The Best Tech Stack for Start-ups

My agency, Sangfroid!, is a full-service marketing agency embedded in the start-up and tech scene in Austin, Texas. We have spent years working with entrepreneurs who have founded a business and are creating something from the ground up. This experience has given me first-hand experience of how an organized stack of tech tools is essential for successful growth marketing.

Previous Sangfroid! clients include startups in the technology and lifestyle space—from the music industry to healthcare—we’ve researched and rolled out the best-in-class tech to match the needs of a diverse range of clients. With this experience, here are my top marketing tech stack recommendations for startups:

#1 | Get the Right Instrumentation

The first thing you need to think about as a tech startup is your product instrumentation. Think about it hard, and think about it early.

I suggest pairing instrumentation with the building and refining of a product. Implementing tools and tracking to measure marketing funnels, organizing customer data, and measuring product performance all fall under instrumentation. Don’t wait until your product has been perfected before considering these things: instrumentation is essential for finding the fit between what your product offers and how your customer base interacts with it.

Many teams make the effort to track product analytics and marketing acquisition, but it’s rarer to see it done in a scalable way. The common stack of product marketing tools like web analytics, ad attribution, and CRM/ live chat support no longer have to be independently instrumented. By using a single Customer Data Platform, like Segment, your team can integrate the platform one time and connect all of these to use without the need to integrate each one separately into your app code.

Although I have no affiliation with Segment, I’m a huge advocate of this tool. The biggest benefits include reducing development time and organizing your data more effectively, however, its less obvious benefits also offer significant value. Early integration of this platform allows your product, marketing, and engineering teams to work together and have the same visibility on how your product is adopted and used by your audience.

#2 | Choose the Best CRM for Your Business

Choosing a CRM platform that is best optimized for your business is essential. Startup teams operating with the appropriate CRM will reach their goals faster and more easily.

Consider a CRM to be your group’s operating system. The client’s entire user journey in one place — from their marketing data (followed a link on social), website activity (checked out some blogs before moving onto a product page), app usage (started a free trial), and customer support history (interacted with web chat, called your helpline). In today’s world, operating without an effective CRM is like choosing to go without email or a phone — it’s an essential tool for communicating with your customer.

The best advice I can give is to install a single tool that allows all your external-facing teams — marketing, sales, support, service,  investor relations — to take advantage of it and work from a single source of truth. This will allow each function to operate in a joined-up way, and your marketing team can understand, for example, which campaigns bring in the most valuable customers.

You may also need to consider whether you need a generic CRM or one built specially for your vertical.  There are CRMs relevant only to construction, lawyers, etc. Unfortunately, these kinds of platforms are limited in their market and don’t usually have the best features and integrations. At Sangfroid! we prefer general CRMs like HubSpot (for live sales cycles), Intercom (for mobile apps), and Salesforce for larger sales teams.

#3 | Buy What’s Already Been Built

Finally, I advise product teams and new businesses to think carefully before committing to building software that can be purchased. In many cases, your team has the ability to create tools, but it might not be the best use of resources.

As a marketer, I’ve seen companies building custom sites on Bootstrap or React, but this can be a detrimental decision long term. If you tie a marketing site to a development cycle it can be difficult to make even the smallest changes. Your marketing team needs tools sets that allow them, for example, to continually produce A/B test variations of the home page, nav, and pricing page.

I recommend separating the product from the marketing site and use little- to no- code solutions for your site. Not only is this scalable for your team’s testing strategy, but also for your content marketing needs. Webflow offers a variety of design options and ready-made templates, and Instapage works best for PPC and testing.

It’s easy to confuse software for a solution to a problem, but while buying new accounting software doesn’t necessarily keep you in the black, when it comes to marketing, getting everyone using the right tools really is half the battle. So with this, go and further your team’s profitability, while keeping customer data and engineering resources top of mind!

To learn more about Sangfroid!’s service, check out our website.