Top Tech Tools Your Startup Should Know
The Best (and Simple) Startup Tech Stack
The startup ecosystem is ever-evolving and it’s changing fast. Every day new tools are being created, others are becoming obsolete, and even more, are being adopted by startups at an exponential rate. To stay competitive and keep pace, startups need to understand the latest trends and best practices in order to succeed.
Tech tools are one of your startup’s most important business assets. Without the right technology, your company will struggle to keep up with the pace of change, and could even fall behind. Fortunately, there are plenty of resources to help you navigate this constantly evolving landscape and leverage the best tools for your company.
This post is the first in a series of blog posts we will do on tech stacks for startups. Through this series, we will cover several topics including open source/free tech stack, top data and ML tech stack, top tech architecture for AWS, and more.
In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some simple and powerful startup tech tools you should know about. We’ll provide an overview of each tool, share its pros and cons, and suggest when and how you can start using them today.
Hosting: Firebase or Supabase
Unsurprisingly, the first step is going to be where and how to host your web app. There are many options to choose from in this space. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Microsoft Azure, Netlify, Vercel, Heroku, just to name a few. Many of these are good options and we can discuss each at length.
If you’re looking for a simple and powerful solution that is easy to get started and scales with your business, Firebase is an excellent option.
Firebase offers a lot of flexibility, letting you use the same tool for both hosting your app, storing your data, authenticating users, setting up microservices, and more. All this means you can spend less time worrying about each of these individual pieces and more time building a great product.
Firebase offers several free usage plans to get started and relatively low fees as your app scales. Firebase was acquired by Google and has some integrations within GCP but even as a stand-alone, it is great as is.
If you prefer a fully open-source service, then Supabase should be your choice. Supabase dubs itself as the open-source alternative to Firebase. It has many of the same features like data storage and hosting but outside of the GCP environment.
Authentication: Auth0 (or hosting/micro)
If you want to be able to provide multiple authentication methods or want an authentication service decoupled from your hosting then Auth0 could be a great option for you. It’s a fantastic identity and access management (IAM) solution that provides a lot of the functionality you might need without being overly complicated.
You can use it to manage user sign-in, security permissions, and user sessions. You can use it to issue API keys, manage webhooks, and much more. It has a great set of integrations, including an excellent one with Slack.
If you’re building a lot of apps, then Auth0 is a great option. It lets you focus more on what matters — building your product — instead of worrying about onboarding users, keeping track of logins, and adding security features.
Microservices & Backends: Buildable
As you continue to build your product you will want to ensure you are not building a monolithic application. You will also need to be sure you are thinking about automating some tedious services by building little applets to handle them. This is where microservice tools like Buildable come in handy.
Buildable is a powerful low-code app builder where you can easily integrate with disparate apps and services (like Airtable, and Slack) and create end-to-end process automation. Once completed, you deploy your flows behind RESTful API endpoints and call them from your other services.
Tools like this support storage and databases, which can make it a very comprehensive solution for many microservices. Our pick is Buildable as you can leverage a lot of pre-built blocks and templates with very minimal code input required. This means you can get up and running very quickly on their platform.
Web (& Mobile) Frameworks: Vue.js (or React)
Vue.js is a JavaScript framework that lets you build interactive web apps with a data-driven approach. It’s extremely easy to learn and use, and has a broad set of use cases because of its wide range of features.
If you’re building an app that has a significant amount of dynamic content, or if you’re building an app that has to be able to handle multiple users at the same time, Vue.js is an excellent choice.
Another big advantage of Vue.js is that it’s easy to integrate with other technologies and services. You can use it with most major email marketing platforms, for example, and it has a great ecosystem of development and design tools as well.
The bigger elephant in the room is React.js. React is more popular than Vue.js and is of course a great choice for many companies. React.js will be easier to hire developers for if only because of its popularity. It also has a bigger ecosystem than Vue for this reason and may have more support in various areas.
