Resources to Help You Run Your SaaS, eCommerce, and Subscription-Based Business
People ask us all the time for suggestions on tools and services that can help them run their SaaS, eCommerce, or Subscription-based online business. Well, we’ve FINALLY put a huge resource together that details the things we use and what we recommend to our customers.
Best Resources for Every Online Business
A Business Phone – Grasshopper and Freedom Voice are both easy, affordable options. They all let you set up and receive business calls to your personal cell phone, give you multiple extensions for your team members, and let you choose a vanity number that’s great for branding.
A Professional Business Mailing Address – We wanted a business mailing address that wasn’t a PO Box so we looked around and chose Virtual Post Mail (we use this). We’ve been a long time user of Virtual Post Mail and they are fine – but their web backend is outdated and a pain to use. They help you set up a virtual address and get access to scanned email from anywhere in the world. So you can’t go wrong with either one.
Online Accounting Software – We used Wave Accounting when we started because it was free. But we’re moving to Xero because it has more integrations with awesome tools like Shoeboxed (just use it) – which means less of the most horrible work I can think of – accounting, sorry accountants, lol. We also really liked FreshBooks, LessAccounting, and Accountedge. I’d choose Freshbooks if you do a lot of invoicing, LessAccounting if you need nothing less than superior customer service, and Accountedge if you need the whole sha-bang ( payroll, track sales, manage contacts, and billing).
Creating a Website – Get a domain name with Namecheap or buy a domain with established traffic and domain authority for a higher price from Flippa. If you’re a newbie or don’t want to deal with setting up hosting or designing pages to get your website up and running use something like Strikingly or Instapage (we use this). Both options have limited integrations with other tools BUT win on ease and are quick to launch. Want something a little more advanced? I’d use Flywheel or WPEngine (we use this) and use WordPress to create a website. Both options take care of the hard part of WordPress AND they give you the opportunity to add all the WP plugins without the speed and install hurdles WP is known for. Speaking of speed, for all the self-hosted or WordPress options make sure your website’s fast and use a CDN like Maxcdn (we use this). If you’re setting up an eCommerce shop, scroll down to the eCommerce section for website options.
Email Marketing Tools – If you’re just looking to start/manage a email newsletter, I HIGHLY recommend MailerLite (we use this). We switched from Mailchimp to Mailerlite for a few reasons (mainly simplicity and price). But I always recommend MailerLite or Constant Contact to people that need something simple. If you’re looking for something more advanced with deep segmentation built into your app, try Autosend (we use this), but I’d only recommend this if you’re running a SaaS, eCommerce, or Subscription-based service and looking for a multi-medium lifecycle marketing tool and customer journey tool.
Social Media Marketing Tools – If you’re just starting out on social media you can use Knowem to check the availability of your username across multiple social networks (over 500) at once. Once your accounts are up and running you can monitor your brand over social media with Sprout Social, Hootsuite (we use this), or Sendible. When it’s time to take your social media up a notch you can use Hashtracking and Keyhole to track hashtags across multiple networks. And you can use Socialcentiv to actually make money on Twitter by finding new customers that are prime to buy your service or product (we’re testing this tool out now).
SEO/Content Marketing – These are exactly all the tools we use to handle our content marketing and SEO. We will detail the process of how exactly how we use these tools in a later article, but for now, here’s we use this for content marketing and SEO: Hittail, Positionly, Co-Schedule, ContentMarketer.io, and SEMRush.
Customer Service and Success – If you care about growing your business, you care about your customers. This is why you need the right tools to help customers before, during, and after the sale. A good place to start for every online business is a support ticket software. Right now we’re beta testing Deskolia with good results. It’s just a really simple web based customer support software that looks like regular email. If you want to help customers pre-sale, you need a live chat tool like Livechat and Olark (we use this). Want to really impress your customers? Help them, before they ask. If this sounds like sci-fi I promise it’s easy to do with a tool like Autosend. Autosend helps you track your customers online behavior and proactively email, text, or message them the moment they need it. Finally, when you want to manage all your customers, contacts, meetings, and tasks in one tool, try a CRM like Nutshell or UkuuPeople. After you get happy customers, give them a place to share a testimonial using something like SurveyGizmo or Boast. And since happy customers bring more happy customers you can ask them to refer others with a tool like Referral Candy or Gleam (we use this).
