Running a company requires very few tools and services, however there are quite a few that do make things much easier and faster.
We get asked regularly what tools we use for various tasks, so below we’ve listed out all the tools and services we as a company (and individually) use to make the magic happen here at Baremetrics.
One interesting thing I noticed while putting all of this together is that the large majority of these we pay for…we use basically zero free tools. That’s important to note because as a business, we choose to use tools that actually make a difference in our daily workflow. Free tools rarely do that…otherwise they’d be able to charge for it.
On top of that, nearly the majority of these we pay $50/mo+ for. If you build anything for businesses, you should be charging for it and you should be solving a big enough problem that you can actually pull off charging $50/mo+. If you can’t get anyone to pay at least that, you’re probably not solving a big enough pain point.
But I digress! On with the listing…
Side note: If Product Hunt is your jam, here’s a Collection with nearly all of these tools.
Shortcut is the first project management platform for software development that brings everyone on every team together to build better products. It's designed to create healthier and efficient collaboration across organizations so teams can focus on what matters – creating products their customers love.
Shortcut features a web app, iOS app, simple API and a robust set of integrations.
The majority of our company-wide file storage and sharing happens in Dropbox.
Dropbox is a cloud storage and synchronization solution that lets you back up files online and sync folders across multiple devices. The free version offers 2GB of storage, while the paid version offers 2TB for a monthly fee of $11.99.
eSignatures and integrations with major apps — such as Zoom, Canva, and Slack — are available. Dropbox also works with all operating systems. When using Dropbox for business, the pricing can get expensive, starting at $15 per user per month.
Any text document goes here. If they’d build a spreadsheet app, we’d abandon Google Docs immediately.
Dropbox Paper enables real-time communication and collaboration on projects created within it. You can set milestones, invite others, leave comments, and sync document changes. To-do lists and media files are also available on Dropbox Paper.
Its UI is uncluttered and easy to understand. The collaboration features allow teams to focus on individual tasks while tracking overarching goals and deadlines. However, Dropbox Paper lacks comprehensive formatting tools, such as spell checks. You also can’t save old document versions.
Street address for us, since we’re a remote company. Also magically does mail scanning, which is my favorite thing on earth.
Earth Class Mail is a virtual mailbox service offering mail scanning, automatic check deposits, and cloud integrations, turning paper documents into high-res PDFs. Customers can pay bills, deposit checks, and share documents without using a single envelope.
Earth Class Mail is HIPAA-compliant and has over 90 real addresses in the US. It also integrates with other useful apps like QuickBooks, Google Drive, and Bill.com. Its pricing may get a little confusing for some users, however.
Email, calendar, spreadsheets and some file storage are all here.
Formerly known as G-Suite, Google Workspace is an enterprise productivity tool that offers collaboration tools for a wide variety of customers. It’s widely used by businesses, educational organizations, and other institutions.
Its Google Drive feature offers file storage and sync services. It features Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, Google Slides, and other online apps for productivity and collaboration. However, even with a focus on remote collaboration, Google Workspace has online-only apps that require Chrome and advanced planning to work offline.
Any document that needs to be signed goes through HelloSign.
Dropbox Sign (previously HelloSign) is the easiest way to send, receive and manage legally binding signatures for your business of any size. Its most notable features include:
- powerful workflow
- security/compliance
- custom branding
- automatic email reminders
- flexible signing workflow
- team management capabilities
- mobile-friendly and more.
Dropbox Sign enables businesses all over the world to ditch costly paper processes, increase efficiency, and reach a ROI faster.
How I stay sane juggling all the things.
Your Life, In Perspective
Bookkeeping software.
Easy Online Accounting to Organize Your Finances in One Place. Run your entire business with the #1 small business cloud accounting solution!
Where 99% of our team communication happens.
Slack is your single workspace that connects you with the people and tools you work with everyday, no matter where you are or what you do.
