My picks: The best service providers for startups
A friend of mine…I’ll call him Arnold Babar…is in the early stages of starting a company. Over a few beers the other night, Arnold asked me a few general questions about service providers we’ve used for various aspects of building the KnowledgeBid expert network management platform and other projects. A few came to mind immediately…then I thought of a few later that night…then a few more the next day. I’m putting them all into a post in the hopes that I might save someone else the hours of head + wall collisions it took me to find these guys. I’m only going to include services that I use heavily myself and would recommend to a close personal friend. I’ll add to this as more come to me. My top priorities: 1) cost; 2) functionality / flexibility; 3) quality; 4) reliability.
Best Corporate Telephony / PBX / Fax Service: RingCentral
My previous write-up on RingCentral is here. Super flexible PBX, digital fax delivery, digital voice mail delivery, $19.95/month. Can’t beat it. Mac friendly except for the sound recording / uploading feature.
Best Payment Processing Service: Braintree Payment Solutions
My previous write-up on Braintree is here. The payment processing industry is a total mess. The Braintree guys are straight shooters. Save yourself serious pain and go straight to them.
Best Press Release Services: PRZOOM, The Open Press
The web has antiquated the newswire industry. These two providers are free and get your PR messages on sites other than your own, which is all you really need. PRWeb and the others try to get you to pay, but it’s really not worth it.
Best Conference Call Service: Free Conference
My previous write-ups on the free conference call industry are here. The FCC says these guys can stay in business and so long as you just need them to work for your call tomorrow or next week, you’ll be fine. Call quality is good and reliability is good. I would advise against trying to bake them into your app though…you get what you pay for and who knows how long their loophole will be open.
Best Desktop Sharing Software: Glance
This a simple, functional, reliable piece of software perfect for sharing your desktop for demos. No install needed for your clients, but this means there is no way to see the screen of the person on the other end. It’s $39/month and WebEx has dropped prices in response. There may be some free stuff out there too but I would rather have my demos work and pay a little. Glance is Mac friendly, WebEx is not.
Best Domain Registrar: One and One
One and One is clean, easy to use, without constant upselling, ads and pop-ups. GoDaddy is a nightmare IMO.
Best Hosting Service: M5 Hosting
Previous mention here. These guys were referred to us by a friend and they have done a great job so far. Stay the hell away from MediaTemple.
Best Blog Platform: WordPress.com, WordPress.org
The best blogging and simple content management system out there, IMO. Open source so there are an amazing number of plug-ins, style sheets, and high quality WordPress designers out there so you can really make anything. WordPress.com is a free, hosted blogging platform (example here) while you need to host WordPress.org on your own server (example here, here, and here).
Best Corporate Email Solution: Google Apps for Your Domain
Face it, yourcompanyname@gmail.com is JV. Google Apps makes it free and easy to have Google tools under your own domain.
Best Bug Tracker: Mantis
We’re coming up on our 300th mantis ticket and so far, so good. Free, open source bug tracking & project management. We tried some of the more trendy solutions out there and were very disappointed.
Best Stock Photography: Stockxpert
High quality stock photography on a pay-as-you-go model. Many other players out there have high subscription fees which sucks when you only need 1 or 2 pictures. Examples here and here.
Best Professional Voice Recording: VoiceVector
These guys and gals are based in Alaska but you wouldn’t know it. $1o for your first 12 words and $8 for each additional group of 12 or fewer words in a single recording. Quick, easy, high quality, and they give you your recording in lots of formats. For example call here.
Best Screencast Solution: Camtasia
The web video world is like the credit card processing world…it’s a total mess. Camtasia makes it easy to record a screencast, polish it up, and host it so anyone can watch it. Example here. They have a free demo period. Tip: don’t try to cut and splice within a single recording – just go all the way through.
Best Competitive / Industry Monitor: Google Alerts
Previous write-up here. Cut down on your unnecessary news reading and get productive.
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I’d love to hear comments on these and other solid services out there. I’m actively looking for these:
Best Headset for Blackberry 8703e
Best Low Volume SMS Solution
Best Free CRM
Best Password / Login Manager
I think Slicehost would win best hosting for a startup hands down. They pop up on Hackers News comments all the time. Anyway, good list thanks!
I highly disagree with your pick for domain registrar. Transferring domains away from 1and1 is a royal pain and their tech support is awful. I personally have had a good experience with GoDaddy and I have heard good things about NameCheap (http://www.namecheap.com/).
