What’s your stack?

A few weeks ago, I attended a (very) interesting event at TQ, the coworking space designed by The Next Web in Amsterdam. Its name: “Stack Exchange” (not to confuse with stackexchange.com, an entry point for the coding-related questions for developers).

Basically, the event consisted of eight tables hosted by an entrepreneur sharing with a group of other startuppers its “stack”, that is the tools their company uses on a daily basis to optimize operations and increase productivity (more details here if you’re interested in the topic).

My table was all about BtoB sales and CRM and hosted by Yasir Khokhar, CEO, and founder of Connecterra, the dutch startup that created Ida, “the world’s first dairy farmers’ assistant powered by artificial intelligence”.

We didn’t talk much about cows and farms (sadly) and instead chatted about Salesforce, Hootsuite, Pipeline, Fullstory and other BtoB tools.

Yasir was the perfect host for the topic since he also has an extensive experience at Microsoft, where he held various roles across technology and business management. All the attendees of the roundtable were also interesting and enthusiastic about sharing their experiences.

While Petit Web doesn’t have the scale of Connecterra, or the other “scaleups” featured that evening, we do have our how stack, that we built over the past 6 years:

• Mailchimp is the core of our system, acting as our CRM tool, e-mail router, and analytics platform
• Wordpress is our publication tool (CMS) for the website, that’s a classic
• Google Analytics, as well as Quantcast for Publishers, are useful for on-site analytics and insights about our audience
• Trello is our project management platform to organise the work inside our team
• Typeform is our “Swiss knife” to collect readers’ feedbacks, leads, attendees to our events or entries for our Grand Prix de l’Innovation Digitale.

5 years ago, the switch to Mailchimp was a significant and welcomed change. The service is perfect for a newsletter-based business like ours. In the same place, we have our editorial mailing list (43,000 subscribers and counting), our prospects mailing list for business development and our invitations mailing list for our events.

Recently, the most useful for us has been Typeform. We started using it as a fun way to collect our readers’ feedback, but quickly we noticed how convenient it is for anything related to data collection.

As we now organize up to half a dozen events a month, a platform as easy to use as Typeform is a game changer. We’ve tried almost everything on the market for event organizers: Splashthat, Eventbrite, PaperlessPost,… and even no tool at all, asking our guest to simply reply with an e-mail.

Typeform makes everything easy and fully customizable. We’ve never tried it to sell tickets to our events (most of them are invitation-only and free to attend), but its integration with Stripe for transactions works very well when we register entries for our Grand Prix de l’Innovation Digitale.

Talking about integrations, that’s the main hassle with all those services, and a thing that all participants of the “Stack Exchange” pointed out: they hardly communicate together. Solutions like Zapier or IFTTT can help building bridges but are still limited.

On the personal side, I also do have my own “stack” that helps me be more productive, especially on the go (currently typing this post on my phone, waiting for boarding at the airport…).

• Todoist for basic tasks management
• Gmail for every work-related communications, I rarely answer the phone
• Evercontact, to automatically enrich my contact list from the e-mails I receive (very useful to know who is calling you), as well as Rapportive, to get more information about who is sending me e-mails
• Telegram as a preferred canal for personal, real-time communication. I find it WAY better than Whatsapp or Messenger. And more secured, apparently.
• Pocket to save stuff for later (sometimes wayyyy later, I still have bookmarks from three years ago I still need to read)
• Twitter as my primary source of “hot news” (as well as a ton of newsletters, but that will be the topic of another post)
• LeKiosk, to read magazines (20+ a month!) while commuting, on my smartphone, or at home, on the iPad
• Blinkist to get a quick “shot” of culture
• Citymapper for moving around in most of the cities

The area I’m terrible at is note-taking. Sometimes I’ll use Evernote on my phone, other times open a Google Doc, or just a draft in Gmail, depending on the topic. And when I’m on my laptop, I will be either typing on Gmail, directly into the WordPress admin or in a Word document.

For a long time, I used Evernote, but I dropped it about a year ago, as I found the app less and less reliable and increasingly complicated. If anyone knows about a good, easy to use, multi-screen one, feel free to share it!