SaaS stack that is a must have for every startup
In today’s world, it’s harder than ever to keep track of your company’s goals and processes. The effort required to do so is only going to increase as more employees (and their devices) are added to the mix.
That’s where software as a service (SaaS) tools come into play. SaaS tools allow you to organise and manage your business from anywhere in the world, without having to worry about hardware or software. You can use these tools for everything from managing email marketing campaigns to keeping track of employee productivity and more. These tools are a must have for every startup if they want to optimise and maximise efficiency.
What is Software as a service (SaaS)?
Software as a service or SaaS is a type of cloud service model through which any software can be used via the internet. The third party provider hosts these SaaS applications which are provided to the customers over the internet. Various examples of these products are Zoom, Salesforce, Google workspace apps, Adobe creative cloud, Docusign, Shopify, Zendesk, Trello, Hubspot and many more.
SaaS is one of the three types of services; the other two being Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and Platform as a service (PaaS). A startup in today’s day and age can’t do without these products. As they provide innumerable benefits such as reduced costs of buying any commercial software, instant updates for all users, flexibility of using the software on your own terms and many more, it’s more so that startups prefer these products over the alternatives.
Top SaaS products, and how we at CredoHire utilise them:
Canva : Canva is a graphic design platform. One can create graphics for social media, presentations, posters, documents etc. for all different kinds of visual content. There are amazing templates in this product which makes it extremely easy to create good looking graphics for your projects. CredoHire uses it to create most of the website graphics, social media designs, presentations and many more. Since this works on the principle that anything that is being designed should be designed with minimal friction and quickly, most startups are penchanting towards it.
Sendinblue : SendinBlue is an email marketing solution for small and medium-sized businesses that want to send and automate email marketing campaigns. CredoHire uses it to build sustainable relationships with their target markets with the help of email campaigns, transactional emails and other messages.
Hunter : Hunter is a powerful tool that extracts email addresses with usernames from webpages. CredoHire uses it for email campaigns and marketing. Other than that, it is also used to find emails from a variety of data sources, in online conversations like message boards, Q&A sites, blogs and can also scrape them by domains and departments.
G Suite: G Suite encapsulates within itself various tools and applications like Gmail, Google drive, Google hangouts, Google productivity apps (Google sheets, Google slides, Google docs) and many more. It is majorly used by small and mid-sized corporations because of its low infrastructure cost (since it is hosted on Google cloud) and also provides a consumer grade experience to business users. CredoHire uses it to run the business since it is the building block of any startup. We work with the G Suite editors such as Docs, Sheets, Slides etc., rely on Gmail for sending emails, Google Calendar for planning the day, meeting set ups and more. We also utilise add-on tools to build out a full solution for business processes, including AODocs for file management, OverDRIVE for intranets, etc.
Interakt: Interakt is an official WhatsApp Business service provider, which helps you grow your online sales and transform customer experience at scale. It can be used to send automated WhatsApp messages like delivery tracking, order confirmation, abandoned cart notification, payment confirmation/failure etc. One can also broadcast promotional messages to over 1,00,000+ people in one go! CredoHire uses it to ease the workflow and improve the work velocity by automating several marketing and operational tasks such as sending automated whatsapp messages to freshers applying for jobs and many more.
SEMrush: SEMrush is an off the chart SEO tool which is a complete SEO suite in itself including more than 50+ SEO tools. It is a simple yet powerful marketing research tool that helps one uncover valuable insights about one’s competitors. It can help you find detailed information on your competitors’ website traffic, search engine rankings, insights into the content marketing strategies they’re using and the keywords they’re targeting. Basically it has an arsenal of tools which it provides to its users to gain an edge in the marketplace. CredoHire utilises it for content, market research as well as SEO and Social Media Marketing. Basically it is used for improving online visibility and discovering marketing insights.
