4 SaaS tools we will use actively in 2018
Last year saw us turning from an idea into a profitable startup and then again into a fast-growing venture, with zero marketing spend. In this journey, we experimented with several SaaS products to help us focus on clients better. Some passed the test, but some could not. Here’s a list of those who did with flying colors:
1. Airtable
At my previous company, we used to roll out a new SaaS tool every few weeks for every business function, but within a few days, everyone used to turn to Google Sheets — be it Sales, Product or Marketing teams, despite knowing about its limitations. Eventually, every team started maintaining hundreds of Gsheets, which became a nightmare for managers. If only there were a tool so simple to use as Google Sheets, but possessed the functionalities of a CRM, a task/product management tool, an analytics dashboard as well as a note-taking app.
When we started Airim facing the same trouble in Airim, we started looking for a solution and after some digging into ProductHunt, we found Airtable. It provided what we exactly wanted — superpowers of specialized tools alongwith the simplicity of Google Sheets. Our entire company is using it now, and it has helped us immensely in managing productivity.
2. Heap
Being ex-analysts ourselves, we apply data science in every decision of our product journey. We set up Heap several months ago to find common patterns among our website visitors as well as signed up accounts. We observed the usage of each of our features — and used Heap’s analysis to decide which feature to kill and which to invest more resources on. These decisions have paid off really well and we continue to login to Heap several times a day to track Airim’s heartbeat.
3. Redash
We once had to create a custom analytics dashboard for a client and ended up creating analyses on a tool that we were not very fond of. Worse, when the presentation day came, the tool stopped working because it kept refreshing data. It was then that the clients recommended us to switch to Redash, and we never looked back ever since.
Redash is the quickest way to create an analysis using SQL and to share it with anyone you want. The visualization options give you a lot of flexibility and the error messages have been programmed to be immensely helpful for beginners and power users alike. We expect becoming power users of this tool very soon.
4. Airim
Yes, our own tool. While reputed websites see an average of 7.5 visits before signing up for a free trial account, this number is less than 3 for us. Over 60% of our signups come from first-time visitors, indicating that our website content is working well in converting. We always write our copy after analysing which FAQ gets highest engagement on our website. Two months ago, we were surprised to observe that the 4th most asked question among our visitors was “Does Airim provide APIs for developers?” This made us realise that we have to put more efforts into API integration, after which our tech team took up creating Zapier integrations with most common SaaS tools. We also put up a picture and a stat in our homepage to demonstrate Airim’s compatibility with most commonly used SaaS tools.
Is there any tool I am missing here? Please let me know in comments below. Thanks for your time!
