Ask HN: What software do you use for your startup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What software do you use for your startup?

49 pointsolalonde70 comments

I'll start with mine (feel free to add categories):

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Slicehost

- Invoicing: Freshbooks

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Ta-da list (seriously)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: rsync + home server

- Instant messaging: Skype

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Wow. All these startups, making potentially game changing software, all sending their private data and communications around via an uncontrollable 3rd party e-mail system managed by the admins of an company known for its aggressive consumption of startups.

Call me paranoid, but though Google's public motto may be "Do no evil" they're like every company and are after profit at the end of the day. Are you encrypting your e-mails? Is running your own mail server that hard, or does Google Apps offer that much benefit? Would you host your e-mail with Microsoft? Oracle? What really make's Google that different?

I am genuinely curious - Google seems to be treated by large portions of the startup community as if it were some charitable organisation, working for the benefit of man-kind in an open and free manner. Sure, they've done great things - Search, G-Mail, Android and loads of open source work. But they're still a company beholden to their shareholders, selling adverts based on mass data collection. At the end of the day, in my eyes, they're not fundamentally different from Apple, Microsoft or any other hugely funded mega-corp. I wouldn't store my secret sauces with those companies and their ever evolving market plans and TOSs. Am I overly cautious?

Why the downvotes? I consider the wanton use of Google Apps also dangerous for startups who may be competing in a space that Google is curious in. I don't believe that Google would read through anyone's emails (mostly because I'm comfortable that 99.99% of Google Engineers/Operations people are good people) but I'm still aware that I leave that decision at their mercy.

Think about the things that go through e-mail, Powerpoint strategy decks, git commit messages (not too hard to recreate an entire git repo from the procession of messages being sent) etc. You have to be really careful about who gets access to that kind of information.

Because access (even if they do, which they dont) to startup emails is not enough to replicate startup's success.

Perhaps not, but it's more than enough to find out strategy, preempt potential competitive advantage, reconstruct development patterns, cherry pick staff members, and gain a huge upper hand in takeover negotiations (potentially driving down acquisition price based on unfortunate private data).

Would you write down everything you're doing, and post it to a competitor? Because if you work in an area Google's interested in then that's what you're doing, modulo a privacy policy you'll never find out they've violated (and has happened at least once before - http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/16/business/la-fi-googl...).

Good point on the cherry-picking of staff members. I could definitely see Google releasing something like Google Me based on their Gmail and if they did something like Buzz, you'd have your entire company (Google App domain) in the open.

In this day and age, information travels fast enough that trying to keep a lid on your top talent is probably useless, but still good to have that information under your control.

While it's possible Google might snoop on their competitors email to figure out their strategy, I'd think the possible consequences if they got caught would be too significant for any possible benefit. With regard to the guy that got fired for looking at other people's messages, one rogue engineer messing with a couple people is very different than a deliberate corporate strategy of espionage. If Google got caught doing that, they'd never be able to pursue government or enterprise contracts again.

I agree, and I very much doubt they'd ever do something like this. My argument is just one of prudence - if you wouldn't leave your business plans and private data lying around in a competitors house, why would you risk even the 10^-7% chance that doing so with Google would damage you when running your own e-mail server (or, if you don't want the maintenance, encrypting e-mail through G-mail) is relatively trivial?

Looking back in time and given what's happened, would Google the Startup have been wise hosting their e-mail on Hotmail?

>With regard to the guy that got fired for looking at other people's messages, one rogue engineer messing with a couple people is very different than a deliberate corporate strategy of espionage.

Consider the case of the UK PM's director of communications (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Coulson#Renewed_allegation...). He was a newspaper editor that allegedly¹ instigated the use of phone cracking to get info on celebs and public figures. Of course once caught he denied having knowledge despite those doing the cracking saying that he instructed them to do it. Result: the peons get it in the neck and the top brass get positions of greater power.

I don't think Google are doing something like that but I'm sure more than one rogue elsewhere, in the past, was actually following orders.

¹ - weasel words!

Edit: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/phone-hacking... for anyone interested; they "lost" the emails sending them to India and of course a major newspaper never keeps backups ...

It's only natural that we feel we're more important than we actually are. 99.99% of those who have access to your inbox either don't know who you are or they don't give a damn about you or your startup.

