The VProud Stacklist

I use Google Analytics. I worked at Google for 10 years, so there’s a definite comfort level with Google products. And it’s free.

From a product perspective, I love SalesforceIQ. I’ve used it at other companies, including AOL and Google. I also use the app on my phone and I really like it. But SalesforceIQ can be expensive for little guys like me. We pay about $1000/year for 1 instance because that’s all that we can afford.

We use Slack religiously, and we’re obsessed.

We use Blogger for our blog.

Thought Industries is an e-learning platform that we use for content marketing.

We use VCommunity to power the video-based, social conversations that happen on VProud.tv. VCommunity has a fast, scalable platform that allows our editors to publish video conversations very quickly, and also allows our users from all over the world to post video content that is important to them. We love the configurable CMS that allows us to have total control over what's published so no spam or trollish content ends up on our site.

We love MailChimp! We have had no issues whatsoever.

We use Dropbox Pro. We make and store a lot of videos, and it’s good for storing videos. But only up to a point; then you have to prune it down.

I use QuickBooks Online. My accountant uses QuickBooks Desktop, but it all hooks together. I would give it a B-. It’s not that intuitive, but it’s fine. When I’m in invoices, if someone makes a partial payment, QuickBooks makes me go down a weird path to note that they only paid part of the invoice. I have to click a thousand times to make one note, which is annoying! But it does what it’s supposed to do overall. I know there’s a way to integrate it into Salesforce, but I haven’t figured out how to do that yet. The 2 systems should definitely talk to each other.

I’ve found really good people on Craigslist. We make videos (and distribute them) for brands like Honest Company and Lilo for our B2C side. We have been able to find really good talent for these videos on Craigslist. We also found our amazing female developer on Craigslist!

We use Sky Pilot's Vimeo integration on our HelloFlo e-learning platform. Sky Pilot is a great service, and I definitely recommend it. It’s a fast, cheap, and easy way to enable a paid video component on your Shopify site. You have to use the Vimeo player, which is fine for us, but some people might not like that. It’s great for people wanting to sell videos.

We’ve built a super alpha experience on Shopify for HelloFlo, our e-learning platform that offers paid educational videos about women’s health. We first used Stripe, but when we put up a PayPal button, sales went up 30%! People seem to be more comfortable paying via PayPal.

We use Paychex for payroll and insurance administration. It’s pretty old school and analog. I get a big packet of mail from them each week, and the font is not pretty, but it’s fine. They pay people, and I don’t worry about it! I also have a direct line to an actual human in New York for customer service, which is a big plus. Their customer service is quite good.

The whole team uses Trello, and we really like it. It’s pretty bare bones, and not very pretty to look at, but it does its job well.

We use Onlypult to schedule posts on Instagram. The UI is not great.

Social media is not high on our priority list because we’re not about driving people to our site. We use Oktopost, but we don’t totally love it. The UI is not great.