As the first product hire at Observe Inc., I was tasked with bringing in a lot of tooling to solve problems. I’ve put together this list in the hopes of making the journey easier for others. Feel free to submit a PR if there’s more you think I should add.
Wiki
- Notion - Fun fact: For a short time we used notion databases as our project management tool but outgrew it.
Observability & Monitoring
- Observe - Shameless plug 😜
- Uptimerobot - No frills synthetic monitoring. Pings all of the things.
Communication
Video Conferencing Equipment
- Neat.no - Most of the hardware suppliers require you to go through a local reseller and buy separate components. This company is a one click stop for getting integrated zoom equipment.
Project Management
- JIRA - We probably complain about it on a daily basis but it feels too risky to try one of the upstarts at this time.
SOC2 Compliance
- Vanta - SOC2 in a box. This company saved my ass as someone who had never run lead this process before.
- Checkr - We are required to do background checks as part of our SOC2 controls.
- KnowBe4 - Security awareness training works.
Billing & Usage
- Ordway Labs - Observe has a usage based pricing model so we could not use the traditional billing system vendors. Ordway caters to B2B companies and has a tight integration with Salesforce.
- Bill.com - Before we had any systems in place we would manually bill using this company.
Business Intelligence
- Metabase - This is an open source BI tool that I used to quickly iterate on usage dashboards for sales. It got the job done well since I was game to write a lot of SQL.
- Snowflake - We dump all of the datas here.
Customer Success
- Intercom - We use a custom embed so that there is no floating bar in our app.
- Slack - All of our customers get invited to a separate user group slack workspace.
SalesOps
- Gong - Out of all of the tools this is the one I didn’t know I needed. It records and transcribes all of the sales calls. It’s been an invaluable tool for tuning our messaging and hearing from customers.
- Salesforce
- Salesloft
Marketing
- Marketo - I can’t believe this is still best in class in 2022 but here we are.
- Google Analytics - I’ve still barely scratched the service with what this can do.
- Reprise - This lets you build interactive click through demos.
- Closefactor - Enriches our account lists with special factors we can use for targeting and prioritization.
- Zoominfo
- Hootsuite
Webinars
- Livestorm - I really wanted a webinar platform that worked in a browser and had good looking forms. This checks all of the boxes at a very reasonable price point.
- Frame.io - Video review software we use to give feedback to video editors.
- Riverside.fm - High quality video interview recording. If you’re using zoom to record a customer interview you’re sacrificing a lot of quality.