📶 Our 2022 Tech Stack

The 22 Best Tools We Use to Run our Business

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We've been software guinea pigs for the past two years, and we've tested over 150 different tools to run our business.

These are the 22 best software products we used to run Confluence this year.

P.S. We're paying customers of all of these companies, and we're affiliate partners for a few of them. These companies have improved our business, and we think they can do the same for yours. Do your own research before buying any new software.

Best new tools:

Most-used:

beehiiv is hands down the best newsletter tool in the game. We made the switch in February, and we haven’t regretted it once.

Their UI/UX flexibility is next level. They provide a built-in referral and recommendation network that helps you scale your subscriber base. They provide best-in-class analytics that gives you a more detailed view on your audience preferences and subscriber attribution. They’ve also rolled out a premium ad network so that newsletter writers can get matched with advertisers and get paid without having to haggle.

We had to switch over to Wordpress last month because we had plateaued with Squarespace. If you’re new to web development, it can be overwhelming, but they have loads of content, plugins, and available developers that can help get your site set up and ready to go.

We use Mercury for banking, and we’ve recommended them to every new company we meet. Comparing their UI/UX to other banking service providers makes it an easy choice, and they’ve also started offering credit to clients.

Jasper is one of the coolest new pieces of software we adopted this year. We started on their basic plan and bumped up twice because we were getting so much value out of the tool.

For those that don’t know, Jasper uses AI to automate different parts of your copywriting. It can save you hours of work every week, and it’s a game changer for any business that plays the content game.

We’ve partnered with them, and if any of you want to get 10k free credits to use in Jasper, just follow this link.

If you run any type of organization that could benefit from a job board or talent network, we highly recommend going with Pallet.

Their team is one of the best we’ve worked with, and their product helps anybody with an audience share relevant job opportunities with that audience (and get paid for it).

We’ve written in the past about some of the cool things you can build with Softr, and this is definitely one of the cooler tools we adopted this year.

One of the problems with using Airtable is that it becomes difficult to do anything with your data once it’s stored. Sure you can create some dashboards, but if you want to leverage that data to create something more public-facing, you’re out of luck.

Softr fixes this by letting you plug right into any front-end template they’ve already created so you can create a web app in minutes.

If you’re looking for some inspiration on what you can build using Softr, check out the writeup we did on how we’re using it to build Signal Tracker.

We created the Community Builder Playbook to package up everything that we’ve learned from creating, scaling, and monetizing an online community. (There’s a lot of nuance to it if anybody was wondering.)

Creating this wouldn’t have been possible without Podia.

Their software is built for content creators to share their knowledge in formats that are easy-to-digest by their most-loyal fans. They also take care of a lot of the administrative work, you can communicate to your audience directly within their platform, and you can even run an affiliate program for any of the products you are selling.

We use Gusto to run payroll so it’s easier to work with contractors.

If you’re starting out as a business owner, you can probably get away with making payments out of your bank account, but tax season will become a nightmare to chase down what can be deductible. This is why we use Gusto.

I don’t think there is a more useful software company out there. Zapier powers our entire business, and it helps us create automations through logic.

If you use software and you’re time-constrained (that’s probably all of you), you should use Zapier.

Surfer is another tool we started using in Q4, and it’s become the tool I’m probably spending the most of my time within.

If you are creating search engine optimized content, you shouldn’t be flying blind. If you’re strategy is to just create good content and watch the search results poor in, you’re in for a rude awakening (this is what we used to believe, and can confirm that it doesn’t work like that).

Surfer gives you tools to plan keywords, create content that ranks, and audit your site to see where it can be improved. They also make it very easy to get started (we knew literally nothing about SEO three months ago), and we’ve already made noticeable improvements to our search rankings all because of Surfer.

I hate meetings. I think they’re bad for the soul. That’s why I love Loom.

Just record you’re screen and send over the video as a link. It makes working with contractors 10x easier, and I’ve probably saved myself 100 hours of meetings this year by using it.

All SaaS companies love ChartMogul.

They help companies build beautiful dashboards for any and all of their SaaS metrics, and they make it incredibly easy to share.

We use Memberspace to gate access to the private community page for Confluence (members can login here).

Their platform lets people create subscription products without needing to code, and it has allowed us to monetize the Confluence.VC community through private memberships. They provide loads of integrations, case studies, and resources to help you get started, and they also take care of a lot of the administrative work that you don’t want to when you’re starting out (chasing down failed payments, automated email communication at different touch points, etc.)

If you have a loyal following and you’re looking to monetize on some of that loyalty, we highly recommend checking out Memberspace.

Super clean product that helps centralize all of your metrics and investor updates. We use Visible to track KPI performance and organize all of our monthly updates.

We’re using their company-focused product, but I highly recommend their investor product for any VCs out there looking to improve their investor reporting.

We use Airtable for all of our form collections, and we couldn’t operate without it.

They offer automations, they integrate nicely with other tools like Softr, and you can filter and embed different views externally on your website or internally within your Notion.

If you’re working with large-ish datasets and hate using Excel and Google Sheets, you should consider Airtable.

We know that everybody else loves Notion too, so we don’t need to cover this one in too much detail. It’s probably the cleanest software I use, and I would recommend it to any business owner.

We originally used Stripe Atlas to incorporate, but switched over to Firstbase off of a recommendation. We’re glad we made the switch.

Firstbase makes it incredibly easy to incorporate, keep track of important filing docs, and their team always stays on top of things for you in case you forget something of want your business to be more efficient.

If any company is starting out and looking to incorporate, you can’t go wrong with Firstbase or Stripe Atlas, but we’d give the edge to the former.

People hate on Google Sheets, but we have almost no problems with it.

We use it to track performance KPIs month-over-month (before integrating into Visible to make it look prettier), and we’ve also started using it to build out our programmatic SEO strategy and webpages.

P.S. If anybody has played around with programmatic SEO before, let me know. Would love to trade notes on what works / doesn’t.

In lieu of raising outside capital, we sell merch to fund operations.

We don’t have the capacity to deal with inventory or anything like that, so we use Printful for print-on-demand. For anybody looking for a lightweight way sell physical goods, go with Printful.

We’ve used Intros for ~one year now, and it’s become one of the better tools used by our community.

Their software helps matchmake community members based on what’s important. As the community leader, you decide the match criteria, and their software goes to work to make it happen.

This is a great tool for anybody that runs a community and is looking for ways to increase community engagement through connections.

If you do any sort of email marketing, you need an email service provider. We recommend going with ActiveCampaign.

They have an advance platform that helps you feed the right information to customers and leads based on where they are in the buyers' journey.

We’ve become huge supporters of Upwork this year. As we started acting more like a business, we started outsourcing more things to contractors. Blog content, design, list building, VA admin tasks. You name it - we’ve probably used Upwork for it.

That's it for this years' list. If you have any other tools that you love using, we'd love to hear about them.

Shoot a quick response to this email to let us know what your favorite software tool is.

- Clay and Tyler

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