The top 9 tools for your startup’s early tech stack
As a founder, you may be fully aware of the tech stack you require to construct your product, but what about the tools required to run your company?
Many entrepreneurs make the mistake of giving the former top priority while neglecting the latter. However, there are so many significant and innovative solutions available today that may greatly improve your workflows and help you position yourself for success as you grow.
This is crucial for small teams since they must function at a scale far larger than their headcount without exhausting their staff by working nonstop. By removing time-consuming chores and administrative work, increasing productivity, and enabling your staff to concentrate on areas where they can have the biggest effect, the appropriate tech stack can help you 10x your headcount.
You can not only save time and establish best practices by developing a robust business tech stack for your startup that covers everything from incorporation to developing long-lasting client relationships, but you can also lay a strong foundation for the expansion of your company.
Are you ready to advance your startup? Here are our top suggestions for each phase of your journey and our recommendations for the best tools for your startup.
the best methods for selecting the appropriate tools for your startup’s technology stack
How can you determine which technologies are actually essential for your company when there are so many available that are geared toward startups? And more importantly, which ones will actually provide a return on your valuable (and constrained) investment?
Here are the top three tech stack-building strategies for startups.
Look for equipment that will grow with you.
You don’t need all the bells and whistles of corporate software when choosing tools for your startup’s tech stack; in fact, products designed for more established businesses are probably more complex (and therefore more expensive) than you actually require at this early stage. Therefore, it’s crucial to look for tools that take into account the particular requirements and difficulties of a company.
You can be sure you’re leaving enough room for your business to expand and evolve when you buy tools with the potential to scale in mind.
Having said that, you won’t always be a startup. Even if you require instruments that can meet your demands right away, you should also consider how they might benefit you later on. You don’t want to establish your company and perfect your processes using equipment that will need to be ripped apart and replaced as soon as a business takes off. On the other hand, when you select tools with the potential for scaling in mind, you can be sure you’re giving your company enough opportunity to expand and change without having to invent completely new methods of operation.
Issues to raise
Adding new functionality is possible as our needs change.
As we expand, would it be simple for us to onboard new personnel or teams?
Does it offer a range of prices?
Make sure the tools you use are integrated.
Every firm understands the value of time, but when you’re a small team working toward ambitious goals, you have to be even more frugal with your use of it. Therefore, compatibility is crucial. Examine how a new tool interfaces with the essential ones you already own and regularly use before you add it to your IT stack.
You can streamline procedures, automate workflows, and communicate data among tools to keep everything up-to-date with the correct connectors. The advantages? Less time spent on administrative tasks, navigating between tools to get important information, and context-switching implies more time is freed up for important work and intense concentration.
Issues to raise
Is it compatible with the tools we often use?
Do these connectors already exist, or must our team create and manage them?
Does it utilize a unique API?
Tools should support, not replace, your people and procedures.
For your startup, the correct tools can completely transform the game. However, the correct people and procedures must still be in place for any instrument to be effective.
Consider the fundamental issue you’re attempting to tackle before adding a new tool to your startup’s tech stack.
“The success of your firm really depends on the quality of your initial personnel. Make sure your technology supports them, not hampers them.
Remember that a new tool’s role is to complement your team and procedures when you do decide to add one to your tech stack. Therefore, it’s important to follow up with key users to determine whether the product is enabling them to do more and work more effectively. Or are you actually wasting time attempting to control devices that cause more issues than they resolve? Is there a problem, and if so, is it a tool problem—one that can be fixed with more resources or training—or a process problem—one that requires greater strategic involvement?
Your initial few recruits have a significant impact on the success of your business, according to Des Traynor, co-founder and chief strategy officer of SimpSocial. Make sure your IT stack supports them, not hinders them, in their work.
Issues to raise
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What is the issue that this tool is intended to address, and how will we assess its effectiveness?
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What role will this tool play in our daily, weekly, and monthly processes?
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How much training will be needed to onboard and maintain this tool?
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What attitude does the team have about adopting this tool?
9 resources for all phases of your startup journey
After considering these best practices, it’s time to consider which technologies might work best for your startup. Here are some of our top recommendations to guide you through significant events and difficulties as you expand your firm.
Stripe Atlas – Incorporation, number 1.
