We have our own in-house General Counsel, but sporadically outsource legal work to the firms she recommends based on our needs.

We just use email right now. We were on Zendesk, but it didn’t make sense for the quantity of tickets we were getting. It was easier to manage the scale of the business in email.

We used to use something we built ourself. But we stopped. We do dip into it every so often for enterprise deals. As Intercom started doing more and more, copying out became more of a hassle than it’s worth, so we stopped using our platform. But for more enterprise deals and that don’t fit into self-serve SaaS cycle and take a bit longer to close, I dip into the old system to keep track of those leads.

All of our content is hosted internally on wootmath.com.

We have a remote assistant.

We do most of our recruiting through networking. I get in front of many student groups, which helps with getting people on board.

We could use a software that could make things more efficient, but we value the personal interaction. So we have a call log and we know the last time we talked to each customer. We call customers that we have not heard from in a while, and this adds a personal touch that is essential to good customer service. Also we make sure that our students are good at communicating with the client and with us. The best way to learn something is to dive in, so the first cleaning assignment that they get is a real job. We mentor and coach them ahead of time, we teach them how to handle communication, how to deal with complaints and possible issue that arise. It is a great way for them to learn real-life skills.

The issue that we had was to be able to track customer's preferences as well as student’s preferences. For example, we cannot assign a student that is allergic to dogs to a house with pets. Another thing that we needed to do is for the students to be able to log in and leave a comment or an important note about the household or the job. Keeping track of everyone’s preferences took a lot of time, and therefore, cost a lot of money. Every semester we have to redo the entire schedule based on the student’s new availability, especially because our customers get really attached to our students and they want to keep working with the same person, so it was getting really challenging and we had to build our own software to keep track of everything.

We are building a chat API, different from standard web products. For our own internal analytics we had to build our own custom insight tool that gives you all the relevant metrics related to real-time activities.

We went through an insurance broker to get benefits.

Our recruiting is mainly by word of mouth and referrals.

We are constantly changing tools. We used our own internal tool, but we tested out different apps here and there. We are trying to match features with cost. We did some Freshdesk integrations with Slack. That combination is probably the most consistent tool that we are using.

Google Analytics serves its purpose. We built on top of it because we needed more internal microdata. I think every company needs it.

We mostly use our local network.

Since we have been through an accelerator, we have been collecting contacts through that network.

For customer service, we built our own tool but we are using integrations to be able to automate certain tasks, like creating an auto-responder for auto generated email. All emails forward to a Slack channel, so anyone can pick up the email and respond. We are using a lot of AI to improve customer service.

We built our own tool and a dashboard using an agency. It is a stack of all productivity tools that connect and allow us to see each team member's productivity.

We also go through referral a lot to get our developers.

We are active in China on social media. In China the most efficient way to promote a product is to outsource to a network star. In our case it is someone famous for reporting technologies on the network.

We believe in directly following up with our users and people who are fans of Amper.

We use almost every tool out there; you never know who’ll you find with each of them.

We get the candidates through the Career page on our website. Our internal recruiter sifts through the applications and we manage the interview process with Greenhouse.

We get emails through the app store. In the future we might implement something more complex.

We use ASO tools to track keywords.

We’ve built an open source platform for HR and recruiting. It’s HR management, recruiting and onboarding in one place. It combines everything we need for candidates and employees, with easy to generate templates.

I often use my Moleskine Notebook. Pen and paper go a long way from an engagement standpoint. It is better than taking notes on devices. In meetings, you look like you are more engaged if you take notes on paper.

In tech, there is a lot of word of mouth.

We have our in-house tool for managing the content in Winnie. We need to be aware of everything that goes through the app.

We have account managers that are assigned to clients. Our relationship with them is highly personal. We want them to be able to pick up the phone and call us directly.

We are mainly B2B so we invoice clients and process payments through our bank account.

We built our tool and integrated it with our website and Slack.

We are gathering data from our website (polymaze.com) and performing analytics ourselves.

We like to keep our relationship with our customers personalized so we do not need to use any tools.

We also like going to meetups. It is a great fun way to meet potential candidates.

Our relationship with our clients is still very personal so we still use traditional in person meetings, email and telephone.

We run our blog ourselves but if we had to go back, we would probably choose a standard platform.

We have a blog on our site. We used to use WordPress but for technical reasons we decided to migrate the blog to our internal platform. It works better for the type of communication that we do.

For B2C businesses, the CRM becomes just a liaison between the customer service tool (Zendesk in our case) and the email marketing tool (Maropost). We are planning to develop a custom solution.

