The Ultimate Startup Software Stack Tool Guide.

Wilson Peng (@wilsonpeng8)

https://www.yesinsights.com

YesInsights

Intercom.

Intercom is a customer platform with a suite of products for live chat, marketing, feedback, and support. Intercom shows you

who your customers are and what they do with your product. You can also communicate with them through real-time in-app

and email messages. If you ever visit a company’s website and notice that little chat widget on the bottom right, chances are

that the company is using Intercom.

YesInsightsYesInsights is the simplest way for you to receive customer feedback across all platforms. This can be through email, blog,

and anywhere else where you could communicate with your customers. Acquiring users are hard, but keeping users engage is

even harder. One of the best way to do this is by understanding your customers and listening to their concerns. That way you

can discover the loopholes in your funnel and fix it. With YesInsights, you never have to guess what your customers want.

You can simply ask them by sending one-click surveys.

https://www.yesinsights.com

Stripe.We use Stripe to manage our payments. People will choose a payment gateway for a variety of reasons including transaction

fees, ease of setup, cards/payment methods accepted, support, and many more. Without a doubt, the most popular in the tech

scene right now is Stripe. The good thing about Stripe is that it is easy to set up. Simply, go to Stripe.com and create an

account. Enter your personal and bank information and you’re good to go.

A startup software stack isn’t complete without a way to accept payments. Stripe is free to use but it does come with a

transaction fee. The fee is 2.9% + 30 cent per card charge. It is without a doubt the easiest way to collect payments. What’s

even better is that Stripe integrates with hundreds of other apps to make your life easier. This includes invoice, analytics, web

forms and many more. It’s definitely a better alternative to Paypal.

WordPress.We all know that content is king. Having a blog for your startup is a great way to boost your brand awareness and get your

startup’s name out there. It’s an excellent way to show your expertise and the value of your product.

There are a lot of blogging platforms out there that you can use to set up a blog. Those include Ghost, but we decided to add

WordPress to this list because it is easy to set up and it’s free to use. There are also a lot of themes out there to make your

blog look nice. Another awesome thing about WordPress is the fact that you can add plugins that will save you time. As a

founder, you don’t have time to set up everything like SEO, but WordPress makes it easy with plugins like Yoast SEO. Our

blog is built on top of WordPress. We use WPEngine to host our blog.

Google Analytics. Knowing your audience and what they want is an important success factor for any website. The best way to know your

audience is through your traffic stats and this is exactly what Google Analytics provide for FREE. There are plenty of stats

softwares and plugins, but we believe that Google Analytics is a must have for every startup.

Buffer.Buffer shares your content at the best possible times throughout the day so that your followers and fans see your updates more

often. That way you can get the most out of each post. As you add content, you can easily select which of your social

accounts you want to post to. Post the same message to all accounts or add context by customizing each.

Trello.Trello is an awesome project management tool that makes collaboration easy and, very fun. We use Trello at YesInsights for

all our project, software, and content planning.A Trello board is basically a web page containing lists laid out horizontally on

the page so you can get a bird’s eye view of your project. Items within the lists, called cards, can be dragged and dropped

onto other lists or reordered within lists. Individual cards themselves can contain checklists, images, attachments, deadline

dates, colored labels, and discussion notes from others who share the board. You can have as many boards as you want.

MailChimp.

You have a nice blog a very well designed site, but you need a way to capture your audience. This is where a mail service

provider kicks in. Mailchimp or Aweber is my go-to source for collecting emails, but there are a lot of them out there. More

advance ones include Drip, ConvertKit, Constant Contact and many more.

It doesn’t matter which one you choose to go with, just make sure you pick one and start collecting emails from the very

beginning. Set up the early foundation and you won’t have to worry about it again!

Perfect Audience.When you’re starting off and you’re on a budget, then paid acquisition might not be an option, but retargeting is a must.

Retargeting, also known as remarketing, is a form of online advertising that can help you keep your brand in front of bounced

traffic after they leave your website. For most websites, only 2% of web traffic convertson the first visit. Retargeting is a tool

designed to help companies reach the 98% of users who don’t convert right away.

Retargeting is simple to set up and it’s highly effective. Getting users to your site is one thing, but most people don’t buy on

the first visit. Reminding them again that your company exist will help you drive users back to your site.

Mention.Mention is a great way for you to keep tracking of your mentions across the web. You can use Mention to see

where people are talking about you over the web. With Mention, you can respond to them immediately and boost

sales. Another great thing about Mention is that you can also track your competitors, so you can always keep up

or stay a step ahead of them. In addition to that, you can use Mention to track certain keywords within your

industry. With Mention’s ability to monitor billions of sources in over 40 languages, you won’t miss anything being

said about what’s important to you. And since mentions are in real time, you’ll be able to reply right away within

Mention.

Baremetrics.Stripe is a great way to receive payments as mentioned above, but Stripe doesn’t provide enough data for you to

analyze your current financial situation. Baremetrics integrates with Stripe, Braintree, and Recurly so you can start

monitoring your revenue’s growth and status. With Baremetrics, you can track all the key metrics for your startup.

This includes MRR, ARR, Net Revenue, User Churn, Refunds, Upgrades, and many more. Baremetrics also

comes with a very well designed dashboard for you to see everything all in one place.

Geckoboard.Navigating between different apps can be a hassle. Use Geckoboard to build clear, effective data dashboards for

your business that keep teams informed, motivated and aligned around your KPIs.

Geckoboard integrates with over hundreds of different apps including Twitter, Facebook, Facebook ads, Stripe

and many more. You can add “widgets” to your dashboard and visualize your entire startup in one dashboard.

