What SaaS products can you use to run a startup
What are the needs of a startup. What SaaS products can fulfill those needs. What architecture should you use.
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If you want to build a SaaS startup, you need an operational stack to run your business. This post is not about the developer tools you would use to build your software product. This post is about the tools you would use to operate your SaaS business.
A startup has many needs and you need to build an operational stack for that. The good thing is that you don't need to reinvent the wheel on any part of your stack. Every single tool you'd ever need to run your business is already built. The only innovation needed on your part is the customer-facing component of your product.
Build something useful by stitching the right tools together and get it into the hands of your customers as quickly as you can.
In this post, we'll talk about how you can build the first version of your business. What are the needs of a startup? What SaaS products can you use to fulfill those needs?
Buying a domain name
Every startup needs a .com domain name that people can visit. You can buy a domain name for $10-15 from GoDaddy and pay the yearly fee to maintain ownership of that domain.
Building a website
Once you have a domain name, you need to build a website with basic information about what you're building. A good website can create a great first impression. This website is not your product. It's a place for visitors to get information about your product. It's a way for people to get familiar with your product.
You can use Wordpress to build your website and scale it. Webflow is good too. These services take care of everything you'd ever need. They both have great ecosystems of developers who have built many plugins to accommodate various needs.
Designing your logo
Your startup needs to have a logo. You can get it done on 99designs for a reasonable price. If you need a contract designer for a longer-term project, you can find one on Dribbble.
Business email
You need a service that can handle your business emails. Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) is the clear winner here. Since everyone is familiar with GMail, you'll feel right at home here. If you want an email client on top of this, Superhuman is a phenomenal product. You can operate your email entirely using keyboard shortcuts. And itās super fast.
Document sharing and collaboration
You need a way to collaborate with your team on documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. You can use Google Drive for this. It's part of Google Workspace. Make sure to stay disciplined about the folder structure from day one. Or it will become a mess as your team grows in size.
Cloud provider
You need to actually build a product and host it on the cloud. AWS is great for this. Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure work well too. All of them offer free tiers to new startups. These free credits are more than enough to keep the lights on for a long time.
Managing payroll
You'll have to pay your employees and make sure you're compliant across all the states. Gusto is great for this. If you're building a multinational team with employees in different countries, Deel is a good product to manage it.
Conference calls
You need a way to talk to your team and your customers remotely. Zoom is a fantastic product for this.
Internal communication with your team
You need to way to chat with your team and share information. Slack is great for this.
Automated communication API
You'll have to send SMS and email messages to your customers in an automated way from your SaaS app or your mobile app. Twilio is great for that.
Accepting payments from your customers
To accept payments from customers, Stripe is a great tool. You can integrate it into your product very easily. You can accept many forms of payments. Stripe's developer documentation is legendary.
Doing outbound sales
This is mostly for B2B startups. Outbound refers to you initiating the communication with potential customers. You'll have to keep reaching out to potential customers in the early days in a systematic way. You need to slice and dice the customer list to see where you can good responses. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is a great tool for this.
Tracking sales
This is mostly for B2B startups. Once you start getting interest, you need to track which customers are at which stages in your funnel. Pipedrive is a good CRM tool in the early days. Once your team gets bigger, you can eventually move to Salesforce.
Doing inbound marketing
To generate interest among customers, you'll have to do inbound as well. It means creating good content and running ad campaigns to get customers to come to you. LinkedIn Ads and Google Ads should serve the purpose here.
Marketing automation
You shouldn't do marketing automation in the early days. Once you have a few real customers and understand what message is working, you can get started with marketing automation. A marketing automation product will manage all the marketing processes and gather data in granular detail across multiple campaigns. HubSpot or Marketo should be good here.
Managing customer success
This is more relevant in B2B startups. Once you close a customer, you need to make sure you diligently track the engagement. You need to make sure the users are using the product and that they're being successful with it. You need to track renewals and upsells. ChurnZero can serve the purpose here.
Managing projects
You need a way to track who's doing what within your team. ClickUp is a great tool to manage collaboration between all functions (e.g. eng, sales, marketing, product).
Live chat with customers
If you want to build the capability on your website to do live chatting with your customers, you can use Intercom for that.
Managing customer support tickets
If you want your customers to be able to submit support tickets, you can use Zendesk or Freshdesk.
Email marketing
If you want to send mass emails to your various customer segments and track the responses, MailChimp is a good tool for that.
Automating simple workflows
Don't automate too much in the early days. Don't engage in busy work. But as your activity grows, it might be helpful to automate simple tasks. For example, let's say someone signs up for your blog on your Wordpress website. You would want to save their contact info on Pipedrive and then get notified on Slack. Doing all of it manually is time consuming. You can use Zapier to automate these workflows. It's a good product.
Catch-all tool to manage smaller projects
Airtable is a powerful tool to manage many business tasks. It's spreadsheet on steroids. You can also use Notion to keep track of tasks.
Compliance
Any company working with data needs to be SOC 2 and ISO 27001 compliant. It's not an issue on day one, but you'll definitely need it as you sign bigger customers. Vanta is a good product for this.
IT related services for employees
Every employee would need a range of IT related services such as laptops, zoom, slack, dev tools, and more. When someone joins your company or when someone leaves, you need to make sure you provide or revoke access to all the services. As your team grows, it becomes difficult to manage this separately for each employee. Rippling is a good product that can do all of this for you.
Background check
Every company needs to do background check on employees before they can join the company. It's a requirement for you to stay compliant. On top of that, let's say you're building a product where you need to verify the identity of the users or service providers. You can't do it manually for hundreds of thousands of people. You can use products like Checkr, Persona, or GoodHire for this.
Address verification API
Let's say you're building a product where you need to verify the physical address of your users via an API. You need to ensure that it's a valid address and you can deliver physical goods to that address. Doing it manually is very expensive. You can use a product like Lob to verify any address with an API call.
Accounting
Hire a firm to do accounting, taxes, and HR-related filings. Don't do QuickBooks or TurboTax yourself to save a few bucks. Not worth the time. Let your accounting team use QuickBooks and TurboTax to manage this process.
Banking
You need a good banking partner to run your business. First Republic Bank and Silicon Valley Bank should be good here.
Insurance policies
You need a number of insurance policies to stay compliant as a business. You need an agent who can get the right policies for you. Your accounting firm should be able to connect you to a good agent.
Law firm
Find a good law firm that can handle all your needs. Your first investor can recommend a good firm based on your context.
Where to go from here
The goal of this post is to lay out various parts of a startup's operational stack. It's meant to provide a starting point on what you need to think about when you're running a business.