However, it is a little bit of a steeper learning curve and it is not quite as lightweight as Vue.js. You should weigh each of these items when making a decision on what language and framework to use. Both React and Vue.js have a very active ecosystem and lots of great third-party libraries which make them an ideal choice for web and mobile applications.
Design: Figma + Tailwind CSS (or Material/Bootstrap Library)
Design can often be overlooked when it comes to building a company. However, a well-designed product beats a product with more features and a poor design more often than not. Design is critical to how users understand and interact with products. Setting great design tools and practices will be critical to making sure your product is in a good place.
There are many different CSS frameworks and libraries that you can choose from as a great starting point for your company. Material and Bootstrap are both very popular libraries that you can use with out-of-the-box components that can help you get started quickly.
TailwindCSS is a very powerful and incredibly easy utility framework to use in CSS. Tailwind is highly customizable so you can have a design system that is entirely unique to your brand. Tailwind also has many resources so you can leverage beautifully designed components right out of the gate.
Before you get to coding anything though you need to have a rough idea of what you will be building. This is where design tools like Figma come in handy. With Figma, you can design individual components in all of the possible states you expect them to be in for your application and then put them together into a single clickable mockup to test with your users. Figma also has a lot of great integrations with tools like Tailwind CSS and Material/Bootstrap so you can easily port your designs into working product code when you are ready.
Marketing & CRM: Mailchimp and HubSpot
It’s not enough to just build your startup though. You also need to be able to acquire (and retain) customers. This is where your marketing, sales, and customer relationship tech tools come in. Both MailChimp and HubSpot are sales and marketing platforms that have become staples of the startup ecosystem.
Used by millions of businesses around the world, these services are trusted by entrepreneurs of all sizes and disciplines. When you’re just getting started with your business, sending emails to your customers and potential customers is a crucial part of building a mailing list and growing your business.
Analytics: Google Analytics or Mixpanel
“If you can’t measure it you can’t manage it.” This mantra is all too true in the startup world but can often be overlooked for building more features. However, measuring your audience engagement with what you are building will be the only way to know if you are on the right track or not.
This is where analytics platforms come in. Google Analytics has long been the powerhouse in the space of understanding website visitors. What’s great is that it is relatively easy to set up and can provide a lot of value for free.
If you want to get a little deeper understanding of your customers and want to be able to create these insights yourself you may want something a little more powerful. This is where tools like Mixpanel can come in. Mixpanel is a highly customizable service that you can use to get a much more rich view into understanding what your customers are doing with your products and services. This service does have some free features for it but largely is meant to be a paid product.
Project Management: ZenHub
As you continue to build out your product and add additional features, it will be important for you to keep track of work that has been done and what work remains. This is where project management tools come in. These tools make it easy for you to put together your backlog, set your goals, track your progress, and share those updates all in one place.
A great option is ZenHub, which easily integrates with code management tools like GitHub and GitLab and provides a host of tools for agile teams in simple automated experiences. ZenHub also makes it easy to understand in real-time how your team is progressing on various projects. It is great for teams that want to be able to manage their agile products along with a host of other products provided by Atlassian.
Customer Onboarding: Onboard.io
The next critical step for any business is helping your customers be successful with what you have to offer. Making sure that your customers are trained and have the access permissions in place as well as all of their payment steps up to date can quickly become untenable problems. This is where customer onboarding applications come in. One in particular that stands out as great service is Onboard.io.
Onboard.io makes it simple and straightforward to understand exactly what the tasks are that need to be completed and track those tasks across all of your customers. This means you don’t have to wonder or worry about your customers anymore and can instead have confidence that everyone has what they need to be successful.
Wrapping Up
As the startup ecosystem evolves, so does the technology that drives it. This is by no means an exhaustive list. New tools are being created, others are becoming obsolete, and even more, are being adopted by startups at an exponential rate.
If you’re building a tool to support startup development, we would love to hear from you. Get in touch with us here.
We hope you found this post helpful. If you liked it, please share and leave comments and be sure you check back for other tech stack articles we will be writing in the future.
This piece was written by Daniel McDade. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions!
Email: dan@rippleventures.com
