We're a Tokyo-based startup providing high-scale human translation. Some people call us the "Mechanical Turk of Translation". We have 8 people in Tokyo, 3 in the US, and 1,600 translators worldwide.
When we started myGengo, we spent a lot (a lot!) of time searching for the ‘perfect’ tools to do all the bits of rubbish that a startup does in its first couple of years of existence. But we now feel we've found an amazing set of services that do things really well for us, from email delivery to API management to accounting to sales. We use this stuff every day, and we depend on it as much as our water supply. So it’s worth sharing with you — there might be a few in here you haven’t tried.
(BTW, we're not getting paid for this stuff, and there are no affiliate links here. It's out of pure appreciation. Oh and apologies for the list-based title. I'm so sorry.)
*** UPDATE: I just heard this described as "Cheap Tech" by @jimworth — I think this is BANG ON. 10-15 services at $10 to $100 per month are not going to kill a startup, so you should use these tools to remove friction and create focus for your team on What You Are Damn Good At. This is the REAL point of this list. ***
1. Zendesk
Customer Support Ticketing & Knowledge Base
As you can imagine, offering support in multiple languages is crucial for us. There are VERY few support ticketing systems that do this, and do it in any way competently. Not only does Zendesk tick this box, but it’s also a friendly, well-built, reliable, intuitive system that is worth every penny of the price we pay. I think it’s pretty amazing how they’ve turned something ‘boring’ like support ticketing into something so fun — their branding and product approach is an inspiration. As disclosure, one of our awesome investors, Christoph Janz, is also a lucky investor in Zendesk.
Public Collaborative Support
We’ve had a bit of a bumpy ride with GetSatisfaction initially (I think we were too small, and had too few users to make it work at first) but it really comes into its own when groups come together to solve problems, and to track common issues that multiple users have. It’s definitely part of our support strategy for the future. My only complaint now would be the price... it’s a bit expensive for a startup :). Check out our community here.
3. SendGrid
Transactional emails
Despite the fact we’re not really a ‘consumer’ service like Facebook or Reddit that relies on millions of users, we still send a TON of email because of the notifications that go out to our translator pool. SendGrid handles all those ‘boring’ emails like signups, order confirmations etc. These are the kinds of emails that you *need* to know will be delivered reliably, day-in, day-out. Before SendGrid, we were perplexed by arcane required knowledge like SPF records, blacklist/whitelist problems and email server overloads. Now we just send our stuff through SendGrid, via their API. Despite being a startup (a 500startups one too), they’ve given us amazing reliability and a service that’s super affordable and easy to scale — I think we only pay them about $80 a month for sending thousands and thousands of emails a day. Awesome.
4. MailChimp
Marketing emails and mailing list signups
We love MailChimp’s flexibility and power, and the little extras like free t-shirts (thanks!) that show the team there appreciates their users. We use MailChimp to send newsletters and updates (basically non-transactional emails) because it allows you to re-use HTML templates, manage large lists, and track open/conversion rates easily. The app is become a bit of a beast, simply because of it’s power — but everyone in the company gets to grips with it quickly.
5. Apigee
API traffic management
Apigee helps us to offer our API reliably, securely and gives us an easy way of tracking how many people are using it and what they’re using it for. It was pretty easy to set up, and routes all API calls through their servers via some DNS tweaks. I liken Apigee to SendGrid quite a bit, because they’re both so easy to get going with, and great for handling ‘boring’ stuff.
6. String
Localization management
Well, it wouldn’t be fair to leave String out, would it! As a multi-lingual website, String is a massively valuable tool for us; we wouldn’t be able to release features nearly as quickly without having localization ‘built-in’ to our dev process, and String allows us to do that by easily keeping track of what is translated and what isn’t, as well as managing our translators across languages. Oh and it’s not just free for us, it’s free for you :)
Content Management for non-app content
For ‘basic’ pages like our blog, translation resources and ‘brochureware’ pages we use Expression Engine — what we think is the most flexible and easy-to-use CMSs out there. ‘EE’ has a great template structure which allows you to build pretty, functional pages really simply, and it’s easy go from HTML page to EE template within a couple of minutes. It’s only a couple of hundred bucks for a license, and we think it’s worth every penny.
