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We're very happy with the tools we're using, but always open to new ideas. Anything you have that you're particulary proud of or happy with? Our arsenal includes many of the usual suspects.

  • Collaboration Tools: BaseCamp, Dropbox
  • Source Control: SVN on SourceRepo
  • Customer Feedback & Support: GetSatisfaction & Twitter
  • Time Management: RescueTime and Doodle

Our startup is a web-based SaaS product, and I'd be interested to hear what tools make your startup life easier or more fun.

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7 Answers

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Peldi, of Balsamiq Mockups fame, compiled a nice list of all tools and services they use at Balsamiq. Find it here: http://www.balsamiq.com/blog/2009/10/30/tools/

It's the most popular post on their blog, so far. :-)

Good luck and have fun!

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That's a great list! Their excitement makes me want to use my mac more. – Joseph Fung Dec 17 '09 at 13:02
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We are building a SaaS startup too. Here are the tools we use -

37signals.com - basecamp for project management, highrise for maintaining customer lists

Outright.com for free simple web-based accounting

Google docs (spreadsheets and documents) for collaborative editing. Also use Google mail for custom company specific email id. And for chat.

git for version control

jira for issue tracking

mailchimp for email marketing

wordpress for blogging

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Thanks for adding Network Hippo - that was new to me! Also, good to see you here David. – Joseph Fung Dec 23 '09 at 15:27
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Also a SAAS based startup (enterprise finance/billing space)

Web based SAAS

  • Unfuddle - bug/task tracking (new to us, moving from Redmine)
  • Bantamlive - CRM
  • PaySimple - ACH
  • Grasshopper - virtual PBX
  • SurePayroll - handles payroll and taxes! (new to us)
  • Dropbox - backup/sync/network drive/etc
  • JungleDisk - new to us, trying this out as a DrobBox replacement. Dropbox really needs the ability to use own Amazon or Rackspace acct
  • Resumator - awesome resume management app
  • SecondCopy - I love using this to automatically backup files from server->desktop, desktop->server, server->desktop->dropbox, etc (at the end of each day I have important logs/files on server, backup drive, desktop, dropbox all with no work on my part)

Development tools

  • Authorizenet CIM API - billing, decreasing PCI scope significantly
  • Litespeed server - super fast web server
  • Zend framework - ease of development
  • Memcached - efficient, distributed query caching
  • Xcache - opcode cache
  • FusionCharts - trending graphs/charts, etc (dreaming of using this for live customer map on 55 inch LCD - pinpoint customers in real time! need more customers first!!)

Marketing tools

  • paper/envelopes/courier font/stamps

Wow...who else is addicted to SAAS!! lol

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Great list! Thanks for the suggestions - some new ones for me there! – Joseph Fung Jan 1 '10 at 1:44
up vote 1 down vote

I posted before about a couple of general business tools, and since you mentioned development tools, we use Beanstalk for our SVN repository and FogBugz for issue tracking. Google Docs serves as a convenient replacement for a wiki for us.

This is probably not relevant to you unless you use Ruby and Rails, but we decided to outsource a lot of our infrastructure so we use Engine Yard as our application platform, and we also use outside services to monitor the exceptions (Hoptoad) and performance (New Relic) of our application. In my opinion, it's more economical to spend money on outside services like this (and put up with the occasional problems) than to develop/maintain them ourselves.

Of course we also use Google's email on our domain, and Skype (it's more convenient than a phone even though we only make local calls).

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up vote 0 down vote

Don't webtools limit your flexibility? As a startup with mobility in mind isn't it important to be untethered? Can you really do without excel, project,word or oneNote?

My 2cents on tools. check out Google voice.

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