For a hosting service, check out Slicehost (http://www.slicehost.com). They specialize in Xen VPS (Virtual Private Server) hosting and have plans to fit a variety of resource needs and budgets. I have been hosting with them since January and service (both uptime and customer service) has been top notch.
Best free CRM – Zoho CRM – free for 3 users. Best by a mile. Salesforce is like GoDaddy cluttered and expensive
Am I missing something? Look at Site5.com and their hosting option. I think it is a better deal.
Sugar Community Edition 5 is a solid, open source CRM that’s worth looking into. For Joomla users, the guys at ExtremeJoomla.com have released a suite of CRM extensions known as jForce (commercial license, $300) that are becoming very popular.
Best Password / Login Manager – KeePass Password Safe(open source)
slicehost.com has lots of positive reviews for its hosting services.
Great post, I currently use and recommend atleast half of these services myself. I went with gotvmail instead of ringcentral a few years ago and love freeconference.com.
I would agree with the other comments about the registrar, 1and1 is decent but there are better ones out there.
For hosting take a look at slicehost, hostgator has been decent and provides quick live help as well.
I forgot to mention Tokbox for video conferencing. Free and simple to use, something that just works and if you need video conferencing this is a no brainer.
[...] My picks: The best service providers for startups [...]
I’m using 1and1 for a client because that’s what they paid for. Their control panel is super slow, the database names are long and frightful, the login usernames and passwords for the databases and the SSH are long and frightful too. They suck. Better to use hostgator.com or a2webhosting.com.
As for a free and intuitive CRM, try Volo Milestone at http://volosystems.com/.
For our startup we are using a dedicated box at GoDaddy. There tech support is good, always american but the never ending marketing is annoying, but I can deal because of the price.
We are also using Sugar CRM’s Community Edition. Easy to setup, extremely powerful and fully customizable.
Chris
http://www.propertystampede.com
what’s wrong with (mt)?
I have been using KeePass for password managemtnt for a very long time. It is fantastic.
[...] My picks: The best service providers for startups « RobWebb2k (tags: startup business entrepreneurship services entrepreneur) [...]
Simple Sales Tracking (http://www.simplesalestracking.com) for Best CRM.
I use almost all google app they help me to get a high quality application with no charge at all. Google rocks.
For hosting, I recommend WebFaction ( http://www.webfaction.com ). These guys do an amazing job!
was using Glance before but recently switched to LiveLOOK – http://www.livelook.net
1. No installation required – even for presenter, works on PC, MAC and Linux.
2. Super simple and Very reliable
3. It’s 39.99 for corporate, Glance corporate starts at $249/month
[...] My picks: The best service providers for startups « RobWebb2k (tags: business startup) [...]
Thank you for recognizing us on your list !
We certainly do cater to those that need the flexibility to customize their platform they can develop, grow and operate their business or project they way they want to. People seem to like the price too.
Thank you very much !
This is a really helpful article.
PaySimple is another option that you missed in your article. We are launching our new on-demand Software as a Service (SaaS) platform — PaySimple 2.0 — that enables small businesses to bill, collect, and manage their customer payments under one user-friendly system. If you or anyone reading this is interested in reviewing the product prior to the press launch in May please contact me at mfb@paysimple.com and I would be glad to set you up with a review account.
Thanks.
Best password manager: http://passpack.com
Some great ideas that you have. Here’s a list we compiled:
* Payroll: Paycycle.com
* VMail: Gotvmail.com
* Concall: Freeconferencecall.com
* Email: Google Apps for Your Domain
* Hosting: Godaddy
* Website analytics: Google Analytics
* Helpdesk: Zendesk.com
* Intl Calls: Skype
This is a very useful list. If you want to keep this list updated (I think you should) so that it is not buried over time, try rankrz.com. I have a similar list at http://rankrz.com/personal/14.
I also like your KnowledgeBid. Good luck.
Great article!
Best Free Job Board – Smuz.com
Like Monster without the big bill
Wow! Great the list.
I use http://www.TheBrain.com – Visual Information Manager
Great software. Bye.
[...] 28, 2008 in Uncategorized In my post a while back about my picks for the best service providers for startups, I included my favorite desktop sharing software, Glance, which I use religiously. Glance was [...]
Rob – thank you for the mention and the kind words. Regarding credit card processing, merchants need to be very careful when storing their customers credit card data with a provider because most will hold it hostage if they ever want to move to a different provider. It’s a huge gotcha with big implications.
To address this problem, we recently created the Credit Card Data Portability Standard. You can read more about it here: http://www.braintreepaymentsolutions.com/blog/data-portability
Bryan Johnson
Braintree