For the last two years, we’ve shared all of the tools we use to run our business with:
This year we’re back with an inside look for 2024! As with last year, many of the tools have stayed the same with some new tools emerging as we’ve grown and a handful of replacements. In total, we’ve now surpassed 50 different tools & services!
Ultimately, these are the tools we use to build Whalesync and support hundreds of customers. We hope some of them can be helpful for you! At Whalesync, we continue to believe in the power of software and welcome the opportunity use more tools that make our lives easier.
Communication
💡 Knowledge Base: Notion
Still the best wiki tool out there with its combination of beautiful design and massive community.
☑️ Project Management: Linear
Imagine if the best designers at Apple decided to rebuild Jira—that’s Linear. It’s an intuitive, fast, and beautiful tool that we rely on for project management across our development and growth teams. One of very few tools on this list I would give a 10/10 (in my imaginary rankings).
🏢 Virtual Office: Gather
Remember playing Pokémon on Gameboy? Gather takes that nostalgic feel and applies it to a virtual workspace. While it doesn’t fully replace in-person interaction, it gives the team a sense of presence that we really value.
💬 Communication: Slack
You know Slack already :)
💻 External Video: Zoom
While Gather is our go-to for internal calls, Zoom is indispensable for external meetings. Its reliability and high-quality video make it the best choice for important calls with customers and investors.
📽️ Screen Recordings: Loom
Loom is crucial for asynchronous communication. From bug reports to documentation and internal updates, Loom helps us communicate more effectively without needing a live meeting. It’s a staple in our workflow.
Customers
🙋 Customer Support: Intercom
We use Intercom to manage inbound customer support requests through either email or chat. While it’s not the most user friendly tool, and it’s quite expensive, it has everything you need for support. Keeping an eye on up-and-comer Pylon.
🆘 Help Docs: Gitbook
As our product grew, so did our documentation needs. Gitbook has been a game-changer, providing a dedicated space for managing our expanding documentation with git-style updates.
✉️ Email Marketing: Loops
A simple, modern email sending tool built for startups.
📣 In Product Announcements: Intercom
Aside from support, Intercom also has what they call “Proactive Support” where you can send users messages. This is how we alert users to new features and manage https://updates.whalesync.com/.
Operations
📰 Spreadsheet: Airtable
Airtable is our Swiss army knife for ops. We use it for too many things to list here.
📰 Blog CMS: Notion
Notion isn’t just for notes; we use it as a CMS for our blog! With Notion AI helping us draft posts, we can easily sync content to Webflow via Whalesync. It’s an all-in-one solution for content creation and collaboration.
🔄 Data Syncing: Whalesync
Yes, we use Whalesync at Whalesync to sync. Specifically, we sync Airtable/Webflow for programmatic SEO pages and HubSpot/Airtable to make our sales process more efficient.
🤖 Automations: Zapier
Zapier is still the GOAT when it comes to automating tasks. For example, when a new user signs up, Zapier sends a message to our #new-signup Slack channel.
⭐ Performance Management: 15Five
We use 15Five for weekly updates and yearly performance reviews. Lattice might be a better product, but it’s 5 - 10x more expensive, so 15Five gets the job done for us.
📝 Forms: Tally
Tally is still our form tool of choice although Reform and Typeform are fairly comparable.
Sales
👤 CRM: HubSpot
While we yearn for the ease of use of Attio (and may switch there one day), HubSpot is still our CRM has it all the features we need as a growing startup to manage our sales process.
✉️ Data Enrichment: Clay
Clay’s data enrichment capabilities are pretty sweet. We use it to create lead lists and then pull data from multiple sources for enrichment.
Outbound Emails: Apollo
Apollo streamlines the process of sending cold outbound emails. While we don’t use outbound often, Apollo makes it easy when we do.
Call Recording: Grain
In a crowded market of AI call recorders, Grain stands out. It is soooo easy to use and their AI summaries are typically spot on.
Marketing
🌎 Landing Page: Webflow
Webflow gives you total control of your website without having to write and maintain any code. It’s a serious no-brainer and one of the most valuable products in our stack.
💰 Partner Rewards: Rewardful
Our partner program allows agencies to earn commissions, and Rewardful has made managing this program a breeze. While manual payouts are still required, the calculations and tracking are straightforward.
📽️ Video Editing: Descript
Descript makes video editing accessible to everyone. With its innovative transcription-based editing, it’s become a favorite tool for quickly editing our videos before we publish them to YouTube.
