On recommended vendors

My personal recommendations on the best software solutions for early stage startups

This is my personal list of the best solution(s) in each category. Note this is a dynamic list and the selection process is obviously highly subjective.

In putting together this list, I optimized for ease of use over features, and pricing over edge cases. Obviously, your startup’s own circumstances may dictate different choices.

Feel free to suggest other vendors or additional categories in the comments or on Twitter.

• Cap table management (Pulley, Carta)

• Payroll (Gusto, anti-recommendation for Xero)

• Overseas payroll (Upwork is a lightweight start, but for more involved processes, Deel is popular, as is Remote)

• Banking (Mercury)

• Credit cards (Ramp, anti-recommendation for Brex)

• Compensation dashboards / equity grant benchmarking (Pave)

• Videoconferencing (just use Zoom, don’t be cute)

• All-in-one company ops (Rippling, AbstractOps)

• Lightweight automation (Phantom Buster for cheap and easy, Zapier for slightly more complex use cases and Notion integration)

• Centralized team knowledge base (Notion)

• Lightweight social media scheduling (native Twitter scheduling or Buffer for LinkedIn, which doesn’t have built-in delay functionality)

• Tracking Twitter follower counts (the sole cheap/free solution seems to be Automate)

• Event pages (native Zoom event pages for webinars, or Partiful for in-person events)

• Email (GSuite is the best value for money unless you have specific operating restrictions, like an office in China)

• Incorporation (seriously, use a real lawyer, but if you really want to use an automated solution, then Stripe Atlas and Clerky are the most popular)

• Scheduling (TidyCal from AppSumo is a great lightweight alternative to Calendly)

The following are vendors I’m not as familiar with, but have collected recommendations on from our network:

• Lightweight CRM (Close is a popular recommendation, although I do not have a personal view here)

• Asynchronous team communication (Twist seems popular, although I usually just use scheduled Slack messages)

• Screen recordings for demos etc. (Screen Studio is highly recommended)