Favorite Cloud-Based Web Apps for Startups

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One thing I like to stay current with is web-apps that are popular among startups. It’s amazing how good and how powerful apps have gotten over the past five years.

Here’s what I believe to be the most popular cloud-based web apps for startups:

Help desk – Zendesk and Desk.com
Project management – Trello and Basecamp
Source code management – GitHub
Group chat – Flowdock
Issue tracking – Lighthouse and JIRA
Site call out management – Hello Bar
Content management – WordPress and SquareSpace
Applicant tracking – The Resumator
Chat – Olark
Marketing automation – Pardot
Web analytics – Google Analytics
Accounting – QuickBooks Online

What web apps are on your list? Which ones do you like?

Comments

17 responses to “Favorite Cloud-Based Web Apps for Startups”

November 26, 2012

Mike Schinkel (@mikeschinkel)

Great list. It really is amazing how empowering these SaaS have been for startups and other businesses.

That said, I would question Pardot being on that list? Clearly it’s kickass, but at $1000/mon minimum, wouldn’t you say it’s a bit out of the price range of the average startup? 🙂

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November 26, 2012

Nate Bird

For accounting I stay far away from Quickbooks and go with Xero. http://xero.com

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November 27, 2012

kunlqt

Reblogged this on Kunlqt's Blog.

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November 27, 2012

Greg Benoit

For source code management: BitBucket.org is also a solid solution.

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November 27, 2012

Jennifer

Do you have any favorite social media tools as well?

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November 27, 2012

Jennifer

On second thoughts, it would be really insightful to get your opinion on whether social media is effective at all in the business context? Recent article from TechCrunch about social media having little or no effect on Black Friday sales and others seem to suggest that social media will never equal email marketing.

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1. December 7, 2012
  
  nikaalomatchwelli
  
  Social media is an effective tool, actually it’s the number one besides the conventional marketing tools and target area research..I worked with a start up on digital artworks and web development. Most of our ideas met up with good response over social media sites. Thanks!
  
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November 27, 2012

Jason Swenk

I have a couple more. BillingOrchard.com is an automated billing system that streamlines the recurring invoices and collections process.

I also love Weebly.com for an easy to use content management system.

You can find the full list of the online solutions that I love here and yes it includes Pardot. http://www.jasonswenk.com/business-tools.html

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November 27, 2012

Bradley Wagner

Campfire works great for group chat as well. I think Github Issues is quickly supplanting Lighthouse too. It’s simple no frills interface is great for tech and non-tech folks alike.

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November 27, 2012

anglaisaparisphotos

Nice sum up. You have two that I hadn’t heard of before: Pardot and Hello Bar. Pardot seems particularly interesting in a world where leads are coming from more and more sources. I’d also suggest adding a tool called walkme (www.walkme.com) It places interactive help texts in applications. I’m currently looking at integrating it with our CRM system.

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November 27, 2012

Rob Forman

A couple others I often use:

Agile story management – Pivotal Tracker
Application performance monitoring – New Relic
On-call rotation and alert management – Pager Duty
Software metrics – Code Climate

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November 28, 2012

Pete Franconi

Instapaper

I often get distracted in my inbox — and assume I’m not alone. I use InstaPaper to save all of the articles and websites that I want to revisit at a later date so that I can stay focused and productive.

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1. November 28, 2012
  
  David Cummings
  
  One thing I do for my Gmail tab that I always keep open is to click the “Starred” link under Inbox so that I’m not in my inbox, thus I don’t see the number of unread messages in my inbox in the title text.
  
  Reply
November 28, 2012

Travis G

Great list David. A few comments…

Time Tracking – toggl.com is very handy.

I haven’t used any online Accounting tools – but did try QB Online for a few months and was disappointed. ymmv, just my opinion 🙂

I agree with above post re: Social Media Apps – thoughts?

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1. November 28, 2012
  
  David Cummings
  
  HootSuite and TweetDeck appear to be the most popular social media apps
  
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December 26, 2012

Dmitry

I would also include Salesforce – powerful CRM capabilities.

Cheers.

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January 9, 2013

Sahil Parikh (@sahilparikh)

We are working on Brightpod.com – a simple and elegant tool to plan, organize and track your marketing projects. Going niche this time around 🙂

BTW, enjoy reading your blog articles. All the best for 2013

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