Here’s all the software we use at our Series A startup

When just starting out (pre-seed -> seed)

Productivity

• Slack for all team communication and for analytics (a bunch of events piped into channels)
• Superhuman as an email client (the standard for founders)
• Pitch for decks and presentations that spark joy (boo Google slides)
• Loom, which we still use and is indispensable for so many things (design feedback, explainers, walkthroughs, product updates), but back then, especially for cold outbound.
• Notion for everything that we’d need to save and reference later. Also used for our first product docs.

EPD

• Github (self-explanatory)
• AWS for hosting our servers
• Netlify for hosting our frontend (including our janky marketing site)
• Highlight for session capture/replay; this was very useful in helping us understand how the product was used in the early days.
• Excalidraw for anything design-related. Yes, really.

Marketing / Sales / Operations

• Google Sheets as our CRM.
• Rho for banking/operations
• Ramp for credit cards
• Intercom for human chat support.
• Gusto for paying ourselves

Once we felt PMF (seed -> series A)

EPD

• Figma for design.
• Docusaurus for our product docs.
• Retool for analytics and sending important events to Slack.

Marketing / Sales / Operations

• Webflow; we built the first versions of our real marketing site and blog using this. A lot faster and more lightweight than custom-built (for what we needed at that point anyway).
• HubSpot as we started growing our marketing efforts. We use it for marketing emails, but also analytics.

Once we built a sales team

• Outreach for getting started with outbound email.
• Salesforce as our CRM. We needed something more complex that could also make it easier for the sales team to collaborate.
• Apollo.io for lead enrichment.
• Gong; absolutely critical for staying close to customer conversations. Also used as an unconventional onboarding tool for new team members.

Once we built a marketing team

• 6sense for account-based marketing.
• Ghost for hosting all of our blog content (when we started to get serious about SEO)
• Letterdrop for social selling
• Clearbit for B2B data

Once our product needed to scale

• Segment for analytics
• Explo for embedded product analytics (so we didn’t need to DIY it ourselves)
• Vantage (for saving money on AWS costs)
• LaunchDarkly for feature flags and A/B testing
• Segment for product analytics
• ContentStack as a CMS for our docs (so anyone can contribute)

Conclusion

About James Evans