8. Chartbeat
Live analytics
Chartbeat is on the left-hand monitor of our metrics viz machine in the office. We loved chartbeat because of this: the moment we pasted the code into our site, it started tracking and showing us how many active users we have on the site. I mean the *second* it was in there. Visitors to our office always ask “what’s that?”; it’s a great talking point. Chartbeat also alerts us when there’s a new article about us that’s sending a bunch of new traffic (and it’s an instant alert if something’s wrong, too). Cheap as chips.
9. Mint
Semi-live analytics
(This is not the same as mint.com) Mint forms the right-hand view for our metrics machine. It’s an app you install on your server, rather than being a web-service. Mint gives you basic traffic stats like users, SERPs, referrers etc. The main reason for using Mint now is the lag in Google Analytics — by having Mint on auto-refresh every 5 mins we get an up-to-date view of site traffic as it happens. It functions as info-porn for the office, when we go to the bathroom or to get a snack.
10. PivotalTracker
Dev Project Mangement and Bug Tracking
We’ve just switched to Pivotal Tracker from Lighthouse, after finding that we (read: me) needed much better visibility of the overall backlog and milestones, rather than just seeing ‘what we’re working on *this* week’. We do weekly releases, and prioritizing bug-fixes versus features is (as with any startup) vital to do, and we think Pivotal does it nicely visually. Some nice little extras are integration with GetSatisfaction and Zendesk — so we can drag support tickets into the dev backlog in a flash. Nice. Oh and free.
11. Salesforce
Enterprise sales management & CRM
Well, who’d have thunk that a startup would use something so ‘enterprise’ (read: clunky)! It was a bit of a surprise for us but Salesforce has actually been great for managing our larger sales, and making things visible across our US and JP teams. To be honest, Salesforce is basically just a very flexible database with hundreds of custom fields, i.e. to a programmer it seems like a $25/user version of phpmyadmin... but it’s money well spent. We’ve evaluated ‘simple’ solutions like Highrise but they never actually helped track the things that really needed tracking, so we’re sticking with the big guns of Salesforce.
12. RightSignature
Online document signing
You can read a full case study on RightSignature here. Suffice to say that we use them any time we need something signed — from one of our thousands of translators signing a tax form on their PC, to our investors signing on holiday on their iPad, to new customers. Simply awesome.
13. Gotomeeting
Remote meetings
Skype is OK, but for managing meetings with multiple users or reliably screen-sharing, Gotomeeting kicks Skype’s ass. We pay about $50 a month for the privilege, but it’s worth it for the reliability.
14. Xero
Accounts/bookkeeping and invoicing
Oh man, Xero is awesome. They don’t seem to get the US press they deserve — which is odd because they provide probably the most user-friendly and powerful invoicing and accounting system I’ve ever seen. The interface is uber-consistent (and pretty) and they have super-nice touches like automatic PayPal feed imports and little graphs to show what invoices are outstanding. We only pay about $40 a month and I don’t begrudge a penny of it. Oh and they have an API. Kicks Freshbooks' ass (IMO).
15. Dropbox
Online backup and file-sharing
Dropbox is so awesome that it’s easy to forget *how* awesome it is. The sync of your files to the cloud happens in the background, and so seamlessly that you just get used to it. I have all my myGengo files in one folder within my dropbox on my machine, so it’s available everywhere and in case my machine is lost or stolen. The BIG hassle with Dropbox is they don’t have business accounts, so I have to manually pay for each staff member by logging in as them and then paying — so it’s hard to track and manage. But apart from that, love it. EDIT: I've learned from the comments that Dropbox now has "Teams" — I'll be checking that out! Thanks commenters.
BONUS: Office Glico
Honesty-Based Office Snack Delivery
Glico is a high-tech hunger solution only found in Japan. Using a combination of local delivery networks and client-request-based snack provision, they provide a scalable and reliable support infrastructure for stomach emptiness. Oh wait.... ACTUALLY it’s a service where a person comes round to our office on a bike and fills up a box with snacks for which you pay individually through an honour system. Only in Japan, suckeeerrsss!!
Have any tools that are indispensable for your company? Let us know.
