Tools and instruments for a new technical startup

Last year we have succeeded to build from scratch a brand new Fintech company within 6 months (from the first line of code to the closed beta launch). In this article, I will briefly describe the tools and instruments which assisted us to do it. Some of these tools are widely accepted and known, but still, I believe these tips will help early-stage startups to move forward fast without breaking things too much.

Pritunl

In Billie, we take security very seriously. For restraining access to the internal resources (servers, websites, database) we use VPN servers. There are multiple VPN protocols, but the most widely used one is OpenVPN. Even though one can easily spin-up a “classic” OpenVPN server, users and routes management can become an exhausting and annoying burden. Pritunl can be seen as a kind of add-on for OpenVPN server which helps with the server management and monitoring using an intuitive UI.

Salesforce

Salesforce is probably the leading CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system in the world. What is it good for:

• Building a service call center
• Management of support cases
• Management of customer funnels and pipelines
• Dispatch and tracking of marketing campaigns
• Dispatch of transactional emails in case of business events
• Dashboards and Reports creation for the top management
• Building a Customer/Partner portal

Besides that, you can use Salesforce for building custom Apps, which will help you to keep your business running (e.g. create an internal tool for Operations/Finance teams).

However, there are some aspects which should be taken into account, when evaluating Salesforce usage.

• Salesforce is quite expensive
• It is hard to find Salesforce developers

Segment.io

Every company wants to know as much as possible about visitors’ interaction with its website. Where did they come from? How did they interact with it? In order to answer these questions, Javascript tracking codes can be embedded into the site’s HTML. Usually, such tracking codes send data to Google Analytics, which de-facto became the industrial standard.

The problem with Google Analytics is that the free version makes only aggregated data accessible, while the paid version, Google Analytics 360, is extremely expensive.

Since in Billie we were building a sophisticated marketing attribution model, we had to have access to the raw tracking data. However, as a lean startup, we didn’t want to pay a significant amount of money for Google Analytics 360.

This is where segment.io came to help us. This instrument makes possible to forward tracking events to BigQuery, Redshift or old-school on-premises databases. We use BigQuery and the integration setup was extremely smooth and fast.

The best part about segment.io is that custom tracking events are not the only possible source of data for its pipelines. For example with a couple of clicks one can easily configure Salesforce as a data source and voila — all your Contacts/Accounts/Opportunities/Leads are automatically brought to the dedicated tables in BigQuery. How cool is that?!

Full Story

No matter how hard you try to avoid bugs in your website, they will still appear. Users become upset and complain to the customer support. In order to understand better these complaints, you can record ALL website visitors’ sessions using the tool named Full Story. These sessions can be later played (and, naturally, replayed) as kind of clips. So a customer support agent can see exactly what the user did and what kind of problem he encountered.

Sensitive information, like credit card numbers, can be explicitly excluded from being recorded and stored.

Atlassian

Well, this one is a no-brainer. The majority of teams who develop software use Atlassian Wiki for documenting created artifacts and Atlassian JIRA for managing tasks. In Billie we aim to build the software development workflow, which includes documentation creation, thus by using Wiki and ticket system from the same vendor, we make the coupling of tickets with articles much easier.

Slack

90% of internal communication in Billie happens in Slack. We use Slack for one-on-one communication, daily standup calls, failed builds monitoring, KPI queries, and even employees birthday reminders.

One can easily integrate external tools with Slack using webhooks, which makes it one stop shop for monitoring and maintenance needs.

Slack also makes the communication with external stakeholders easier, because one can grant access to non-employees to the dedicated channels only.

When it comes to Slack, my favorite part is the ability to upload a code snippet. Very neat and flexible.