You realize in the US company directors can face criminal charges for corporate espionage ?

Give me an interface as nice as Gmail's, and I'll consider it.

Add that to Google's Spam filtering, and the fact that I have to do nothing other than change some DNS records to get email for free, and it's really hard to bother to use something else.

> Give me an interface as nice as Gmail's, and I'll consider it.

How about Gnus? A single interface for mail, news, RSS, even files on your local machine. Regular expression-based filtering and sorting, on arbitrary fields in the header or body of messages. Adaptive scoring for prioritizing new messages. Auto-expiry and deletion of mail that you don't need to read. Completely extensible and hackable in Lisp.

And best of all, it's completely integrated with your favorite editor. ;)

Honestly, the GMail interface feels really limited to me. The one thing that GMail has -- or should have -- over other mail clients is its ability to search your mail archive. But GMail's search isn't even good! It doesn't match substrings, for example. Grepping a local mail spool is infinitely more powerful.

I don't think "an emacs extension" and "a nice interface" really belong together. (Then again, I'm a vim guy...)

Almost none of those features matter to me, and sound like a bunch of extra junk I don't want. I want:

1) Webmail

2) with a reasonable interface

3) and a good spam filter

4) That has a ton of space to save my emails

5) That I don't have to administer.

In your first post, you made a clear distinction between the interface and the server-side stuff. Your points 3-5 are all related to server-side stuff. With respect to those things, you can get the benefits of GMail using Gnus or any other mail client (by reading your mail over IMAP or even POP).

(True, Gnus requires an initial configuration step -- maybe that counts as "administration" -- that the GMail web interface does not. But that's basically set-and-forget; it doesn't require the kind of monitoring or tweaking that running a mail server does.)

As far as the interface itself goes, if GMail works for you, that's great. Personally, I want:

1) to be able to check my mail from a terminal

2) a lot of control over pre-processing of mail, especially in filters that sort messages into groups/folders/labels. I find that simple string-match filters are really limiting.

3) to be able to copy and paste code and other data into and out of my email (e.g., to create new TODO items in Org mode), without using the mouse

4) to have the option to automate tasks like (3) when they become too frequent or annoying to do by hand

Different strokes, I guess. :)

> Different strokes, I guess. :)

Yep. :)

I used to access GMail through mutt, so I'm not totally opposed to doing something like this, but the OP was talking about not wanting to use GMail for privacy reasons, so using something like gnus to access your gmail account wasn't really on the table. And 'server side stuff' is all under 'do nothing' in my original post.

> Give me an interface as nice as Gmail's, and I'll consider it.

Roundcube is getting there slowly but surely:

http://roundcube.net/

In addition to what steveklabnik said, it's also nice that you can integrate all of the Google App services into your system and quickly and conveniently work online and share things via Docs and Calendar by company domain. It makes it super convenient. While there are some certains on privacy, I don't feel the threat outweighs the benefit. It's not like Google is sniffing around to know what you do via your personal email and stuff. They are using that data to target ads. And to be honest, that doesn't matter to me as much.

I have difficulty believing that the folks who work at Google have sufficient time to read the millions (if not billions) of emails they handle daily to snoop out some seedling that might, maybe, someday have sufficient value to be of interest to them.

Of course, that assumption might come from the nearly 3000 unread emails in my inbox. Maybe they can keep up with my mail better than I can. (Not a "startup". Just some gal with some websites.)

Peace.

I stopped hosting my own email because I didn't want to navigate the maze of corporate spam filters necessary to make sure I could reach anyone I needed to contact.

For solo entrepreneurs like myself, one thing like setting up and managing my own mail server isn't a big deal by itself, but add that to all the other little things I do myself (not to mention the other stuff that Google Apps makes easy) and it's an easy choice to simply set up Google Apps and forget it.

The chances of Google stealing my idea is virtually nil, and if they wanted to steal it, they just have to go to my public website. Trying to hide what you're doing just seems silly to me in this day and age, so I'm just super-open about it; I'll blog, tweet, & FB what I'm doing on my start-up any time, and let the chips fall where they may...

I feel so conventional!

