The 67 tools & services we use to run our startup - Baremetrics

Running a company requires very few tools and services, however there are quite a few that do make things much easier and faster.

We get asked regularly what tools we use for various tasks, so below we’ve listed out all the tools and services we as a company (and individually) use to make the magic happen here at Baremetrics.

One interesting thing I noticed while putting all of this together is that the large majority of these we pay for…we use basically zero free tools. That’s important to note because as a business, we choose to use tools that actually make a difference in our daily workflow. Free tools rarely do that…otherwise they’d be able to charge for it.

On top of that, nearly the majority of these we pay $50/mo+ for. If you build anything for businesses, you should be charging for it and you should be solving a big enough problem that you can actually pull off charging $50/mo+. If you can’t get anyone to pay at least that, you’re probably not solving a big enough pain point.

But I digress! On with the listing…

Side note: If Product Hunt is your jam, here’s a Collection with nearly all of these tools.

Business

• 1Password Teams — Amazingly, a lot of business apps don’t have multi-user support and thus we’re left needing to share some passwords. 1Password Teams makes that really easy.
• Appear.in — Whenever we need to do quick video chats outside of our own team, we use Appear.in…it’s basically Google Hangouts, except it actually works.
• Baremetrics — Obviously. 😉
• Clubhouse — Project management software that we’ve actually been able to stick with. Just the right amount of constraints and flexibility.
• Dropbox — The majority of our company-wide file storage and sharing happens in Dropbox.
• Dropbox Paper — Any text document goes here. If they’d build a spreadsheet app, we’d abandon Google Docs immediately.
• Earth Class Mail — Street address for us, since we’re a remote company. Also magically does mail scanning, which is my favorite thing on earth.
• G Suite — Email, calendar, spreadsheets and some file storage are all here.
• HelloSign — Any document that needs to be signed goes through HelloSign.
• OmniFocus — How I stay sane juggling all the things.
• QuickBooks Online — Bookkeeping software.
• Slack – Where 99% of our team communication happens.
• Soulver — Essentially an obscenely powerful calculator. I use this to think out problems, algorithms, business scenarios and more.
• Stripe — How we accept payments.
• Workable — Recruiting software. We use this to manage job postings and applications.
• Zapier — I’m honestly not even sure how to sum up what Zapier does for us. It touches nearly every part of our business from marketing to bookkeeping to customer follow ups. So. Much. Stuff.

Engineering

• Amazon Web Services — We specifically use their S3 and Machine Learning services. S3 for backup storage and serving some assets on our marketing site and Machine Learning for…something top secret that’s in the works. 😎
• Atom — The text editor of choice for most of our engineers.
• CircleCI — Continuous integration and testing.
• Clearbit — Provides an unbelievable amount of person and company data that’s used extensively throughout our app.
• Cloudflare — This does a whole host of things around file delivery, SSL, security and speed optimization.
• Cloud 66 — Manages our deployment process across lots and lots of servers.
• DataDog — Server/infrastructure monitoring.
• Digital Ocean — Our marketing site lives here.
• GitHub — Seems to not do this enough justice to say “git hosting” but ultimately all our code and versioning is stored here.
• Heroku — We’ve got a couple of really small micro-services hosted here.
• Honeybadger – Application error monitoring.
• Imgix — Image optimization on the marketing site.
• iTerm — A more powerful command line app for macOS.
• Mailgun — Email delivery for app emails as well as for our Recover feature.
• Mapbox — Used for generating location maps on our Customer Profiles feature.
• Packet — We have a slew of baremetal servers here and it’s where all of the main Baremetrics app lives.
• PagerDuty — Automated on-call scheduling and incident escalation.
• Pusher — Used for realtime data streaming to our dashboard.
• Quandl — This is the data source behind our currency conversion feature.
• Readme.io — Powers our API documentation and it’s magical.
• RethinkDB — Our primary database.
• Segment — Lets us merge all data streams in to a single source.
• Sidekiq Enterprise — The number of background jobs we run is borderline offensive. Sidekiq makes that cake.
• TextMate — Old habits die hard…

Marketing

• Buffer — Manages our social media scheduling for both @Baremetrics and @Shpigford.
• ConvertKit — We use this mainly for sending our weekly newsletter, but also for some other things like marketing drip campaigns and new-feature notifications.
• Crowdcast — This is the webinar tool I always wanted. We use this to do customer webinars as well as our Founders Live Q&A.
• Final Cut Pro X — For producing various marketing videos.
• GIF Brewery — Makes quick work of GIF creation for customer support issues, feature animations for marketing and more!
• Google Analytics — Provides some insights in to user acquisition, though we tend to default to Mixpanel much more.
• GoSquared — For live web traffic analytics.
• HitTail — Surfaces potentially productive keywords we could produce content for.
• Mixpanel — How we track user acquisition channels and product usage.
• Moz — How we track our SEO efforts.
• Screenflow — For recording our screens when doing demos or creating marketing videos.
• Simplecast — Podcast publishing.
• Soundcloud – Audio hosting for our podcasts.
• Trello — Basically the only usable way we’ve found to stay on top of content planning and scheduling.
• Ulysses — My personal favorite writing app.
• Upscribe — Embeds newsletter signup forms on Medium articles.
• Zencastr — Podcast recording for interviews. I use this extensively for Founder Chats.

Customer Success

• Grasshopper — For our 1-800 number, which essentially no-one but recruiters and off-shore dev shops use, is there primarily as a comfort to potential new customers (“Hey, they’ve got a phone number!”).
• Intercom — If apps could get married, we’d totally tie the knot with Intercom. Every bit of communication with our customers, from onboarding to support and everything in between, flows through Intercom. We’ve written an entire guide on how to grow your business with Intercom.
• Promoter.io — Quantitatively tracking customer feedback is a key part of how we make sure we’re serving customers well. Promoter.io powers all of that. We’ve written extensively as well about how we use Promoter.io.
• StatusPage — Whenever we have an outage or a service interruption, we update our status page to keep customers in the loop.
• Wistia — Any videos we produce are hosted on Wistia, which we then use throughout our app and in customer communication.

Design

• After Effects — We use this to mockup UI animations and interactions.
• FullStory — This gives us direct insight in to how customers are using the app. It’s also really great for seeing what users were doing leading up to an error they received or pinpointing when they’re getting frustrated in-app.
• IconJar — We use icons in all sorts of ways and IconJar helps organize them.
• Illustrator — For all your vector-editing needs.
• Sketch — The defacto UI design tool on our team.

So, what about you? What tools are indespensible for you and your business?