Sep 16, 2020
10 Tools for SaaS Founders during the pandemic and beyond
When I chat with founders, we often have discussions on our “stack” of tools we use to run our businesses. With this article, I wanted to put into writing the stack we use at Selly CRM (vertical focused SaaS business) to manage everything from revenue operations to the product roadmap.
This article is not an all-inclusive list, but more so, the most utilized tools at Selly (I’ve left out prominent household names like Slack, Grammarly, or Zoom). So, whether you’re a founder getting started or already running your business, some of these tools can hopefully add value to your daily hustle!
1. Gusto — Payroll
Form DE 9C, Form 941, and Form TC-86; do these sound like a productive use of your time? Gusto takes care of payroll admin work, benefits, state fillings, and even PPP loan repayment reports.
Gusto is also useful for new employee and contractor onboarding as well as the management of employee termination. Their user interface is super simple, and the Gusto support team is very helpful, including assistance on edge case issues. Sign up for Gusto here.
2. Baremetrics — Revenue Analytics
If you use Stripe or Braintree to bill SaaS subscriptions, then Baremetrics is a must-have. The majority of payment processor analytics dashboards are barebones and make it challenging to calculate MRR, LTV, and churn without a fair amount of Excel jockeying and exporting CSV files.
That’s where Baremetrics is different. It integrates with your payment processor then quickly populates all of your data on the platform. Whether you’re determining your Quick Ratio, Net Revenue Churn, or MRR growth last month compared to the previous calendar year, Baremetrics has a way to track important metrics. It’s also easy to share access with stakeholders to keep everyone in the loop on company growth and revenue-based KPI’s.
3. Brex Card & Bank
Brex has two noteworthy products for startups, a credit card, and a bank account offering. With the credit card, instead of relying on a founder’s creditworthiness, Brex determines your credit limit based on the cash in your startup’s bank account without a personal guarantor. There are other features I’ve come to love, as well. First, Brex allows you to instantly create virtual credit cards for anyone in the company. If one of my employees in another city needs to make an immediate purchase, I can immediately send them a virtual card.
In terms of the bank account, it has many of the expected features of an online banking system, but one of my personal favorites is the ability to have Brex print and mail a check on your behalf at no cost. At my startup, we work in an industry with many outdated means of doing business, and we have to mail “old-school” checks regularly, so this has been a small win for us. Sign up using this link, and Brex will give you a $250 gift.
4. Typeform — Customer Experience & more
At Selly, we use Typeform for more than just surveys. We initially started using Typeform to improve our customer onboarding experience. We use Typeform after a customer is contracted to gather the initial setup information previously collected via a phone call or through a chain of emails; this has saved us an average of 20 minutes during the onboard process.
More recently, we started using it for hiring. We link LinkedIn job posts to a Typeform application where we ask deep, specific questions about the role. Typeform’s logic feature allows us to route the applicant to different questions based on their responses. Finally, we use Typeform for customer feedback and beta signups.
5. Onplan — Financial Modeling
OnPlan is a financial modeling tool that allows us to forecast and track our actuals month-to-month. It integrates with the most popular accounting and finance tools, including Excel, Google Sheets, and Quickbooks.
They make it effortless to convert existing Excel or Google Sheets models into their platform. They also have a variety of existing templates, dashboards, and reports to choose from, including a D2D3 report. Whether you’re a financial whiz or a complete beginner, OnPlan helps you forecast like a pro.
6. TransferWise
As a startup with an international team and international office expenditures, it has become an invaluable tool for keeping our global team members, and vendors paid quickly and with an accurate USD to foreign currency conversion.
TransferWise automatically calculates exchange rates for currencies around the world. They also have lower transaction costs and faster transfer time than any other payment service providers we have utilized. Sign up for Transferwise here.
7. Carta — Equity Management
Prior to tools like Carta managing ISO/NSO employee stock options, equity grants, board consents could be extremely bandwidth-intensive and frequently disorganized. Carta makes it simple and cost-efficient to issue new employee options, manage your cap table, and board consents. This is one of the tools you’re going to want to get in place shortly after founding your business if you incorporate as a Delaware corporation and intend on issuing equity!
8. Hubstaff — Time tracking for contractors
Managing contractors, especially with a global remote team, creates its challenges. Hubstaff is a simple tool to manage time tracking and invoices and captures user activity to hold accountability. Many products offer this sort of functionality, but I believe Hubstaff does it the best in the most integrated and cost-efficient manner.
Another interesting note about this company is that they publicly share their SaaS metrics via Baremetrics, and they just broke $10M in ARR; you can view their metrics here. You can sign up for Hubstaff through this link.
9. RoadMunk — Product Roadmap
One of the most critical conversations in any SaaS or software business is your product roadmap. As you scale, this will continuously be developing, and sometimes the priorities of features will be debated. Roadmunk allows you to organize your projects and assign a R.I.C.E score based on reach, impact, confidence, and effort. The RICE score can then be utilized to evaluate the effort and impact of a new project or feature.
10. Buzzsprout — Podcast Syndication and Analytics
Let’s face it; everyone now has a podcast. However, do you understand your reach? Do you have time to individually submit RSS feeds to all the major outlets like Apple, Google, Spotify, and iHeart Radio? Buzzsprout is an all in one podcast management platform where you can determine where the majority of your audience comes from, syndicate to all the major podcast platforms, and even find new advertisers for your podcast via the Podcorn integration. Sign up for Buzzspout through this link.
Hopefully, as you’ve just finished this top 10 list, there were some gems or new products you learned about.
