What Tools KickoffLabs Uses

“Josh had to expand the product beyond launch pages into ongoing campaigns, contests, and integrations with Mailchimp and Salesforce to attract customers with recurring needs.”

Saasclub high

“Google Adwords – By far, the most money we have spent on customer acquisition has been with Google Adwords.”

Kickofflabs high

“Google Analytics – Like most, we default to Google Analytics. As I write this, I realize this is the cheap (and likely wrong) choice.”

Kickofflabs high

“DropBox – Easiest way to share anything not Google doc related.”

Kickofflabs high

“PayPal – We still use PayPal occasionally when a customer cannot use our regular credit card form and needs a pre-paid plan. We also leverage the invoice feature when we perform custom work for a client.”

Kickofflabs high

“Xero – I would sum it up as, “accounting software that just works.””

Kickofflabs high

“BufferApp – Does one thing and does it really well. Spend an hour each week and fill up a queue of tweets and Facebook posts.”

Kickofflabs high

“Trello – Some day we will need something with more features/control, but for the two of us, this works very well.”

Kickofflabs high

“GetDrip – Our auto responder class on landing pages has been a really good source of new users for us. Drip makes this easy and is something we will start using more in the coming months.”

Kickofflabs high

“Heroku – The first thing I hear when I tell people we use Heroku is “Isn’t it expensive?”. My standard response is: I value my time much more. There are cheaper ways to host an app, but they all would require much more time.”

Kickofflabs high

“Skype – With just two of us, we have not had the need to venture into the land of hip chat or campfire. We generally do a daily video chat and then go our separate ways.”

Kickofflabs high

“Sendgrid – We use this to send all KickoffLabs customer related emails and anything internally which does not fit within the PostMark guidelines.”

Kickofflabs high

“Braintree – We have flirted in the past with the idea of moving to Stripe, but Braintree has been very solid and is already working.”

Kickofflabs high

“KissMetrics – We run everything through KissMetrics. Setup is manual and tedious, but once it is up and running, you are good to go and it is well worth the effort.”

Kickofflabs high

“Google Mail – I suspect this is the same for 99.9% of startups. I recently started moving my personal email to FastMail, and I could see us moving KickoffLabs in the same direct in the near future.”

Kickofflabs high

“Google Docs – Even though there is just two of us, having a central place to collaborate on documents and spreadsheets has been very important.”

Kickofflabs high

“NewRelic – We generally use the free plan that comes with Heroku. NewRelic provides us notifications of when the proverbial shit hits the fan.”

Kickofflabs high

“DNSimple – Set it and forget it. Really the simplest way you can manage your DNS and top notch support.”

Kickofflabs high

“Namecheap – repeat after me: friends don’t let friends buy anything from GoDaddy. I have been using Namecheap for years, and I am extremely happy with the entire experience.”

Kickofflabs high

“WPEngine – Before WPEngine, I was what you could call anti-wordpress. I tolerated it at times, but would rather use just about anything else. However, the support and reliability of WPEngine have been so good, I now run my own personal blog on it and we will be moving the KickoffLabs marketing si...”

Kickofflabs high

“Visual Web Optimizer – we used to use VWO much more, but today we generally use this simple helper + KissMetrics. Still, if you want easy A/B testing, I would start here.”

Kickofflabs high

“Perfect Audience – It takes a lot of effort to get someone to your website the first time. Don’t let that go to waste after they leave. Perfect Audience is simple “retargeting” that follows these visitors around the internet until they come back and make a purchase or at least give us their email...”

Kickofflabs high

“UserVoice – A while ago we wrote about UserVoice being the best support service we could find. Are they still the best? Maybe, but there are a lot of upstarts I would love to try.”

Kickofflabs medium

“We recently came across two services that let us put together a quality product promo video in a couple of hours and for less than $200! First, check out the video: OK, so how did we do it? (and by we, I mean, how did Josh do it? :) Tools PowToon – allows you to build a great looking animated pre...”

Kickofflabs high

“Tools PowToon – allows you to build a great looking animated presentations. VoiceBunny – Crowd Voice overs – seriously, this exists.”

Kickofflabs high

“RedisToGo – We used to leverage Redis a lot more in KickoffLabs but got burned by having a dependency on multiple data stores. We now use Redis for essentially throw away data.”

Kickofflabs high

“BugSnag – Exceptions are caught and logged by BugSnag. We tried lots of providers here and fell in love with BugSnag.”

Kickofflabs high

“Pingdom – Old school simple uptime notifications. Use it for both downtime notices and to let us know when we have a big back up in our worker queues.”

Kickofflabs high

“PaperTrail –  I tried a bunch of logging services before. This is the hands down best option.”

Kickofflabs high

“Trunks App – Cheap and easy shared Git repositories. Someday we will move to GitHub, but for now this works really well.”

Kickofflabs high

“oDesk – Finding good help is hard. oDesk doesn’t necessarily make it easy, but it is as good as it gets today.”

Kickofflabs medium