Ready to make the first significant move? When the time comes to incorporate, Stripe Atlas enables you to do so quickly and easily from any location in the world. Stripe Atlas gives creators more time to focus on growing their businesses while ensuring the proper legal and financial foundations are in place to support scaling. It does this by eliminating the paperwork, legalese, and hidden fees usually involved with starting a startup.
Mercury: Banking 2.
A financial technology business called Mercury offers banking* designed with entrepreneurs in mind. Along with the typical banking advantages, such as FDIC-insured checking and savings accounts, simple foreign payments, and more, it allows you to access venture loans that can increase your runway and earn a yield on your idle capital. In order to let entrepreneurs spend as little time as possible thinking about banking, Mercury’s solution also has connectors, rules, and shortcuts.
Mercury is not a bank; it is a provider of financial technologies. Choice Financial Group and Evolve Bank & Trust®, members of the FDIC, offer all banking services.
“The remote work revolution is here to stay, so you need to think globally if you want to make sure you’re growing your team with the right talent,”
3. Brex: business cards
Brex makes it easy for entrepreneurs and startups to control expenses and maintain compliance. Brex makes it simpler for your team to use discretionary spending to stay within budget by providing high-limit corporate cards, an FDIC-insured account for deposits and payments, 24/7 support and rewards all in one location. Brex’s simple expense tracking, automatic receipt matching, and accounting integrations to cut down on reconciliation time also save your finance team (or, depending on staffing, your finance person) time. In order to help you gain a deeper understanding of expenditures and empower executives to make wiser financial decisions, they also provide financial modeling tools.
Deel – Payroll 4.
The change in remote work is here to stay, so if you want to be sure you’re adding the best talent to your team, you need to think broadly. It might be intimidating for small firms to hire globally. Payroll obstacles and worldwide compliance issues further complicate matters. Deel eliminates this complexity, making it quicker and easier to hire, pay, and manage workers and contractors everywhere. Deel can help you spend less time developing unique contracts and managing payroll by taking care of local regulations and compliance, giving you more time to concentrate on creating a world-class workforce.
“Keeping everyone informed and on the same page is easy when you have a clear, collaborative, and current hub for all of your crucial information, ensuring you’re all working in the same direction.”
5. Cloud computing with AWS
The cloud computing platform provides hundreds of tools, from developing APIs to using serverless technology to performance monitoring, to assist you in growing your business. AWS Activate offers expert assistance and architecture direction specifically for startups to help you expand faster.
6. Theorem: Team output
Whether you’re a team of three or a team of 3,000, it’s important to have a single source of truth for key documents. The notion is a great way to keep everyone in your business aligned and can house everything from your company’s big-picture vision to important engineering and process documents, meeting notes, and roadmaps. Having a clear, collaborative, up-to-date hub for all of your crucial information is an easy way to keep everyone informed and on the same page, ensuring you’re all working in the same direction (and not getting waylaid trying to chase up essential documents lost in emails or spreadsheets).
7. Segment: Customer data platform
If you want to take your startup from idea to IPO, you need the right analytics. Collecting and analyzing customer data is crucial to understanding your customers, perfecting your product-market fit, and enabling you to test and iterate on your successes. Segment helps you collect, clean, and act on your customer data and scale it, empowering you to build fast with a reliable, performant, and compliant stack. What’s more, it offers easy integrations and a single API, so it’s even easier to set up and maintain, meaning your team can focus on interpreting the data rather than chasing it down.
“From first visit to ongoing support, SimpSocial helps startups like yours communicate with prospects and customers across every stage of the customer journey.”
8. HubSpot: CRM
HubSpot is a unified platform that lets you manage customer relationships throughout the sales and marketing funnel and beyond. It provides three straightforward, interconnected hubs for startups: a sales hub to track leads, automate outreach, and have visibility over your pipeline; a marketing hub to let your marketing team control the funnel from first impression to reporting; and a service hub to handle customer issues.
9. SimpSocial – Customer engagement
From your first customer to your thousandth, how do you ensure that you’re always delivering exceptional customer experiences and growing long-lasting customer relationships? We built SimpSocial to help you do just that. Our mission is to make internet business personal using a customer communications platform that allows you to make the most of every customer interaction with personalized, in-context messaging. From the first visit to ongoing support, we help startups like yours communicate with prospects and customers across every stage of the customer journey without needing to add heaps of headcount to stay personal at scale.
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