Startups Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome) |
- Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome)
- Choosing the right software to build your startup
- Co-founder back Stabs me
- Investor wants 50% of my baking business
- How do you stay productive and avoid "time-sinks"?
- Technical due diligence [HARDWARE STARTUP]
- How can a venture capital damage your startup
- Marketing Diretor
- How do I figure out if giving an investor a $1M SAFE is a good move?
- Letter of Intent and MoU templates
- What information to prep for seed funding?
| Feedback Fridays - A Friendly Feedback Exchange For Ideas and Products (surveys/polls are welcome) Posted: 20 Jan 2022 09:01 PM PST Welcome to this week's Feedback Thread! Please use this thread appropriately to gather feedback:
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| Choosing the right software to build your startup Posted: 21 Jan 2022 05:41 AM PST I'm the co-founder of a startup called Whalesync. We're a small team of four but believe strongly in the idea that the tools we use shape the work we do. We've invested a lot of time seeking out and choosing what we believe to be the best SaaS tools to support our business. I thought it might be helpful to share with other founders who are likely making many of the same decisions. Our stack is constantly evolving. Although certain tools will stay with us for the life of the company, I expect this list will look significantly different in a year. I'd love to know what other people think of our choices and which tools we missed! Communication💡 Knowledge Base: Notion I'm convinced there are other excellent knowledge base tools out there. I'm not convinced any are better than Notion. We use Notion as our company source of truth. Wherever possible, we link information back to Notion, including docs, contacts, and more. ☑️ Project Management: Linear Functionally Linear is similar to Jira. In terms of user experience, Linear is an entirely different ballpark. It might be the most delightful app I use on a daily basis. Quick and clean with intuitive keyboard shortcuts. 🏢 Virtual Office: Gather We previously used Tandem as our virtual office and had a great experience. Then we came across Gather and haven't looked back. Although clunkier than Tandem, Gather provides a sense of presence we haven't felt with other virtual offices. 💬 Communication: Slack I have my fair share of gripes with Slack, but it gets the job done. Particularly as a small team, we've been able to keep channels consolidated. ⬜ Virtual Whiteboard: Miro Every two weeks, we plan an upcoming cycle of work. If we were in person, we'd gather around a whiteboard. Since that's not available remotely, we turn to Miro. It's not quite as good as a whiteboard, but it's the best online replacement we've found. 💻 External Video: Zoom In the early days of Whalesync, we chose Google Hangouts because it was free. We quickly realized that the video quality on Google Hangouts just doesn't compare to Zoom. When we started having meetings with potential customers and investors, we couldn't afford to have poor connection. We use Gather for internal video chats, but Zoom is our default for calls outside the organization. 📽️ Screen Recordings: Loom The not-so-secret weapon of async communication. Sometimes it's sooo much easier to share context with a screen recording + video rather than write up a doc. We still generate plenty of docs and Slack messages, but Loom is a game-changer. Operations📰 CMS: Airtable Airtable is an incredibly versatile tool, so we employ it for a few different use cases. One key one is our CMS for all our blog content and SEO pages. Airtable is easy to get started and offers a powerful relational database that's great for managing data. 🔄 Data Syncing: Whalesync Dogfooding! One of our goals with Whalesync was to build a product we needed ourselves. Today we use Whalesync to sync data from Airtable to Webflow to display blog posts and SEO pages on our site. It's awesome 🙂. 🤖 Automations: Zapier Zapier is an excellent tool for simple automations. We use it to add waitlist sign-ups to our mailing list and Slack automatically. 📝 Forms: Typeform There are some new form tools like Reform and Tally that take a more "Notion-like" approach to form building. Typeform is a classic at this point, but it's simple, clean, and integrates well with others. Finance + Admin💯 Cap Table: Pulley Cap table management is a class of software I didn't realize we'd need until I started a company. In retrospect, it's vital. Pulley handles cap tables well, plus they're adding new features constantly. We also utilize their 409A offering, offer letter builder, and shares calculator. 🗝️ Password Management: Dashlane After about a week of working as a team, we realized we needed a shared password manager for all team accounts. As you can see by this list, there are a lot of potential passwords to remember. Dashlane is a bit aggressive in auto-filling passwords, but other than that has been trusty and reliable. 👫 Payroll: Gusto We started with Quickbooks for payroll. Eventually, we got smart and moved to Gusto which was a major upgrade. HR and payroll can be a nightmare. As much as is possible, Gusto makes it easier. 💸 Payments: Stripe Not much explanation needed here. 🧑⚖️ Legal Docs: Clerky Quality legal docs are essential. Lawyers are expensive. Enter Clerky. It's the one legal paperwork company praised by actual lawyers. We created and distributed SAFEs for fundraising entirely through the platform. 💳 Credit Cards: Brex A fantastic product that has everything you would expect from a modern business credit card company and keeps adding more. We issue credit cards, pay vendors, and take advantage of their cash accounts. We've tried and enjoyed Ramp as well, but Brex is impressive. 🏦 Banking: Mercury My experience with banking products has always been clunky and frustrating. Mercury is the opposite - delightful and modern. |
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