We have also implemented some custom cross-platform solutions for our marketing attribution model.

We have a hacked together a CRM using our email list in Campaign Monitor. We survey and append a lot of records to that subscriber to see when they joined, different emails they’ve opened, where they work, birthdays, etc. That’s our system of record. We talked about something more formal--but this works for now.

We have our own website sitting on our own server. We built it with a design agency and they provided us with a tool for blogging.

We work with headhunters too--they are still better for recruiting in the end.

Customers submit tickets through the email form on the site.

We have a feedback page on our site where users can communicate with us.

We had the resources and our company was young so we built our own solution.

We built a really solid internal CRM that tracks our customer funnel and some touchpoints built in through Mandrill. A lot of our CRM is automated for us. We talked to Salesforce and it seems like it might be relevant at some point.

We built our own CMS because WordPress was driving us crazy. It almost gives you too many options in terms of publishing. It made our pages inconsistent aesthetically. My business partner coded something something very simple that let us post our content in markdown and kept image dimensions the same. He limited our options so our pages weren’t as messy. Making changes on the front end was cumbersome for our developers with WordPress, and our custom tool simplified all that.

We built most of it ourselves--we created a chat application with a texting gateway. We built it using open source tools.

We built our own CRM which comes with its fair share of benefits and challenges. We had no choice but to develop our own CRM. The primary reason is that there were not many CRM’s out there that would handle the two-sided exchange. We have many customers and many contractors--it’s a many-to-many relationship. We struggled to find a structure that could do that. Now, we have a permanent obligation to maintain our own CRM, but it allows us a lot of flexibility with modifications and open source plugins.

We handle all of the transactional and drip campaigns from our home-grown platform GIL. The logic is built into our own system.

We use a lot of paper sticky notes to visualize tasks and our workflow.

We also use iTunes Connect and Google Play built in analytics.

We make a lot of custom stuff for analytics because we care about them so much on our end. A lot of our tools are homegrown because we are building our own solution to give out to customers, engineers and so on.

We have our Hello inbox; whenever one client wants to make a change, they have to mail the collaborative inbox. Eventually we are thinking of using Zendesk. I don’t think that it is perfect in terms of intuitiveness. But it does the job--creates tickets. Once that ticket is created, it can be tagged and assigned to a different person. An agent does not necessarily have to log in to handle the ticket. He can just reply to the email. There are different stages for the tickets, and labels to recognize them.

From a services firm perspective, we built our own spreadsheets to plot Rate vs. Hours vs. Role. They do the job, but they aren’t as portable and unified as I would like them to be. I would love to see this as a SaaS model.

I recently started using Oristand. It’s a packable piece of cardboard that folds out to be a portable standing desk. It is a product, not a business tool but I highly recommend it.

We built our own content marketing software that our non-technical folks use to upload blogs or make other changes on the site.

Being a healthcare company, we need to be cautious with how we share our patient data so we have our own proprietary data we built in-house.

We have our own system for file sharing.

We built a simple email-based communication tool which is basically a contact form.

We’ve built a custom client account system to match our need to be flexible. I don’t believe this is something that is easily outsourced to a SaaS tool, as the need to be flexible on the account interface quickly is necessary to make way for changes to how our products and services operate.

We built a custom dashboard that shows basic key performance indicators of our business such as trial users, paid users, churn, etc.

We have our own software that we use for HR.

Because of our university ties, we know people graduating from the University of Waterloo and can advertise jobs on campus.

We built our own tool and used D3.js to visualize data.

We have our ticketing system that we created ourselves.

We use our own tool. We built it because we have very simple needs in that regard.

Everything we do is custom; we’ve made our own website, and it’s integrated with our back end so we can play around with it.

We are migrating our accounting to our own backend system because the cannabis industry is a bit different from other industries, so it makes sense for us to use our own solution. There are some cannabis-specific solutions out there, but we felt that it made more sense to do our own custom and we are rolling and testing it out.

For our blog and documentation, we’ve rolled our own rails app that we’ve customized a lot. We found we spent a lot of time customizing other people’s blogging and documentation software so it was easier to make our own and have as much control as we wanted. We’re a unique organization though because virtually everyone on our team codes, so this was pretty simple to pull off without wasting too much time.

Our customers contact us directly and use us as a support system. We have an IRC channel for Coinkite developers, customers can contact us through our twitter, and we often speak with them on the phone to talk about features or problems. We have a lot of customers that try to do advanced or new things with bitcoin and they often need a new API or code; we do our best to accommodate.