Finance
💯 Cap Table: Carta
Whether you like it or not, if you raise money, you need to manage a cap table. Pulley is probably the better tool for most startups but we switched to Carta because they gave us a deal and they’ve gotten the job done.
409A: Aranca
Like above, if you raise money, you need to get a 409A every year. Aranca has done a great job for us each time we’ve tapped them.
HR
👫 Payroll: Gusto
Gusto makes managing HR, payroll, and everything in between simple.
🇵🇭 International Payroll: Deel
Deel changes the game for international hiring. We now have teammates in Canada and Bulgaria and we don’t even think twice about anything on the HR side.
Admin
💴 State Taxes: Taxjar
Taxjar simplifies the complicated world of state tax filings. As Stripe’s preferred partner, their integration makes auto-filing pretty painless.
💱 Tax Compliance: Avalara
Avalara handles our international tax compliance. It’s expensive and they do a fine enough job.
Insurance: Vouch
Vouch is a modern company offering business insurance tailored to startups. It’s everything we’ve needed and they’re easy to work with.
Virtual Mailbox: Stable
As a remote company, we needed a place to send all our mail. Stable gave us a virtual mailbox so we receive all mail there which they upload for us to see and manage.
🗝️ Password Management: 1Password
1Pass is one of those products where every month I look at the bill and go “wow, I can’t believe they don’t charge us more”. It’s necessary for security but just makes life easier when signing into all these other tools.
Banking
💳 Credit Cards: Brex
Brex has been a great choice for our business credit cards, offering everything we need and more. With a growing number of competitors, Brex still stands out as a solid option.
🏦 Banking: Mercury
Such a smooth banking experience. They make it easy to forget just how clunky and painful the alternatives are by comparison.
💰 Treasury: Arc
When you raise capital, you need a place to store that money and ideally earn interest. Arc lets us earn top-tier returns on our capital in trustworthy banks and t-bills.
Finance
💱 Bookkeeping & Federal Taxes: Fondo
Fondo handles our bookkeeping and taxes, offering top-tier customer service as well as helping us secure R&D tax credits. Just an awesome company.
🧾 Accounting: Digits
We used to use Quickbooks and try to do our accounting on our own but it was a pain. Digits provides a modern interface to interact with our accountant and charges a very reasonable price.
Development
🎨 Design: Figma
You know Figma :)
🚩 Feature Flags: LaunchDarkly
LaunchDarkly gives us the confidence to release features incrementally and respond quickly if issues arise. It’s a key part of our development toolkit.
🛠️ Internal Tools: Retool
Retool allows us to build custom internal tools on top of our production data. For us, that’s mostly customer support tooling.
☁️ Cloud Platform: GCP
Not super startup friendly, but they have some credit programs we’ve been able to leverage.
🛡️ Security Compliance: Vanta
Vanta helps you get SOC 2 certified and then monitors you to ensure you stay SOC 2 certified. Check out our Security page here.
👤 Authentication: Clerk
Clerk has been an amazing developer tool that has allowed us to implement top quality, secure auth + organization management without writing all that code ourselves.
💸 Payments: Stripe
Stripe continues to set the gold standard for payment processing. Reliable, developer-friendly, and constantly innovating—there’s a reason we rely on them.
Recruiting
💼 ATS: Polymer
Polymer gives you a modern job board out of the box and then helps you keep track of your candidate convos. While there are more fully featured offerings, we chose Polymer because it was simple and easy.
Personal
📩 Email: Superhuman
Superhuman may come with a high price tag, but for heavy email users, it’s worth every penny. If you spend hours in your inbox, the productivity boost is noticeable.
📅 Calendar / Task Management: Motion
Motion allows me to access my calendar with “opt-c” on my keyboard and gives me a meeting booking tool like Calendly.
🤖 AI: ChatGPT
You know this one :)
📥 Mail Batcher: Mailman
Mailman helps me reclaim some focus time each day by batching my personal emails.
🎨 Browser: Arc
Just a beautifully designed browser. If you’re used to Chrome, it takes a few days to get used to, but now you can rip Arc from cold dead body.
🦊 Gifs: Gifox
High-quality GIFs directly on the Mac. The best part is a nifty editor so you can quickly clip GIFs to the length you want.
📸 Screenshots: CleanShot X
Just a clean, powerful screenshotting tool. Scrolling capture is my favorite feature!
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