ProSEO Tools: ProSEO tools give access to a lot of SEO tools such as SEMrush (for keyword research and market analysis), Ubersuggest (also for keyword research), Ahrefs (for backlink analysis) and many more. CredoHire uses these tools to improve its visibility and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Atlassian suite: Atlassian’s team collaboration software like Jira, Confluence and Trello help teams organise, discuss, and complete shared work.
Jira: Jira is widely used by agile development teams to track bugs, stories, epics, and other tasks. It is a cloud-based software tool that helps teams manage their tasks, projects, and issues. It’s primarily used to track progress on projects across multiple teams, as well as track issues in real-time. Jira provides a dashboard that shows all of the team’s projects, along with their status reports and change history. It includes a number of add-ons for customising how it looks and works for different teams. With the help of Jira Software, teams at CredoHire assign work, track progress, change workflows as they go and track bugs every step of the way.
Confluence: Confluence is an application that allow teams to collaborate on documents using real-time communication features such as chat boxes, polls and comments. Documents can be stored indefinitely or deleted after they’ve been reviewed by other users in the organisation. Documents can be shared among different teams within an organisation or with external partners who need access to specific information stored within Confluence. CredoHire is using it to document technical documentation, project ideas and other things.
Trello: Trello is a tool that helps teams organise projects, prioritise tasks, and collaborate on goals. It allows users to create boards for different aspects of their business, such as marketing, sales, and customer support. Each board can have its own sets of cards with information about each task or project listed on them. Boards can be organised into lists that are used to track larger projects or initiatives. CredoHire uses Trello to maximise efficient collaboration.
Hubspot: The software of HubSpot is used for marketing, sales, and customer support that assists businesses in attracting consumers, converting leads, and closing deals. Having an intuitive UX with a unified codebase, it is an all-in-one platform that integrates your sales, marketing, service, CMS, and the operation teams to work in one hub. CredoHire uses HubSpot software to manage its marketing, sales, service, and operational initiatives more effectively.
Zoho Books: Zoho books is an accounting and bookkeeping tool provided by Zoho CRM (which is one of the leading CRM Softwares). CredoHire uses it as an invoice facility and to keep record of the transactions. We also use it to monitor our expenses and to provide quotations/estimates regarding the services we offer at CredoHire.
AnswerThePublic: AnswerThePublic taps into autocomplete data from Google and then comes out with every useful phrase and questions people are asking around your keyword.
Open AI: CredoHire has utilised Open AI in innumerable prospects such as writing email content and blogs. It is a tool that allows you to organise your content by topic or key words and then publish it on the web, in a mobile app or through an email newsletter campaign. You can also use it to organise your team’s workflows so they’re easier to follow and manage than ever before. In general, Open AI aims to develop AI in ways that will benefit humanity as a whole.
Copy AI: Copy AI allows you to manage all of your copywriting needs in one place, from top-level brand guidelines to individual ad copy. You can also use it to create and manage content for e-commerce sites, customer support, blogs and more. CredoHire uses it for generating contents for a blog post, technical articles and many others.
LinkedIn Sales Navigator: Linkedin Sales Navigator helps you manage your pipeline by helping you identify potential leads from the LinkedIn network. The tool also helps you find out how much time it takes to close deals with those leads (and whether or not they’re worth pursuing). It also shows you how much money each deal would bring in over time, as well as how much time you’ll need to spend on each deal if you decide to move forward. CredoHire uses LinkedIn Sales Navigator as a tool for B2B sales through which we are able to optimise our current practices and gain new insights into our pipeline so that we are able to make better decisions about which deals are worthwhile.
Loom: The Loom Video communication is a tool that allows you to create animated videos in minutes. You can use it to create short videos, like those used in social media posts, and longer videos, like explainer videos. The program is easy to use and comes with a library of stock music tracks for you to use. You can use the Loom Video Tool because it’s free and easy to use. You can even create animated videos using just photos from your phone or tablet! CredoHire uses Loom to create explanatory and informative videos for different stakeholders to be able to utilise our product in its full capacity.
