SAAS for running a SAAS business

In the last 3 years of running FloydHub, I have signed up for over one hundred online SAAS products to support us in the everyday running of the company. We often evaluate competing products for a given problem and choose the one that works best for us. Here I’m sharing the must have category of tools for running your company —a SAAS cheat sheet if you will, for early-stage companies.

Assumptions

It is very difficult to come up with a comprehensive list of tools that is applicable for everyone reading this. So I’m making these assumptions about who will find this list useful:

• You are starting a new software company or running/working at a small software company
• Your product is a SAAS — software is deployed on servers and accessed via browsers. Some of these tools could be useful for non-software companies too.
• For each of the tools listed below I have included the product we currently use at our company as an example. Feel free to try other tools in the same category and use the one that fits best for your company.

With that said, lets dive in.

Software in production

First here are tools that help you to get your code running smoothly in production:

Cloud Provider — AWS

AWS is very easy to learn and get on-boarded. It has most of the functionality you would need for your application, good documentation, and helpful blog posts on the interweb. Skip other cloud providers (for their credits) and save time — just use AWS.

Payment Provider — Stripe

If you are going to charge for your product from within your product, Stripe is the best option to process payments. You may have to integrate PayPal later based on your user demographics but try to avoid it as long as possible — it is a pain to integrate and test.

Monitoring — Pingdom, PagerDuty

Use Pingdom to periodically check if your site is up. Also include any specific APIs and services you want to check as well. If something is down use PagerDuty to reach you in whatever way possible.

Logs & Crashes — LogDNA, Sentry

Ship all your service logs to one central location like LogDNA so that you can see what is wrong when are paged in the middle of the night by PagerDuty. Sentry is for tracking software exceptions and crashes in the app — it is often useful to tell if a new release has introduced any production issue.

Endpoint protection — Cloudflare

Cloudflare helps speed up your site for users around the world —all the traffic to your site goes through Cloudflare and they also cache the static content and serve it from their data centers. Cloudflare has a global firewall you can use to quickly block access to certain IPs, regions and even countries. You won’t think about Cloudflare after you set it up until you need Cloudflare urgently. So it is useful to set this up early on.

Authentication service — Auth0

User authentication is one of those services that is easy to build in-house but very difficult to tell if it is fully secure. You have a lot of choices to make and if you are not careful, you could open your service to vulnerabilities you are not aware of. This is also one of the decisions that is difficult to reverse later. So I recommend using an auth service right off the bat. Auth0 provides a lot of authentication options including Single Sign On with popular services.

Code — GitHub, CircleCI

This is a standard tool chain in the industry for code repo and CI — to build and test your code on changes. These tools integrate and work very well —so you don’t have to reinvent the wheel.

Increase traction

After you launch your product (which you should do very quickly) the goal is to get more people to use it (and possibly pay for it). These tools are helpful in that process:

Product analytics — Google Analytics, Metabase, Full Story

There is a reason Google Analytics is used so widely — it is very powerful, easy to integrate and free for a long time. It is useful to abstract out the analytics layer in your code and add other analytics providers later.

Metabase is an open source tool (that you can self-host) that gives a read-only view of your production database. It is very powerful and super useful early on to figure out what is going on with the product. Another tool that could be useful to learn user behavior is Full Story — it shows video recordings of your users performing their tasks on the app. We have found more than a few usability issues with this tool.

Sales — Copper, LinkedIn Premium, PersistIQ

Our sales stack has a CRM (copper) to which we add potential customers. We use LinkedIn to get more details about them. And if we need to cold-email them, we use PersistIQ. We are not a sales driven company, so we use these tools sparingly but they are very handy when we need them.

Talking to users — Intercom, Zoom, Rev

We have Intercom as our help button on the website. Sometimes after solving a customer issue via Intercom, we want to do a longer call to learn more about the customer and their use case. We use Zoom for those calls and try to record them for future learning. Since video is hard to consume, we use a transcription service (Rev) to convert it to text. This makes it easier to index and search for call notes later.

Product planning — Asana, Product Board

You can get away with a simple task management system for a long time. You just need a place to track what work is coming up and who is doing what. Most of the advanced features won’t be necessary until the team gets really big. There are tools like Product Board that integrate with customer support systems and help identify what most of the users are complaining about. It is helpful to prioritize the biggest customer problems first.

NPS — Delighted

Net Promoter Score is fairly useful to identify how your users are valuing your product. It is important to categorize your users into different categories (like paying vs free, starter plan vs enterprise users) and look at their scores separately. Make sure to follow up with users who give bad ratings and learn why. Another hack: For users who give a perfect score for NPS, ask them to write a public review of your product on SAAS review websites.

Blog hosting — Ghost

It is useful to have a company blog to share product updates and show users how to get the most out of your product. It is even more impactful if you can build a brand with your blog so that your target customers are attracted to the blog for its content. Either way, the blog is usually managed by the marketing team and requires external writers to access it. So it is simpler to let a third party SAAS manage the blog.

Jack of all trades — Zapier

Zapier is an automation tool. It offers ways to creatively connect the different SAAS products you use. We create Zapier workflows for a variety of use cases. Our most used Zapier workflow: When a user signs up, take their email address and enrich it, if they work for a company above a certain size and located in a region, post a slack message in our growth channel. One of us will follow up with this potentially high value user and see how we can help them.

Company operations

The third category of tools reduce the amount of work you have to do for the daily operations.

Documentation — Notion

It is important to write down technical details of the company on a wiki — for yourself, your team and future hires. Select any document organization hierarchy you can think of , don’t over think it — just make sure to use all the relevant key words so that you can later search and find the document. Notion is very good at search.

Credit Card — Brex

Use a credit card that offers virtual card numbers and use a separate card for each SAAS product that you use. This gives you an easy way to track how much each of the services are costing. Plus if you are no longer using the service, just disable the card from the same page!

Virtual personal assistant — Byron

For a small company it is difficult to hire an executive assistant because there isn’t enough work for that person. But there are often tasks that you do not want to spend your time on —like finding a good location for a meeting and making reservations, scheduling lunch delivery. For this, get a virtual assistant and remember your time is worth money, so spend it wisely.

Email tracking — Mixmax

After sending an email, how often have you wondered if the email has been viewed by the recipient or they have chosen to ignore you? Mixmax is very reliable at tracking email opens. Plus it also has other useful functionality around email sending and scheduling meetings.

It takes a village of SAAS products to raise a new SAAS company. Embrace it and identify your stack of tools to make your life easy and run a happy company! Let me know if there are other category of tools that you find useful that I did not include in the post — would love to hear from you!