23 SaaS Tools We Use to Grow Our Startup

As a Seed-stage startup, we’re super picky about the tools we spend time and money on. Every single one of our tools has to be actively driving the business forward.

After nearly 4 years of trying out various SaaS products, these are the ones that stuck!

SaaS We Love:

Customer Communication

• Hubspot is our central hub for marketing communication. We have our marketing website hosting with Hubspot, use it as our CRM, and send all of our emails through Hubspot.
• Intercom is our hub for user-communication. We use it for in-app chat, product tutorials, and our help center. There’s a lot of overlap with Hubspot, but we think of Hubspot our “Sales & Marketing Hub” and Intercom as our “Customer Support Hub.”
• Sendspark — our own platform — is our key for building personalized relationships with customers. We use Sendspark to send videos to customers in our sales outreach, onboarding emails, and support chats within Hubspot, Intercom, and Gmail. The videos help us increase engagement, communicate better, and add a human touch.

Data

• Segment is key for tracking all key user events (User Signed Up, User Recorded Video, etc), and then sending them to all other SaaS platforms we use. With Segment, we can easily experiment with different SaaS platforms, because sending data to them is as easy as flipping a switch.
• Amplitude helps us visualize KPIs so we can easily run growth experiments and optimize our business.

Internal Communication

• Slack is our central hub for communication. We also use it for team video calls — which is a totally unrated feature!
• Grow is a Slack app that helps us share feedback internally with team members to help us all “grow”

Revenue

• Stripe is our payments processing software.
• Chargify (now Maxio) is our billing system that sits on top of Stripe and helps us manage plans and recurring revenue. This is essential for any SaaS with a recurring revenue model.

Product-Market Fit

• Smartlook records user sessions, so we can watch and see what users are trying to do with Sendspark, and where they get stuck.

Design & Development

• Figma is a web-based design platform that supports collaborative design. This is essential for our fully remote team to work together on product and marketing designs
• JIRA is where we manage our development sprints. I know JIRA doesn’t have the best reputation with developers, but we found it the best for using SCRUM methodology, and their Mac app is much better / faster than their web application.

New tools we’re trying now!

• Pineapple is a new way of recruiting candidates that lets them submit “stories” instead of traditional resumes. We hope this will help us hire better culture-fits for our team.
• Copy.ai automatically writes ad & other other content using AI. I just tried it out a few days ago and was shocked by how good it was. I’ll definitely use it more as we start running more ads and needing more copy.
• Stack helps manage Chrome tabs within a desktop app, so I don’t always have to have 50+ tabs open on computer.
• UpdateAI is a Zoom bot that listens to customer meetings and automatically creates action items to make following up after calls easy.

The SaaS graveyard 💀

Okay “the SaaS graveyard” is a little dark for a heading. These are the tools that we tried that didn’t quite work for us at the time, but we still keep on our radar to try again. And they might be exactly what you need, so I’m sharing here!

• Notion gets raving reviews from many startups, but it just wasn’t sticky for us. We might give it another try soon now that our team is fully remote and growing though!
• Fullstory was amazing for one year, but then the price shot up to a whopping $14k / year. Smartlook has nearly identical functionality — and even some features that Fullstory lacks — for 1/10th of the price.
• Asana looks and feels better than JIRA, but lacks too many features for us to implement SCRUM methodology, so we’re still using JIRA for now.
• Whereby is a great tool for video conferencing, and far more aesthetically pleasing than Zoom. We ended up phasing it out in exchange for Slack calls for internal communication and Google meet for external, because Google automatically adds itself to calendar invites anyway, but will likely bring it back when we need more of a “wow” factor for customer calls.
• Survicate is a survey platform that integrates with Intercom, and so we can easily automate surveys that ask for NPS and Product Fit scores.
• Grain helps us grab snippets from Zoom meetings and share them internally, which is great for capturing feedback and testimonials from customer interviews.
• LeadDyno is a platform to manage partners and affiliate programs. We loved the concept, but had a lot of technical difficulty where the platform just wasn’t working to track affiliate purchases or show analytics to us or our partners

What other SaaS should we use?

Is there a tool you’re building or you love that you don’t see here? Shoot me a message and I’d love to try it out. 😊

Originally published at https://blog.sendspark.com.