With Slack you get real-time messaging through calls and chat, a searchable record of all your files and conversations, and integrations with a growing number of handy bots and apps.
Now everyone can finally be on the same page and get their work done. Slack: It’s where work happens.
Essentially an obscenely powerful calculator. I use this to think out problems, algorithms, business scenarios and more.
Soulver is the original notepad calculator app for Mac. It supports currency & unit conversions, dates and times, percentages, time zones, variables and more.
How we accept payments.
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for online businesses of all sizes, including fraud prevention, and subscription management. Use Stripe’s payment platform to accept and process payments online for easy-to-use commerce solutions.
I’m honestly not even sure how to sum up what Zapier does for us. It touches nearly every part of our business from marketing to bookkeeping to customer follow ups. So. Much. Stuff.
Zapier helps businesses easily automate work in 4,000+ web apps without writing any code. With Zapier, you can automate anything, fast, and eliminate all the repetitive tasks that slow your team down at work. With more integrations than any other solution, Zapier makes the systems you rely on more efficient.
Unlock the power of automation by easily connecting the tools you rely on in minutes, and building custom workflows that fit the way you work.
The text editor of choice for most of our engineers.
Atom is a desk application based on web technologies that allows you to take control of your editor with CSS and other features.
Continuous integration and testing.
CircleCI is the largest globally shared continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform. It is used by prominent companies such as Slack, AWS, Terrafor, and many others to make their software idea come to life.
The engineering teams praise this CI/CD platform for its extraordinary features that make their job easier and more effective. Example features are:
- FedRAMP certified
- SOC 2 Type II compliant
- Audit logs
- OpenID Connect
- LDAP
- Build on your preferred API
- Reusable configurations
- Integrations
- Premium support from DevOps experts and so much more.
Some users reported occasional glitches with pipeline progress and user dashboard but nothing too serious.
Provides an unbelievable amount of person and company data that’s used extensively throughout our app.
Clearbit is a SaaS software that helps businesses create, capture, and convert demand. It is a very useful tool that analyzes and reports on market trends and features, suggesting prospects and strategies for lead conversion.
By using Clearbit, businesses have a clear idea of their business and how to properly advertise it to attract the right audience.
Some notable features include:
- Data enrichment
- Lead scoring and routing
- Form optimization
- Intent-based outreach
- Advanced personalization
- Ad targeting and
- Conversion tracking
This SaaS tools is best for Sales, Marketing and Operations teams. It flawlessly integrates with Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, Segment and other popular third-party integrations.
On the negative side, some users complained that it is not suitable for B2C and that some data it collected was outdated.
This does a whole host of things around file delivery, SSL, security and speed optimization.
Cloudflare is a service that helps to optimize the performance of websites by handling delivery, security, and speed optimization. Cloudflare also provides exception logging, error tracking, and performance metrics. The service works by caching website content and optimizing load times for websites across different regions.
However, some users have reported that Cloudflare customer support was unreachable, and that there are occasional bugs.
Manages our deployment process across lots and lots of servers.
The Cloud 66 service offers users a variety of secure options to keep their data safe and accessible from anywhere in the world. With its unlimited storage capacity, you can save as much data as you want without worrying about running out of space. You can also use Cloud 66 to share files with friends and family members easily, so everyone can have access to your memories wherever they are in the world.
The Cloud 66 team offers 24/7 customer support, so if you ever have any issues or questions related to using their service, don't hesitate to reach out for help. If you're looking for an affordable and reliable way to store your photos and videos online, look no further than Cloud 66!
Server/infrastructure monitoring.
DataDog is a platform dedicated to developers, IT operations teams, security engeneers and other businesses. It offers monitoring, analytics and security services and it integrates data from numerous sources, making it a versatile tool that can help boost your business efficiency.
Its features include:
- Infrastructure monitoring automation
- Application performance monitoring
- Log management, etc.
The user interface is not user-friendly for people who are not tech savvy and the data may be difficult to sort through.