A huge factor of attack for a company is people getting into your communication channel and messing up your systems, so we have our own encrypted IRC server. Communication is the core of a business that handles money and IRC is the cockroach of internal communication tools. It’s always going to exist, and you can get hundreds of clients to use it. It’s fantastic.

We built our own subscription service using a combination of Stripe and the open source software Kilbill.io because all the tools that we explored were too expensive to get the flexibility that we wanted. The admin interface is not really pretty but it does the job.

Along with Metabase, we use a suite of tools for collecting data; mainly an-house system, Google Analytics, and Segment. Amplitude, Mixpanel, Branch are also used to varying degrees.

We have a custom admin site that our fulfillment team uses to track customers, shipments, coupons, etc. We went custom because there aren’t off-the-shelf solutions for our “subscription rental with option to purchase” model. There are lots of intricacies in our model like tracking damages, how long a piece is rented, and there’s nothing available that can support those intricacies out of the box.

We’ve used a few agents at different recruiting agencies, but we’ve found that the best way to recruit is through your team and their networks. And if you have the luxury, going to hackathons or having your own hackathons. Getting to people earlier in their careers is a good tactic.

We are creating a better business analysis tool in-house. Everything available now is not automated, so we’re building our own custom tool.

For our bi-weekly marketing emails, we use MailChimp. The ability to set it up quickly and its straightforward API integration make us a happy client. Now, we’re pushing for more customized HTML in outgoing emails. As our client base grows and we begin different marketing strategies we might need features beyond what MailChimp can do for us, but for right now it’s great.

Our custom LeafLink analytics gives us an overview of how many clients we serve and the transactions that are processed through the platform.

Texting is a popular communication tool in the marijuana industry as a result of traditions that have carried over from the black market. We frequently text to coordinate with our clients, which is unique to this industry.

Most of our inbound customer services are sent to [email protected], which is manned by our staff. We use our own custom solution because it’s important for our brand to have a human that responds to our customers, and responds quickly. Our custom tool integrates into Slack and puts notifications into a Slack channel when we have customer service requests.

Our custom software works very well as a CRM. We tried Intercom.io, but found it didn’t provide much value on top of what we could do ourselves.

Our custom system is for more transactional and personalized emails. We use it to give our customers recommendations.

Our headquarters has its own office space. Our New York office is in a coworking space.

We have our own office space in the south end of Boston.

We built our own proprietary customer service platform.

We’re a little different than other SaaS companies because we’re a marketplace. We use Streak for PR and media relations, and our homegrown CRM tools for user relations.

We use custom tools we’ve built through FullContact combined with MailChimp.

For the most part, all of our BI is done using an in-house solution we built. All of our data goes into our data warehouse, and then people get that data through email reports or ODBC access, etc.

Our B2C side is built into our custom, homegrown e-commerce site.

We built our own custom CRM platform because we have so much user data that is tied to what users are searching for, offering, etc.

We have our own internal CMS, along with a team of original content writers.

We have an internal tool built on Django that I use to create blogposts.

We have a custom internal tool that we built on top of the app.

For internal analytics, we have our own custom, open-source software.

Our site is built on a custom backend.

We have a full in-house creative team that updates everything internally.

We use our own proprietary solutions for internal business intelligence measurements, since analytics are a big part of what we do!

We use different tools for different openings and locations. For example, we use something different to find a developer in Estonia than we do to find a marketer in the U.S. Our biggest recruiting “channel” is definitely internal recommendations from people already at Pipedrive.

We schedule posts on Facebook via the Facebook scheduler. For Google+ and Tumblr, we just press the “share” button from VProud.tv

We have a custom CMS. It was more work to set up, but it’s a very powerful tool that supports our blog and landing pages. Marketo will supplement our CMS.

We’re using our own custom tool, and it’s a combination of MailTrack.io and custom backend coded by us. It lets us know if people have read the emails, and it stores the meta-information like sender, receiver, date of all conversations. It serves as a facility for the tutors to check their approval status, for example. We definitely will need to move to a more established tool such as Zendesk or Salesforce.

We have our own blog platform built into our system.

We created our own custom dashboard. We started with a Magento base and spent a year custom coding everything.

We’re building out a custom solution for some of our analytics.

This is a service we provide our clients. For our company, we use our own custom in-house system.

We used to use Kissmetrics, but moved away from them because we weren’t using them in a way that got the most value. We now do everything via a homegrown, in-house solution.