Another great thing about Geckoboard is that you can connect it to a monitor/TV and display everything in front of

your team. It’s a great way for you to keep track of all your KPIs in one place.

Zapier.Zapier lets you easily connect the web apps you use, making it easy to automate tedious tasks. You can wait for third-party

app developers to offer the SaaS integrations you need. You can hire expensive freelance programmers to build custom

software for you. Or you can simply do it yourself with Zapier, and then get back to the work that matters most to your

business.The great thing about Zapier is that it integrates with most of the apps that you can think of. Need to automate your

Twitter? Zapier can handle that. It makes your life a lot easier as a founder and Zapier comes with a free tier.

Asana.There are a lot of good project management tools out there, but Asana is one of the best ones and it’s free. Asana

is a handy project management tool that helps you keep your team and your projects organized in one place. The

important feature here is that it takes place outside of your email, as to avoid clutter and time wasting.

It helps to improve a team’s efficiency by putting all the ideas, plans, conversations, files and tasks all in one easy

to access platform that everyone can see and contribute to.

Moz.Moz builds tools that make inbound marketing easy. Moz is the most robust and all in one system for anything SEO related.

Need to do competitor research? Need to see what’s wrong with your SEO? Moz has a tool for it. You can boost your online

visibility and keep ahead of competitors with Moz Pro.

Hubstaff.Hubstaff is awesome. Hubstaff runs as an application on the desktop making it easy to track time. Once the time is

tracked you can invoice clients, pay employees, see in-depth reporting and much more.

We used Hubstaff in the early stages of production to track our oversea developers. It works really well and I

highly recommend it. If you’re building a new startup, you might not have the budget to hire an in-house developer

since they are so pricey nowadays. The hardest thing about hiring an outside developer is keeping track of their

progress since you’re not next to them. Hubstaff makes this process easy. You can also integrate with payment

systems and pay them directly through there.

Bench.Bookkeeping is the last thing you want to be worrying about. With Bench, you can count on your books being up-

to-date and finished on time, every time. As a busy founder myself, I hate dealing with anything finance related

and tend to push it aside, but it is necessary for all business.

Bench makes it easy. Bench will assign you to a personal bookkeeper that will help you keep track of all your

expenses and revenue. That way when it comes to tax time, you don’t have to worry and have everything all in

one place. A life savor!

Buzzsumo.Growth and content marketing is hard. You always want to write and grow your business, but you don’t know what your

audience wants to read. That is one reason why we created YesInsights, so that you don’t have to keep guessing and can

actually ask your audience what they want.

Another thing you can do is use Buzzsumo to do your research. With Buzzsumo you can analyze what content performs best

for any topic or competitor. BuzzSumo can be used for gathering valuable insight into the success of your content on social

media channels. Simply type in a keyword and it’ll show you a list of articles that people are sharing related to that topic. You

can also find influencers within the results and reach out to them about your new article

Slack.Slack is used for everything nowadays. Prior to Slack we were using email and Hipchat for communication. Slack is the go-to

option for team communication as well as community building. Slack brings all your communication together in one place.

It’s real-time messaging, archiving and search for modern teams.

Streak CRM.With Streak, you can create different stages and pipelines to automate your sales process. They even have Mailmerge built in

within it so you can mass email, even though I don’t recommend doing that. Streak also keeps track of all the email open and

responses for you.

Unbounce.Unbounce lets marketers build, publish and test landing pages without IT or software. A/B testing and lead gen make it a

powerful marketing tool. Coding a landing page could take up a lot of time, but Unbounce makes it easy. It comes with a drag

and drop builder that allows you to easily create landing pages in minutes.

Wistia.Wistia provides professional video hosting with amazing viewer analytics, HD video delivery, and marketing tools

to help understand your visitors. You can post videos directly into Youtube, but Wistia gives you analytics and

tools that you cannot find in any other video hosting provider.

With Wistia, you can set up lead magnets within the video to capture your audience’s emails. What’s even more

great is that you can see exactly which part of the video your audience is watching.

GoToWebinar.Webinar is one of the best ways to convert users. There are a lot of different software you can use for webinar,

but GoToWebinar is the go-to standard for hosting webinars. GoToWebinar will allow you to host webinars and

send a custom link for people to join.

With GoToWebinar, you can create custom email invitations, confirmations and reminders – or let GoToWebinar

handle it with our automated email templates. You can also record webinars for future replays. Other options

include WebinarJam and many more.

HelloSign.HelloSign is a cloud-based electronic signature tool that enables users to sign, fill out, send, retrieve, and save

documents paperlessly.

HelloSign users may fill out and sign documents on a computer, tablet, or mobile phone. Users may also upload

and prepare documents to be signed and filled out by another party or parties, otherwise known as a “signature

request.” Recipients receive the signature request via e-mail, in which they click the “Review & Sign” button to

begin the signature process. The document will display, and signers are guided through the document with arrows

indicating where they need to sign, fill in text, or select a check-box, as indicated by the originator of the

document. At the end, the signer clicks “I Agree,” and a copy of the signed document is e-mailed to the signer and

returned to the requester. Users may also create and save editable templates for documents they send

repeatedly. Users may add co-workers to their “team” and share templates with team members as well.

Segment.Segment allows you to collect user data with one API and send it to hundreds of tools or a data warehouse.

Instead of going through custom integrations and bothering your developers for data, you can use Segment to

connect everything all in one place.

With Segment, you can track events in your web and mobile apps using their libraries. They’ll normalize the data

and send it to integrations and warehouses.

Thanks! :)

Looking for an all in one customer feedback platform that doesn’t ruin the

customer’s experience?

- YesInsights - https://www.yesinsights.com

7 day free trial :D

Wilson Peng - Co founder of YesInsights (@wilsonpeng8)