Our marketing site lives here.
DigitalOcean is a cloud-hosting and IaaS provider that lets developers launch apps faster and easier. It has an average of 99.97% uptime and offers great pricing and scalability.
DigitalOcean has a simple API approach that lets developers automate and integrate with third-party tools with ease. It has 14 distributed data centers around the world that support production-level environments. On the flipside, DigitalOcean has limited customer support. Its pricing may also be confusing for some.
Seems to not do this enough justice to say “git hosting” but ultimately all our code and versioning is stored here.
GitHub is a popular tool among developers needing public and private code hosting. Teams can leverage the product’s software and collaboration tools. Its features include:
- Version control and issue tracking
- Code review
- Team management
GitHub is great if your team needs great documentation, collaboration, and backup features. Its help section is also robust. On the flip side, GitHub’s repositories aren’t the most secure place for high-value IPs. Additionally, some features are locked behind a paywall.
We’ve got a couple of really
small micro-services hosted here.
Heroku is a cloud application platform that combines compute, data, and workflow with a high-productivity developer experience.
Heroku Enterprise offers the same great developer experience along with enterprise-grade control, collaboration, and compliance. The platform gives enterprise teams the quickest path to delivering trusted customer experiences at scale.
-Enhanced privacy in a network-isolated runtime environment
-Seamless scalability to meet enterprise demand
-Simplified compliance with PCI, HIPPA, SOC, and other standards
-Automated, CI/CD workflows for optimal team collaboration
-Integration with Salesforce data to build personalized experiences
-Ecosystem of 150+ third-party add-on services to accelerate development
-Unified dashboard to manage apps, add-ons, billing, permissions, and more.
Application error monitoring.
Honeybadger provides exception and uptime monitoring to keep the web apps error-free.
Image optimization on the marketing site.
imgix’s dynamic, high-speed global image CDN delivers the perfect image to your customer in milliseconds—not a pixel or a moment wasted. Speed and image quality count when customers and users choose whether to click away or wait. imgix gives you a full suite of tools to ensure that your products look their best on any device or browser. Enhanced color, no distortion, and smart cropping tools keep your site sharp and fast. We serve over 4 billion images daily for companies of all sizes. Both our infrastructure and pricing are designed to grow seamlessly as your customer base does.
A more powerful command line app for macOS.
iTerm2 has a lot of features. Every conceivable desire a terminal user might have has been foreseen and solved.
Email delivery for app emails as well as for our Recover feature.
A set of powerful APIs that enable you to send, receive and track email from your app effortlessly whether you use Python, Ruby, PHP, C#, Node.js or Java.
Easy SMTP integration and a simple, RESTful API abstracts away the messy details of sending transactional or bulk email. Scale quickly, whether you need to send 10 or 10 million emails.
Searchable logs mean you always know what is happening to your email while tags make it easy to A/B test and report on your data, all via our webhooks.
Used for generating location maps on our Customer Profiles feature.
Turf is GIS for web maps. It's a fast, compact, and open-source JavaScript library that implements the most common geospatial operations: buffering, contouring, triangular networks, and more.
Automated on-call scheduling and incident escalation.
PagerDuty, Inc. (NYSE:PD) is a leader in digital operations management. In an always-on world, organizations of all sizes trust PagerDuty to help them deliver a perfect digital experience to their customers, every time. Teams use PagerDuty to identify issues and opportunities in real time and bring together the right people to fix problems faster and prevent them in the future.
Notable customers include GE, Cisco, Genentech, Electronic Arts, Cox Automotive, Netflix, Shopify, Zoom, DoorDash, Lululemon, and more. To learn more and try PagerDuty for free, visit www.pagerduty.com.
Used for realtime data streaming to our dashboard.
Bi-directional hosted APIs that are flexible, scalable and easy to use. We create and maintain complex infrastructure so you can build the realtime features your users need, fast.
This is the data source behind our currency conversion feature.