We do all of our email processing, and sending, in-house. We have a lot of weekly reports that would be difficult to tie into a service like MailChimp.

We’ve created a purpose-built proprietary system that exists on top of our custom-built email protocol. With our product, it’s very easy to schedule meetings with Amy, but you might also have a question for Amy, and she’s able to understand it. You can schedule meetings with her, but you can also reply with something like, “Amy, if I want to sign 17 people up (my whole team), what would that cost?”, and we have that routed automatically to another environment; she knows not to set up a calendar invite.

Our product exists on email, so we’re extremely particular about what our emails look like. Because of this, we designed our own email infrastructure for all communications coming directly from Amy (or Andrew).

We also export data from our cloud-based tools like QuickBooks, Square, and Stripe, and do our own internal reporting and analyses.

We have our own custom platform that pushes data to Amazon Redshift.

We combine data from Smartsheet and our own custom business intelligence tools as well.

We’ve built our own CMS because that was the most suitable solution for us. We needed something that worked on web, mobile, and tablets, that could connect a video management system with an e-commerce system, so it was much better for us to build our own. We’ve looked into Moz, but we have not had a chance to use it yet.

All direct 1:1 customer communication is done via email.

We’ve just started to implement Stripe. We currently have a Magento store, but we’re transitioning from Magento to a combination of our own custom system, and Stripe.

For just about any analytics use-case, we will eat our own dog food, of course, by using Elasticsearch and the ELK Stack, the technology we host and manage for our customers.

We built our own CMS.

On the buyer side of the platform, we built our own custom CRM, and it has been working great. We knew our CRM on the buyer side would have to be closely integrated with our internal database of buyer information, so we built our own internal solution.

It’s fascinating to me how many players are out there that offer solutions for BI and analytics! And what’s really interesting is that they all say they’re different, but really, they’re all pretty much the same. We’ve built a lot of in-house tracking, and we have a good handle on what our users are doing. We need a lot of detailed data that other solutions can’t provide out of the box. We wanted email info to tie into user info, which would then tie into CRM info, so in the end, building in-house was just easier for us. But building visualization and query tools was annoying, so we did go with some already-built solutions for that.

We originally started looking at email marketing solutions very early on, when we only had three employees. Some of the more advanced solutions, like Sailthru, were too expensive. And we looked at lighter, and less expensive, solutions like MailChimp, but they were too simplistic. So we built our own custom systems for drip campaigns and email marketing to existing and potential users. We tied them into our own A/B tracking, open rate and click tracking systems. And we’ve been able to tie email information to user data via our custom systems. Custom solutions worked for us, but you have think ahead and know that you will have to devote engineering resources to keep it all up to date. We are a data-centric company that is hardcore about quantitative analysis, and we’ve found that our level of data sophistication requires custom systems. We don’t have cookie-cutter email needs that could be met by a solution like MailChimp.

We’ve built a deep proprietary backend data system designed to support our specific business model. We take that system and integrate it with Salesforce to automatically log all on-site/product user activity. From there, our sales and customer experience teams log new customer information based on manual phone and email outreach.

We have an in-house solution to handle our member database.

We’ve been using in-house solutions to date, but they’re coming up insufficient when it comes to integrating with our other systems, like email list, mobile list and all of our web and messaging applications. We’re now looking to bring on an out-of-the-box solution, and strongly considering Looker as a visualization tool, on top of a centralized data warehouse like Amazon Redshift.

We’re one of those companies that still has a file server in the office. Given the amount of data we have, we see some real advantages to using a file server. It does require a bit of extra IT savvy, but we don’t yet see the need to use another program when what we have works so well.

Pipedrive is really good when going from a cold lead to striking a deal, but for more advanced revenue forecasting we’ve kept our home-grown CRM in place.

We use a hybrid of everything. It's mainly Google Analytics and Mixpanel, and we also write our own back-end analytics for some stuff as well.

We built our custom analytics tool to use in parallel with the other analytics providers. None of these services alone gives us the full picture. For instance, our internal analytics get more granular, giving us quick stats on which items are most bartered. Used together, these four tools give us everything we need to understand our users.

We built a proprietary tool for payment processing that works through Authorize.Net. Authorize.Net is a gateway that does automatic recurring billing through ACH, as well as credit card payments, which is really hard to find. The legacy systems are much more affordable than newer platforms like Stripe, and a lot of the new ones don’t do automatic ACH recurring billing, where you can just set it and forget it. They will do recurring credit card payments, but not with ACH, which is important because ACH is the cheapest way of processing payments.

