything full-featured yet for a CRM.
We tried Glip and HipChat, and while they were both great ideas in theory, in practice, neither one worked well. We’re on Slack now, but honestly, I don’t see the fuss about Slack. It’s not that user-friendly, and there’s usually too much going on in Slack. If I just want to ask someone a question, it makes it so complicated. Our team is ambivalent about it at this point. But there is a lot of active development on it, which is really good.
We buy templates and plugins for WordPress on GraphicRiver and ThemeForest.
We buy templates and plugins for WordPress on GraphicRiver and ThemeForest.
We haven’t used Stripe much at this point, since we’re only B2C right now, but when we launch our B2B side, we will definitely be using it more.
UserVoice, Optimizely, and Kissmetrics suit our needs, which are not super complex. Our customers are only asking basic questions, so they fit our needs. But we’re still exploring what else we can use.
UserVoice, Optimizely, and Kissmetrics suit our needs, which are not super complex. Our customers are only asking basic questions, so they fit our needs. But we’re still exploring what else we can use.
UserVoice, Optimizely, and Kissmetrics suit our needs, which are not super complex. Our customers are only asking basic questions, so they fit our needs. But we’re still exploring what else we can use.
We use SendGrid (a fellow TechStars company) for transactional emails, and it works decently well. We do wish they had better marketing emails.
Vero is a great Australian company that we use for conditional emails. It’s a more sophisticated version of Mixpanel that allows you to trigger emails based on customer actions. It has worked really well for us, and we’re constantly loading it with more email lifecycle templates. It’s very specialized, and highly customizable. And though it’s not as easy to use as MailChimp, it is much more cost effective because you’re not billed on number of subscribers, you’re billed based on volume.
I am really impressed with Box. Our law firm has forced us to use it, and I think it’s brilliant!
We use the trifecta of QuickBooks, Bill.com, and Expensify. Expensify is awesome!
We use the trifecta of QuickBooks, Bill.com, and Expensify. Bill.com can be a pain. But once it’s setup, it works okay, but it’s not very flexible.
I load up everything for my personal and business accounts in Mint. It allows me to have my finger on the pulse of everything related to finances.
We’ve used a bunch of different tools, and finally found something that worked for us: Zenefits. But to be honest, there is no tool that ever delivers on all of its promises. We’re considering consolidating all HR and payroll on Zenefits or Gusto, because at this point, they don’t always talk well to each other.
AngelList is amazing. They should be charging for what they do. We’ve been very successful getting tons of recruits through it, and it doesn’t cost us any money to use it.
We use our own product, Good&Co! For job seekers, based on the quizzes you take, you can see your fit score with any company (e.g. Google, Facebook, etc.). For current employees at a company, it keeps employees engaged, which makes them more productive, as well as stay longer at your company.
LinkTexting allows you to send your users a text message to download your app.
LinkSense gives you one URL to embed everywhere. Then, depending on the platform someone is using to click the link (iPhone, Android, desktop, etc.), that one link takes them to the correct destination/app store.
eShares is pretty good for managing stock options and other corporate management stuff.
UserTesting is great for gathering qualitative feedback from people using your website or app.
UXPin is brilliant for wireframes. They have a library of popular UX patterns, and you can just import them and modify them for your brand.
We really like Gusto; you just fill it in and forget it. You can basically leave it on autopilot. It doesn’t always sync correctly with Zenefits for benefits, so we’re getting quotes for consolidating everything onto either Zenefits or Gusto. Usability-wise, Gusto is significantly more self-service, so we’re more inclined to use them.
I recently discovered CloudHQ. It syncs and consolidates all of your data assets across multiple cloud services. I discovered that they have a Chrome plugin that allows you to create shared labels on Gmail. This allows me to easily create tasks for people on my team, and share my labels with different individuals on my team. It’s brilliant.
We’ve tried pretty much everything (e.g Basecamp, Asana, Pivotal Tracker), and settled on Trello. We used to use Pivotal Tracker, but it felt like it was designed by engineers, for engineers. There was no transparency if you weren’t an engineer, and it was far too complex for anyone other than the engineers. We eventually moved to Asana, but it got super messy after a while. We had multiple, parallel development streams, and no visual way to connect the dots between multiple projects. So we ended up using Trello, and it’s going well, and we’re not paying anything for it!
Emphatic allows you to find an on-demand social media manager. The quality really varies, and depends greatly on the person doing it. It’s pretty decent if you have nothing too complicated going on with social media. But we grew out of it because we have such a unique voice, and no one we found on Emphatic could get our voice down.