Based on a few conversations in founder groups, I have realised that a lot of people struggle to choose the right tool stack to launch the company. I’ve been there. From our early days to now, we’ve used some great tools that helped us grow. Currently We are 30 people strong, but this tool stack is still working for us.

👍General rules of thumb

• Use what you know: Use tools you know and you are comfortable with, especially in engineering

• Time to market matters!

• What worked for us, might not be suitable for you.

• Most of the tools below are free or give generous credits and can be used first 1-2 years for free!

Ok, let’s start!

🏢Organization

• Bluemeg - (Singapore specific) Corporate entity management

• Wise for paying contractors

🕣Productivity

• Slack - all communications, some HR workflows

• Diagrams.net - for any types of diagrams

• Notion - to track product backlogs, sprints and tickets. Replaces our knowledge base, instead of Jira, Confluence.

• tldv - recordings of meetings and calls

• loom - quick explainers, design walkthroughs, QA sessions

• Google workspace - corporate email, calendar, drive (just everything, no explanation needed)

🛠Engineering / Product

• Github - code repository

• Github Actions - CICD

• Google Cloud - for hosting our servers

• Vercel + Astro - for hosting our landing page

• Wordpress - for hosting our blog

• Mixpanel - tracking of product events and dashboards

• Microsoft Clarity - free hotjar replacement to record user sessions

• Figma - for product and landing UI and prototypes for sales demos

• Stoplight - for hosting our API docs in open-api format

• Hashnode - for our engineering blog

• Scrut - for SOC2 compliance

💰Marketing / Sales / Operations

• Hubspot as our CRM, help portal, meeting scheduler

• Zoominfo for prospect information

• Looker Studio - we use it for customer and internally facing dashboards and reports