Question
What's the best tech stack to transition from a Sales-led to a Product-led company?
As a start-up we want to keep out tech stack simple and avoid introducing too many tools today. But we also want to make sure we choose apps that can scale with us.
We are a product-let SaaS app focused on DTC ecommerce brands. We're starting to build our customer-facing tech stack across our product, sales and marketing funnel. We have no legacy decisions to wrestle with. What are the must-haves in our tech stack, given our maturity?
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@Brian_pagemunk Curious to start: What sales tools are you using today, and are there any product or marketing focused tools you're considering using? Also, marketing especially can be quite broad—is there any specific marketing angle where you're looking for tools? (e.g. my recommendations for SEO/content-focused marketing tools would be different than those for ad-driven marketing).
Then, here are some earlier discussions about stacks that might fit in:
- What is your marketing stack?, where HubSpot, Mailchimp, WordPress, Sendgrid, Clearbit, Front, Intercom, Zapier, Pipedrive, WordPress, Typeform, Loom, ConvertKit, Airtable, and more were popular recommendations.
- What is the ultimate sales tech stack?, with Salesloft, Atrium, Chorus, HubSpot, Pandadoc, Calendly, and more recommended.
Hey Brian, good to see you here! Here's my detailed response:
I am a huge proponent of CDPs -- so much so that I wrote a guide explaining what their core value is.
Regarding customer engagement, I can highly recommend CustomerIO for emails and GetUserflow for in-app experiences.
Userlist is also a lighter, more affordable version of CustomerIO and is well-built.
Intercom is obviously great too but tends to become very complicated. Their new Series builder is actually quite powerful and lets you orchestrate omnichannel campaigns (email and in-app).
For product analytics, both Mixpanel and Amplitude are great. I personally like Mixpanel's UI better but Amplitude is known to be more powerful (and expensive). Mixpanel is the underdog here and has really upped its shipping cadence.
I would also highly recommend using Iteratively or Avo to instrument your product data to maintain data quality.
Happy to answer any further queries!
Hey Arpit, thanks for the Capiche lead. Really useful. Also thanks so much for the detailed response. So, so helpful. Happy to see customer.io there. They're PDX local.
Can second the Customer.io recommendation—that's what we use for Capiche emails, and it's great. There are some odd limitations with automated workflows, and I wish it'd auto-save instead of making you click the save button, but otherwise I'd highly recommend it.
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Great question and we went through this process. Our focus was make it simple but a stack that could scale. For where we landed was:
Hope this helps