Analytics – Currently we use an extremely hacked together and upgraded version of Google Analytics and I sadly wouldn’t recommend this. It’s just too damn hard to get everything set up correctly AND actually get reports you need to make impactful changes. We’re in the process of looking for a better solution. We’re testing PTengine since it’s both analytics and heatmaps in one. We’ll update this page when we nail down our tool. To track our social media analytics we use Sumall, even though it does much more than social media analytics. For our ads we are testing out Improvely.
Website Optimization Tools – This is a huge section, which needs it’s own article (no worries – coming soon). But to make it quick, Instapage (we use this) or Strikingly. If you need real time web analytics to see how customers interact on your site with real time website session replays, you can use heatmaps. My favorite heatmap tools are Mouseflow and LuckyOrange. Need website forms? Try Formstack. Need an exit intent tool? Go with Gleam (we use this) or OptinMonster. When you need to gather feedback from customers, SurveyGizmo helps you create a professional survey that’s secure, interactive, and highly customizable. Need an all-in-one solution with cart abandonment offers, sweepstakes, and social marketing, Justuno is an awesome option.
Online Storage – There’s always the default Dropbox (we use this), but Hightail is a good option too. Hightail gives you enhanced file sharing abilities with a time sensitive feature that automatically self-deletes at the expiration time.
Working Remotely with Team – Track time, set up recurring invoices, manage projects, and collaborate with teams with Hubstaff, Timedoctor, or Nutcache. Share repetitve internal processes (like your content marketing sharing strategy for each piece of content you produce) using Process.st (we use this). There’s a lot of crap on Fiverr (we use this), but there are also many hidden gems, especially for a few small odd jobs your team doesn’t feel like working on. We use Fiverr for videos mostly which we will share soon. But look around, you’d be surprised what you can get for five dollars. Speaking of video, anytime you want to video conference with the team try BigMarker.
Misc – Just starting out or need funding? Then you need to create a beautiful LIVING business plan with Liveplan. Always wanted your own mobile app? With Nativ, you can drag and drop your way to a beautiful mobile app in no time.
Best Resources for SaaS Businesses
Compose – The simple way to host your database. It’s for the devs. We use it to host our MongoDB database.
Digital Ocean (we use this) – Cheap, simple web hosting for devs. The devs on our team love it, it’s we use this to host the Autosend app.
SaaS Metrics Dashboard – There are a few out there now. There’s MRR.io, Chart mogul (we use this) or Baremetrics. We use ChartMogul since it’s dirt cheap and quite useful. MRR.io is new, but free. Baremetrics is a little easier to read/understand but you pay for the bit of ease. Test all three and see which works best for you.
Coding without developers – Segment + Google Tag Manager = Happier, More Productive Marketing and Tech Team! Segment (we use this) helps you install the code of other tools by flipping a switch (you can even install Autosend this way). It’s free for some tools and takes an initial set up from your devs but I promise they’ll never have to touch it again when you need to install all those awesome tools you want to try. The times the marketing side has to make things without devs beyond pasting code blocks, we use Knack. We’ve been testing Knack internally lately and we’ve been pulling off some neat, robust web apps without involving our dev team. Take that busy devs!
Best Resources for eCommerce Businesses
eCommerce shopping cart tools – This is another huge subject that deserves it’s own write up (again – coming soon). But for anyone looking to set up shop quickly I highly recommend Shopify, Bigcommerce, or 3D Cart. WooCommerce is free, but takes a bit more effort to set up since you will need to set up WordPress (easy to do with WP Engine) and find a theme, but it’s totally a quality option.
Best Resources for Subscription-Based Businesses
Expertory – Have a video site and need to sell subscriptions or timed rentals? Want to charge for live sessions? Expertory is a killer option.
Paid Memberships Pro – Use this plugin to add paid memberships to your WordPress site.
Chargify – Set up recurring billing and manage your subscriptions through this billing software.
Disclosure: Please note that some of the links below are affiliate links, and at no additional cost to you, I will earn a commission if you decide to make a purchase. Please understand that I have experience with all of these companies, and I recommend them because they are helpful and useful, not because of the small commissions I make if you decide to buy something. Please do not spend any money on these products unless you feel you need them or that they will help you achieve your goals.