Windows Server 2008, Sql Server IIS Visual Studio Quickbooks & Indinero Authorize.net Google Apps for mail

Hardly conventional! This is what we use too. Except IIS and Sql Server are on Windows Azure.

I'm inclined to say the MS stack is fairly unconventional for startups these days. One decent heuristic for whether a decision is conventional is whether your peers are likely to ask "why did you do that?". If a startup's stack is Rails on EC2, few in the startup world would bother to question it.

So, why did you do that?

I'm going to guess that that's what the person/team had experience with already.

I've not known many people who were already technical developers who started a venture and swapped over to entirely 'new to them' tech just because it's what some other people were using.

Go with what you know and have mastery of already - you've got enough going against you starting a new venture already - don't add to it by trying to learn something like django or rails just because someone on HN or TC used it too.

That said, using 'unconventional' tech may make it harder to find more devs in the future if they're needed. Or... it may mean that you're simply pulling from a different pool. If you're one of 15 rails-based ventures someone is looking to join, you won't stand out as much as the one Perl-based operation.

Well, I can't answer for Stronico, but we use a similar stack (Visual Studio 2010, Windows 7 / Server 2008 R2) for development and ASP.NET MVC 2 / IIS / SQL Server / Azure for our website. Using something else wasn't even really a question, since our product is .NET-based, and I'd already had a few years of experience as an ASP.NET dev.

I'd bet that nearly all of the other startups using a Microsoft-based stack have a senior / lead developer who has a significant amount of C# / .NET experience.

I'm primarily a Linux/OSX developer and use Ruby for most of my web stuff - but I have to admit, for anything desktop related or dealing with a lot of Windows clients (remote installation of services etc) Windows really takes the cake. JRuby has helped a lot with this recently but Java still looks/feels less natural than .net apps and often there's no cross-platform need in this space.

Also, the Windows development tooling is still way ahead of the stuff you can get with Eclipse. I personally use Vim for my Ruby development, but intellisense that works can be really, really for exploring APIs or just navigating new projects. That being said, I've also liked the Xcode environment for the short amount of time I played with it.

If Microsoft played better with other ecosystems, I would definitely consider bringing more of it into my workflow, but as it is I'd rather use open tools than best of breed.

We've all read about what startups use for hosting, analytics, and version control before. What do you use for accounting? hiring (resume database)? Shipping? etc?

I know the big names like git get glory for this crowd, but there's a lot more to running a business than git and web hosting.

EDIT: Erm. I guess this means your company needs revenue. That takes care of a lot of them...

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps

- Hosting: Amazon

- Invoicing: InvoiceExpress

- Analytics: Google Analytics & MixPanel

- Project management: Goplan & Google spreadsheets

- File-sharing: Dropbox & E-mail

- Version control: Mercurial

- Backups: scripts with S3

- Instant messaging: Skype & Gtalk

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode, Slicehost

- Invoicing: Crunch (http://www.crunch.co.uk/)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Pivotal Tracker (http://pivotaltracker.com/)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: SVN, Mercurial

- Backups: rsync

- Instant messaging: Skype

Why go with both Linode and Slicehost? I was under the impression that they were pretty much interchangeable...

That's what I get from the comma. If both were really operating together, he probably would say "Linode + Slicehost".

I wouldn't go that far. I've found Slicehost has some major deficiencies compared to Linode. i/o being the major one.

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Webfaction

- Invoicing: Billable (http://billable.co.za)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Basecamp

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Github + Webfaction git repos

- Instant messaging: Google + iChat

- Email/Cal/Docs: Google

- Hosting: our own servers at colo + EC2

- Expense tracking/management: Xpenser ( http://xpenser.com/ )

- Invoicing: Billing Manager ( https://billingmanager.intuit.com/billing/free-online-invoic... )

- Version control: git

- File sharing: Dropbox

- Analytics: google

- Todo: http://wisetodo.com/ (invite only ATM)

- IDE: mostly Eclipse+Pydev+Aptana

- Screensharing: Adobe Connect

I'm in the process of releasing a game for iOS:

- Email/Cal/Docs - Google Apps

- Hosting - AWS

- Accounting - Quickbooks

- Source Control - Github

- Issue Tracking - Jira

- IDE - XCode

- Libraries - ZLib, LibPNG, Lua, Bullet Physics, Wild Magic Geometry Tools

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Heroku

- IDE: RubyMine

- Accounting: Xero

- Analytics: Google Analytics, MixPanel

- To do list/notes: Workflowy

- Version control: Git

- Backups: SpiderOak (because they store encrypted data)

I'm really loving Workflowy. Next killer feature: sharing sublists with someone else. That would be the killer todo list app!