Nasdaq Data Link is a marketplace for financial, economic and alternative data delivered in modern formats for today's analysts, including Python, Excel, Matlab, R, and via our API.
Powers our API documentation and it’s magical.
With ReadMe, its easy to build a developer hub that adapts to the user, is always up to date, and looks great.
Our primary database.
RethinkDB is built to store JSON documents, and scale to multiple machines with very little effort. It has a pleasant query language that supports really useful queries like table joins and group by, and is easy to setup and learn.
Lets us merge all data streams in to a single source.
Twilio Segment is the world’s leading Customer Data Platform (CDP). Our platform provides companies with the data foundation that they need to put their customers at the heart of every decision.
Using Segment, companies can collect, unify and route their customer data into any system where it’s needed to better understand their customers and create seamless, compelling experiences in real-time.
Thousands of companies, including Intuit, FOX, Instacart, and Levi’s use Segment to make real-time decisions, accelerate growth and deliver world-class customer experiences.
The number of background jobs we run is borderline offensive. Sidekiq makes that cake.
Simple, efficient background processing for Ruby.
Old habits die hard…
TextMate is a general-purpose GUI text editor for Mac OS X.
Manages our social media scheduling for both @Baremetrics and @Shpigford.
Buffer is a social media management platform that helps businesses publish content, engage clients, and analyze their social media performance. Buffer integrates with Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and Pinterest allowing you to post in real time and schedule post across different social media accounts without having to login to each one separately.
Its features are:
- Simple and intuitive interface
- Post scheduling and
- Analytics
Some users report that some hashtags are not supported and adding an RSS feed would be a nice addition.
We use this mainly for sending our weekly newsletter, but also for some other things like marketing drip campaigns and new-feature notifications.
ConvertKit is a lead generation and email automation platform best suited for content-driven entrepreneurs and businesses. Its features strive to make the email marketing easier but more effective through
- Custom opt-in forms
- Automated emails
- Landing page templates
- Workflow automation rules
- Subscribers settings
- RSS feed
- Email templates and others.
On the negative side, some customers reported that troubleshooting issues can be difficult and the system can get "quirky".
This is the webinar tool I always wanted. We use this to do customer webinars as well as our Founders Live Q&A.
Crowdcast is a browser-based solution for creating interactive webinars, live Q&As, workshops, and online summits. This tool helps businesses collect engagement data from their videos that can be used to better understand and track the success of follow-up campaigns.
Crowdcast allows you to collect data on how people are reacting to your video content, determine which topics are engaging viewers, and measure the success of your follow-up campaigns by looking at engagement rates.
According to customer reviews, Crowdcast doesn't function well on some browers such as Safari and there are occasional issues with the quality of screensharing.
Makes quick work of GIF creation for customer support issues, feature animations for marketing and more!
GIF Brewery is an editing tool for iOS users to create stunning GIFs from videos. You can:
- Record or import a video file
- Edit add captions
- Save and share your GIF
Apply filters, set your desired frame rate, and apply image overlays if you want. Uploading to Gfycat is simplified, allowing you to share your work more easily. However, users report bugs; the tool also crashes when recording another video while saving a previous one.
Provides some insights in to user acquisition, though we tend to default to Mixpanel much more.
Google Analytics is a widely used web analytics service. It collects data and gives you valuable insights into how your website is performing. It’s an excellent free tool that provides reports on your audience’s behavior and conversion rates.
Using only one account, Google Analytics users can manage multiple websites. It also allows you to dive deeper into website data through its Universal Analytics feature. It collects and saves data from users, which may not be compliant with GDPR rules.
For live web traffic analytics.
GoSquared is an award-winning software perfect for subscription businesses to manage their customer lifecycle. Its real-time analytics pairs perfectly with features like:
- Customer data hub
- Intelligent live chat
- Marketing automation
You can track traffic sources, campaigns, and new visits. It also offers lead capture, lead enrichment, user segmentation, and automation features.
