Tool stack for a tech startup

I see a lot of blogs about tools that startups use within their teams and founders use for personal use. I always discover new tools through such blogs and am surprised to see the range of tools solving different problems.

For me, I have always tried to limit the number of tools we use within AnalyticsVerse and for my personal use. Reasons for that are:

1. The more the tools, the more information gets spread over these tools. Hence we try to avoid using tools with overlapping functionalities (Unless there is a huge value that we see in adopting another tool)
2. Effort goes while context switching between different tools. Having a smaller set of tools helps me focus better.
3. While bringing in newer people into the team, it is easier to onboard them faster with a limited set of tools and all information being in one place
4. We prefer using freemium tools having more suitable pricing for smaller teams and that have integrations with our teams channels making it easier to have important things in a single place

I’ve compiled a non-exhaustive list of tools we use at AnalyticsVerse and I personally use:

📧 Emails + Internal Comms — MS Suite with Teams

While I personally would prefer using slack over teams for a better interface, the whole ecosystem with outlook, teams, teams video, onedrive makes it a much more integrated and better experience. Almost all other tools we use have integrations with teams channels.

⚙️ Code + Project Management — Gitlab + Jira

We initially went with Gitlab due to better CI/CD capabilities(pre-Github Actions) and Jira because AnalyticsVerse integrates with Jira and using it within the team gave us a better understanding of it.

🗒️. Wikis + Note Taking — Confluence + Notion

We use Confluence as a wiki extensively to document things that make onboarding easier for new members and high-level designs of our system. While Notion is mostly used for personal note-taking and for collaboration between 2 or 3 team members. There is a clear distinction of what should go on Notion vs Confluence

☁️ Hosting — AWS

We chose AWS simply because we were more familiar with this and for the range of services AWS offers. Also, we have started utilizing teams integration to handle cloudwatch alarms much more effectively now.

🎨. Design — Affinity

We found this to be the best alternative to Photoshop and meets most of our design needs.

💬. Lead Tracking — Monday.com

The ease of use is much better than any other CRM we were exploring and helps us track leads much more effectively. One thing we are still looking out for here is having a single tool that gives a detailed account of all interactions with leads across our different channels and campaigns.

📈. Analytics- Amplitude

This is one tool that I use a lot. Helps me understand what feature is being used more by our users and helps shape the product better.

Hopefully, this information is helpful for everyone who’s starting out and still in the process of selecting what tools you want to use for your day-to-day.