As a pet project, we built our own tool (juggll.com) that looks somewhat like Asana. We use this for project management for everyone but our developers. The reasoning for it was that we wanted to see all the projects in a single place. We have a number of functional teams, and managing their workloads across projects is very difficult in most project management tools, which used to lead to bottlenecks.

We have a very basic internal customer management portal that’s built into our database. We don’t focus on personal sales--it’s all automated, so most of the data is in our database anyway.

We built something for ourselves to manage transactional emails, which sits on top of SendGrid. The solution interfaces with our emails to send the appropriate emails to our customers. Our custom tool is postreak.com.

For hiring full-time staff, we just write really compelling job ads and post them on our web site. We’ll get an ad up and then ask our networks to share it. We had a job ad recently that was up for four days and had 30,000+ views!

My co-founder built our entire backend. I guess there's two pieces to that story. One, my co-founder sometimes does that. If he doesn't like what he sees, he'll build it himself--that's just something about him. He wouldn't recommend it to anyone else, but it's worked out fine for us. The second piece is that there's a huge part of our business based around community management. We ended up automating a bunch of the steps that were necessary to our business. Most CRM systems are not great, but you should just pick one and stick to it.

Mixpanel is great for startups, but gets expensive quickly. We also built our own as we scaled.

We are using our own custom ad hoc system for customer service. Users can contact us directly through our app, and the team gets an email and multiple people can reply. All of our customer feedback is put into a JSON database. We use the Alchemy API to run and scrape that database of feedback to run sentiment analysis, so we can see how users are feeling about a crash, for example. We can automate flags in our database to flag if sentiments about something are below a certain level. Then I will automatically get an email or text.

We’ve also built our own interactive roadmap, and everyone runs a form of agile project management.

We use a custom CMS, in conjunction with Pivotal Tracker for project management.

We’ve built our own inhouse data warehouses that allow us to aggregate data and share them across multiple services.

We've built a number of custom solutions on a MySQL database, though we're about to switch to Amazon Redshift--our engineers are very excited about this. In our business, customers pay us a percentage of assets under management, so it's a long life span with a customer, where profitability from a customer is quite uncertain to us. We have to analyze a lot of different variables to try to get a measure of what a customer might look like over the long term, so custom analytics platforms were necessary.

With our own internal tools, we have readily available buttons for contact on our website, and we get customer feedback from those forms. When people use the contact form, it sends us an email, and we respond to them as quickly as possible. And we add any FAQs to our knowledge base.

We have a proprietary file-sharing service. We have rigid security protocols, so we’re a little uncomfortable using the Google platform. At least four of our corporate clients have banned Google Docs in the last six months for similar reasons.

If you really need to integrate your CRM with your email marketing platform, it takes a lot of work and a lot of APIs as you add new product types or features. So we just built our own tool. I think CRM tools are useful, but I also don’t like the idea of paying a monthly retainer for something like this. If I would use a pre-built CRM product, I would choose a software that also does something else, like HubSpot.

I don’t think the enterprise analytics tools get to the bottom of what you need to know about your data. We built our own custom reporting system, and I would advocate that everyone do that because building a foundational layer of data is as important as anything you'll do in the early stage. Relying on a third party to give you that information is equivalent to relying on a third party for understanding your business better than you do.

We’re heavy users of our own solutions.

We have a whole data-capturing client portal built right into our website and our CRM. We use Google Analytics alongside it, but I let my team handle it. I get analytics reports from them each week, and as long as the information is good I don't care how they get it. I try to let my team handle the software choices.

While we use Salesforce for our sales team, we have a custom SQL database integrated with Chartio for user engagement and proficiency/efficacy data.

There's some data that's very unique to our product, like how many subscriptions a particular story drove. For those data points, it was easier to build a custom analytics platform than to find an out-of-the-box solution.

We built our own systems on top of SendGrid.

We've built our own custom solution because we've only sent out a few emails since we've started.

We look at very specialized analytics, so we needed to build our own platforms. We didn’t want to overburden our product by using both our own and out-of-the-box solutions.

We built our own custom reporting tool, in addition to Google Anaytics. Our business is a little complex in that we needed very specific data (by client, week, etc.), and we would have needed a lot of tech support to integrate with the out-of-the-box tools we had looked at. They were also really expensive, so we just decided to build our own.

Most of the time we use our own tools because we are an analytics company and have our own proprietary software. We also really like Blink--it’s very easy to operate, and works well with our quantity of data.