Meanwhile, many users have reported non-responsive customer support services. Others also think the service is a bit pricey.
How we track user acquisition channels and product usage.
Mixpanel helps companies measure what matters, make decisions fast, and build better products through data. With our powerful, self-serve product analytics solution, teams can easily analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain—in real-time, across devices—to improve their user experience.
Mixpanel serves over 26,000 companies from different industries around the world, including Expedia, Uber, Ancestry, DocuSign, and Lemonade. Headquartered in San Francisco, Mixpanel has offices in New York, Seattle, Austin, London, Barcelona, and Singapore.
For more information, visit: www.mixpanel.com
How we track our SEO efforts.
The Moz Local platform brings a robust local technology solution — driving more accurate listings management, actionable insights, automation of duplicate deletion, and review management. Moz Local will help you to better own and manage your physical location data than ever before. Deeper integrations, more active location management, and automation of previously manual processes will make your life easier.
For recording our screens when doing demos or creating marketing videos.
With ScreenFlow you can record any part of your screen or the entire monitor while also capturing your video camera, iOS device, microphone or multi-channel audio device, and your computer’s audio. The easy-to-use editing interface lets you creatively edit your video. When you are done, use the built-in sharing to publish your video directly to YouTube, Vimeo, Wistia, Facebook, Google Drive, Dropbox or to Telestream Cloud for transcoding. Or export an animated .GIF, ProRes file or .MP4 directly to your desktop.
Podcast publishing.
Simplecast is the leading podcast management and analytics platform, powering podcasts from some of the world’s most well-known creators and brands — Dax Shepard, Facebook, Politico, Shopify, TechCrunch, Harvard, Twitter, Fast Company, just to name a few — delivering nearly a billion audio streams each year. Our management, hosting and Audience analytics studio enables creators of all sizes to distribute their podcasts anywhere people listen. The Simplecast toolset makes it effortless for podcasters to grow, understand, and better connect with their audiences.
Audio hosting for our podcasts.
SoundCloud is the world’s largest open audio platform, powered by a connected community of creators, listeners, and curators on the pulse of what's new, now and next in culture. SoundCloud empowers the world’s audio creators with the best tools, services, and resources to build and grow their careers.
Basically the only usable
way we’ve found to stay on
top of content planning and
scheduling.
Trello is the visual tool that empowers your team to manage any type of project, workflow, or task tracking.
Add files, checklists, or even automation: Customize it all for how your team works best. Just sign up, create a board, and you’re off!
My personal favorite writing app.
Ulysses for Mac lets you focus when you need to concentrate. It keeps all your texts neatly stuffed in its intuitive library. With a few clicks, Ulysses can create beautiful documents from your manuscripts: PDFs, web pages, even iBooks-ready ePubs.
Podcast recording for interviews. I use this extensively for Founder Chats.
Zencastr is a modern web-based solution for high-quality podcast production. With a fully featured suite of professional tools, Zencastr allows podcast producers to quickly and painlessly record their guests over the web in studio quality
For our 1-800 number, which essentially no-one but recruiters and off-shore dev shops use, is there primarily as a comfort to potential new customers (“Hey, they’ve got a phone number!”).
Grasshopper is a VoIP service provider targeted toward entrepreneurs and small businesses. It packs plenty of features that include:
- Business texting
- VoIP and WiFi calling
- Virtual fax
It also offers detailed call reports and multiple extensions. New users can choose among Grasshopper's local, vanity, and toll-free numbers. You can also port an existing number over to your new account.
Grasshopper doesn’t offer video communications and CRM services, which may deter larger companies from using it.
If apps could get married, we’d totally tie the knot with Intercom. Every bit of communication with our customers, from onboarding to support and everything in between, flows through Intercom. We’ve written an entire guide on how to grow your business with Intercom.
