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?
David Cummings on Startups 
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? 🙂
For accounting I stay far away from Quickbooks and go with Xero. http://xero.com
Reblogged this on Kunlqt's Blog.
For source code management: BitBucket.org is also a solid solution.
Do you have any favorite social media tools as well?
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
HootSuite and TweetDeck appear to be the most popular social media apps
I would also include Salesforce – powerful CRM capabilities.
Cheers.
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