I would actually like to see the ability to have simple documents as leaf nodes. Sometimes bullet point lists aren't quite enough.

Embrace constraints :)

I have linked to another page or perhaps to an Evernote document which is what I used to use for todolists (but their formatting was painful occasionally).

Agreed though, that if they're going to allow notes, the notes should be more full-featured.

You can treat the notes like a simple document. I have lots of leaf nodes that are like big documents, once you get into them they're basically just like a big plain text doc.

(I am co-founder of WorkFlowy)

For flickscanapp.com + thesocialcollective.com

- Email: Multiple accts forwarded to private Gmail

- Bulk Email Send: AuthSMTP (we setup a small server to act as a central SMTP relay to AuthSMTP to save on costs).

- Hosting: Rackspace Cloud + CloudKick. DB Backups pushed to S3. File uploads within apps direct to S3

- Analytics: Google, ChartBeat

- Project Mgmt: Basecamp

- File-Sharing: Dropbox kinda. We use Google Docs so much that everything pretty much lives there.

- Local Backups: Arq (git style backups for OS X that uses S3)

- Instant Messaging: Skype, heavy users of the video conferencing (my co-founder is on the opposite coast) and screen sharing features.

- Media Monitoring: Watchlister.com (my own project), TweetDeck, Google Alerts

- Code: XCode, TextMate

- Version Control: SVN + Versions, Git (but how I wish there was a Version of Versions with Git support).

- Production: Rails, Mysql, Memcached, Mongo, Nginx

- Blog: Wordpress

- Version Control: SVN + Versions, Git (but how I wish there was a Version of Versions with Git support).

Time to test: git-tower.com

Google Apps Standard Media Temple (Don't know if i'd recommend it though). Project Management: Skype + Email, may use 37 signals soon File Sharing - Cloud App Instant Messaging: Skype Analytics: GoSquared Twitter: CoTweet

Does anyone NOT use Google for email anymore?

For personal stuff I use postfix and imap on a personal sever. The company I work for is sortof a startup and we used zimbra (I don't recommend)

I prefer desktop mail clients to web ones. I also dislike handing all of my mail to another company.

I use Rackspace Mail for my business email. If something goes wrong, I know I can easily get someone on the phone.

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode(much better than Slicehost) & EC2/S3

- Invoicing: Freshbooks

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Nothing

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Its our business, so our own redundant servers(not Linode or AWS)

- Instant messaging: Skype

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Strato, EC2

- Monitoring: Cloudkick, Stashboard

- Invoicing: N/A

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: toodledo, orgmode

- File-sharing: Google Storage

- Version control: SVN, Git

- Backups: Google Storage, S3

- Instant messaging: Etherpad

- Production platform: AppJet, Node, CouchDB, Eucalyptus

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: DreamHost

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Email (lots of), Google Spreadsheets

- File-sharing: WebDAV, Dropbox

- Version control: Mercurial

- Backups: rsync

- Istant messaging: GTalk, Skype

Our list:

http://blog-en.cloudsafe.com/post/1115843272/web-startup-too...

That's an interesting list, if for no other reason that I hadn't considered the differing needs of Euro vs US startups.

foursquare:

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps

- Hosting: Amazon EC2

- Bug database: FogBugz

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Continuous Integration: Hudson

- Code Review: Review Board

- IM: GChat + Campfire

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Linode

- Invoicing: Zoho invoice

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: GQueues/Yast

- File-sharing: Dropbox/OpenVPN

- Version control: Git

- Backups: Crash Plan

- Instant messaging: Skype/GTalk

I'd be curious to know how OpenVPN helps with file-sharing. Is it to secure a non secure file sharing protocol such as FTP?

We share folders between remote Linux, Windows and MacOs machines. Like you can do with Dropbox but without the size limits. With OpenVPN we can see our computers as if they were in the same local network even if they are remote.