Intercom is a Conversational Relationship Platform (CRP). With Intercom, you can build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences across the customer journey.The world's most successful companies, like Atlassian, Shopify, and New Relic use Intercom to deliver conversational customer experiences through chat, bots, and personalized messaging.
Quantitatively tracking customer feedback is a key part of how we make sure we’re serving customers well. Promoter.io powers all of that. We’ve written extensively as well about how we use Promoter.io.
Promoter is the most comprehensive customer intelligence & engagement platform built to drive growth and customer retention. We combine constant actionable feedback using a best-practice NPS approach alongside internal customer data from hundreds of sources to provide unparalleled customer insights.
Whenever we have an outage or a service interruption, we update our status page to keep customers in the loop.
StatusPage is a customer relationship management software used by businesses to update and inform their customers.
Any videos we produce are hosted on Wistia, which we then use throughout our app and in customer communication.
Wistia is more than a leading video hosting platform. Founded in 2006, Wistia helps B2B marketers get bigger results from their videos (and now podcasts, too). From their brandable player and lead generation tools to customizable galleries and industry-leading analytics, Wistia gives marketers more control over their brand experiences and the data to prove ROI. Plus, with free educational resources and world-class support, Wistia has your back—before you even press play. Learn more at wistia.com and follow along on LinkedIn and Instagram.
We use this to mockup UI animations and interactions.
Adobe After Effect is an animation and creative compositing software used by a wide variety of motion graphics and visual effects artists. It features:
- Collaboration
- Text animations
- VFX/Visual effects
- Motion graphics
- Rotoscoping
- Motion tracking
Apart from the many useful features, Adobe After Effect major disadvantage is the steep learning curve as reported by users and the not-so-stellar customer support.
This gives us direct insight in to how customers are using the app. It’s also really great for seeing what users were doing leading up to an error they received or pinpointing when they’re getting frustrated in-app.
FullStory is a digital intelligence system that helps companies optimize their customer experience. Session playbacks allow teams to inspect customer activity, view page clicks, create funnels, and review page analytics from a dashboard.
FullStory also provides “click maps” that offer comprehensive page insights. Brands can use these insights to proactively create effective digital experiences. Meanwhile, the steep learning curve can be overwhelming. Finding specific customer sessions is also tricky.
We use icons in all sorts of ways and IconJar helps organize them.
IconJar is a Mac app that helps to organize, search and use icons the easy way.
For all your vector-editing needs.
Vector graphics software used by designers of all types who want to create digital graphics, illustrations, and typography for all kinds of media: print, web, interactive, video, and mobile
The defacto UI design tool on our team.
The best products start with Sketch. Create, prototype, collaborate and turn your ideas into incredible products with the definitive platform for digital design.
Over one million designers — from freelancers, to some of the largest companies in the world — use Sketch to transform their ideas into incredible products, every day.
With a powerful vector editor, built-in prototyping and more, Sketch makes it easier than ever to take your designs from ideation through to realization.
And, with Sketch for Teams you can take collaboration to the next level. Share designs and prototypes, provide feedback and collaborate with your whole team in a single workspace.
Surfaces potentially productive keywords we could produce content for.
SEO analytics. Drive targeted search visitors to your website by focusing on the most promising organic keywords in your existing traffic.
Whenever we need to do quick video chats outside of our own team, we use Appear.in…it’s basically Google Hangouts, except it actually works.
Appear provide media processing and delivery technology whose modularity, efficiency, and high quality meets the changing needs of live content production.
For producing various marketing videos.
Final Cut Pro X is perfect for video editors that work on Mac devices. It offers a wealth of editing tools without having a confusing interface. It can also work with VR, supporting 360-degree video editing and real-time VR headset playback.
You can expect speedy editing and powerful tools that include filters, special effects, and motion graphics. On the flip side, its non-linear editor may turn off editors that have been using the linear editing approach.
Project management software that we’ve actually been able to stick with. Just the right amount of constraints and flexibility.