Buying a B2B SaaS Startup Toolkit in 2024: Month 0-2
All the apps and services we bought in Tezi's first two months and why
In the two months since we incorporated Tezi (in stealth mode), we’ve hired a lot of tools and vendors to support us. Turns out starting from zero means no systems or processes are in place yet. Sharing where we netted out on each selection and why…
Banking: Went with Mercury. Our concerns about SVB-style, regional bank issues were allayed by their Treasury solution. I’d had great experiences with their product for my LLC, so as long as they could protect our funds they were an easy winner on user experience.
Business Credit Card: We wanted every employee to have a corporate card. It’s so easy to drop ship a card to a new employee and manage their limits in Mercury. At 1.5% cashback, we didn’t feel the need to explore Ramp, Brex, etc.
Payroll, Health Benefits & HRIS: Evaluated Rippling, Gusto, and Deel. Went with Gusto because it was easier to get onboarded (no Sales gate), lower cost, and fewer à la carte add-on unexpected costs. We recognized we may need to migrate to something else later.
Expense Tracking: Gusto has a very basic expense management tool for reimbursing employees for any charges on their personal cards. Since we mostly use corporate cards via Mercury, this was good enough, so we didn’t thoroughly evaluate Xero, Expensify, Concur, etc. It’s nice that reimbursements happen automatically with payroll.
Law Firm: Evaluated three that came highly recommended. We went with Gunderson Dettmer, as they have deep expertise in working with startups, are agile enough to keep up, and were willing to defer a lot of early billing until post-fundraising. We’ve been very happy with them and would highly recommend to other founders.
Bookkeeping & Tax Prep: Evaluated Pilot vs Bench. Went with Pilot even though they’re more expensive because of their experience in accrual-based accounting (vs. cash-based) which is a requirement for VC equity rounds. Pilot had better reviews and switching off of Bench seemed inevitable by Series A at the latest.
Cap Table & Comp Data: Evaluated Carta vs Pulley. Went with Carta even though its more expensive. The add-on products for Comp Data and QSBS Advising for our employees tipped it in Carta’s favor. It’s nice to not have to add-in another tool like Pave. That much of our equity from prior companies was already in Carta certainly helped too.
Chat: Never explored something besides Slack. It’s the default. This was actually our first tool and probably the true beginning of the company well before incorporation.
Email & Calendar: Obviously Google Workspace. Didn’t seriously contemplate anything else. Tried Calendly for scheduling, but the new-ish Bookable Appointments feature in GCal nuked my need for Calendly. Tried Superhuman as an alternative front-end to Gmail. Learning a new way to work through email ended up being net slower, so I reverted back to Gmail.
Video Conferencing: No idea why we’d pay for Zoom when GMeets is included in our Google Workspace subscription, and they’re effectively the same product.
Docs & Wiki: We used Google Docs for awhile. The early engineers wanted Notion instead for it’s richer formatting and better handling of code snippets, tables, etc. Notion is working out nicely as it’s much, much easier to find docs there.
Presentations: Tried to make the pitch deck in Tome. Learning a new tool and trying to get the AI to produce something useful was too slow. Reverted back to Google Slides in Google Workspace.
Research: Throughout ideation and fundraising, ChatGPT and Crunchbase were the most useful tools for understanding markets, investors, and prior art. Bard (RIP) was a little helpful as well.
Naming: ChatGPT was incredibly helpful at generating 100s of names through various prompts. From the hundreds, we were able to dilligence our top 10 with web searches, Crunchbase, GoDaddy, and Gunderson Dettmer.
Project Management: None of us liked Jira from prior companies. Asana doesn’t quite work for engineers. Karri Saarinen, the Linear CEO’s podcast appearances have been really influential on our thinking, so we tried Linear since it’s a very like-minded company. It’s working out really well so far.
Design Tool: Obviously Figma lol. No clue what the alternative would be even.
Co-Working: We use WeWork. Not sure I’d recommend them. The Sales process is slow and a hassle, but the price is reasonable for a quality workspace for the 1 week every 6 that we meet in-person.
State Registrations: To be a multi-state distributed company, the amount of state govt registrations for tax, payroll, worker’s comp, etc. is thoroughly exhausting. We’ve tried CorpNet and SingleFile both to outsource this problem. Neither can do it independently. We’ll be converging on using just SingleFile since they’re a bit better experience-wise.
Corporate Insurance: Tried Vouch and Embroker. Embroker was ~40% less expensive and entirely self-serve with instant underwriting and approval. I got a quote and checked out in the same session. Will be using them for future corporate insurance needs.
401k: Evaluated Betterment, Guideline, and LearnVest. Went with Guideline. Pricing across all three was roughly comparable, as was the process. Guideline was slightly more self-serve, faster, and my co-founder had good experiences with them and their app at his last company.
Code Repository: Went with Github, somewhat by default, but also Github Co-Pilot is such a valuable sweetener that prevents us from really exploring the market of alternatives.
Password Management: Went with 1Password. Been such a long-time happy user as a consumer, I didn’t contemplate learning or using a competitor.
Cloud Hosting: Trying out providers based on their generous & free startup credits. We will likely have to make a call on a final cloud provider around the time we start storing customer data. GCP Sales team coordination was a total mess, but the credits are the most generous.
EA: Tried a few AI admins like Xembly, Ohai, Lindy. None really worked. I’d have to very narrowly scope a task for the agent, which ultimately made it not an EA really. At the EOD, it’s just faster to do it myself.
Business Phone Line: Google Voice is good enough for our stage of company. Once we get some real customer support volume, we will need to re-evaluate.
Brand Design Studio: We evaluated a short list of 3 that I knew from my network. Based on their work, the process they outlined, startup expertise, and speed, we went with Moniker SF. Excited to see the results in a few months!
Recruiting ATS: No vendors or tools onboarded at the moment, just network hiring so far. Evaluated many tools previously. Ashby, Gem, and Dover seem to be the most compelling “all-in-one” solutions we’ve come across.
E-Sign: Using DocSend, but it’s very pricey. Exploring switching to Gusto’s or Carta’s versions since they’re already bundled in.
My overall B2B SaaS takeaways are:
Switching costs of learning a new workflow are a meaningful, but not an insurmountable barrier
It’s great to be a default (i.e. Slack, Figma, Google Workspace)
Employees bring their priors from former jobs with them when making these decisions, so a positive reputation is a brand moat
All-in-one (i.e. Mercury, Gusto, Carta), even if some of the features are weak, is far more compelling than a basket of point solutions