Oh, and to upload files to our linode we use scp protocol.

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Gmail, Google Calendar/Docs

- Hosting: Slicehost

- Invoicing: CurdBee (http://curdbee.com)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Ta-da list

- File-sharing: Dropbox (http://dropbox.com/)

- Version control: Git (http://git-scm.com/)

- Backups: offsite-backups

- Instant messaging: Google chat

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Amazon EC2

- Invoicing: Freshbooks

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: JIRA, Rypple

- Scrum: Greenhopper

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Code Review: Review Board

- IM: GChat + Yammer

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Gmail, Google Calendar/Docs

- Hosting: Slicehost

- Invoicing: CurdBee (http://curdbee.com)

- Analytics: Clicky (http://getclicky.com), Google Analytics

- Project management: ActiveCollab

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git

- Backups: TimeMachine with TimeCapsule & custom offsite-backups

- Instant messaging: Adium

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Amazon EC2 / Linode

- Invoicing: Xero (& Recurly)

- Analytics: Google Analytics, Woopra, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics

- Project management: http://PlayNice.ly (our app)

- File-sharing: Dropbox

- Version control: Git(hub)

- Backups: Github/Dropbox/Time machine

- Instant messaging: Skype/Yammer

Other stuff:

- Billing: Recurly

- IDE: TextMate

- Dev other: VMWare for local Ubuntu dev environments

- E-mail/calendar: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Oxilion (local hosting provider)

- Invoicing: Excel

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Excel

- File-sharing/docs: Dropbox

- Version control: Git: Codaset (previously Beanstalk)

- Backups: Amazon S3

- Instant messaging: Gtalk included in Google Apps for Domains

- Email/Docs: Google

- Hosting: Heroku

- Analytics: GA

- Project Management: Pivotal Tracker

- Chat: Campfire

- File Sharing: Dropbox

- Version Control: Git

- File storage: s3

- Backups: S3+Dropbox

- Coding: TextMate

- Internet: Google Chrome

- Programming: Ruby

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps standard edition

- Hosting: Rackspace cloud

- Project management & invoicing: our own app (which is what the startup is about)

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Version control: Mercurial

- Backups: rsync

- Instant messaging: Skype, GTalk

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Google Apps

- Hosting: Linode

- Invoicing: Google Docs, Billings Pro

- Project management: Pivotal Tracker, Basecamp

- File-sharing: Dropbox, UbuntuOne

- Version control: Git (via Github)

- Instant messaging: Skype, AIM, GTalk/XMPP

Email: Gmail

Hosting: Media Temple and Dreamhost

Analytics: Google Analytics

CRM: Highrise

File-sharing: Dropbox

CMS (I'm not a programmer, but I'm learning Rails): Drupal

Monitoring: Pingdom

(ParkGrades.com plus some related stealth sites)

at iWantMyName we use:

- email/calendar/docs: google

- hosting: slicehost, rackspace cloud, cloudprovider, dedicated servers

- accounting: xero

- analytics: google

- project management/ bug tracking: redmine

- file sharing: dropbox

- version control: git

- IM: jabber

- stack: perl, CouchDB, RabbitMQ

changes in the last year or so:

mail -> google (from zimbra)

hosting -> +rackspace

accounting -> xero (from home grown)

file shareing -> dropbox (from VPN/own server)

stack -> -PostgreSQL

for my personal projects i also use:

time tracking: minutedock + xero (-> from freshbooks)

Well, - Vim - Google Analytics - Dropbox - Git - Linux - Google Docs - Skype

Not a cent paid, not a single complaint.

Are you using Git locally or are you paying for private repos somewhere (via hosted server or Github)?

Locally.

- E-mail/calendar/docs: Exchange/MS Office

- Hosting: Limestone Networks, AWS EC2, Joyent

- Invoicing: N/A

- Analytics: Google Analytics

- Project management: Internal App

- File-sharing: Shared SMB Volume + VPN

- Version control: SVN and Git

- Backups: Tarsnap and rsync.net

- IM: Wildfire XMPP

Other Stuff:

- Development: IntelliJ IDEA, vim

- CDN: AWS Cloudfront

- Production Platform: Jetty, Wicket, Sun JDK, Ubuntu, PostgreSQL

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