We’ve got a good thing going here at WP Buffs. Sure, there’s always room for improvement, but I think we have a good system in place for working with clients and our remote team. But in order to keep everything running smoothly, we rely on a particular set of skills — erm — products.
All of these products are SaaS and make running every aspect of WP Buffs a snap. Seriously, I don’t know what we’d do without this stack. So, if you’re curious as to what we use to keep operations flowing — which helps us to keep your sites fast and secure — keep reading.
Business & Team Management Tools
Teamwork
Slack
Calendly
Zoom
We do all our internal meetings and sales calls via Zoom. It’s an easy and really reliable way to do video calls and make our remote team feel like we’re all in the same room together and helps personalize things when we’re talking to prospective customers. Plus, it works well to host our monthly webinars for WordPress professionals.
😮 Woah, these guys use some pretty dope #SaaS products to run their business! #WordPress Click To Tweet
Payments & Finances
I want to spend my time on improving MRR, not how I’m accepting that revenue, which is why I rely on a few SaaS tools to make things easier for me.
Stripe
Stunning
Stunning* connects into our Stripe account and reduces churn by managing our clients’ credit cards. It automatically emails them when they need to add new payment details or if their credit card is about to expire. Plus it’s all automated so all this happens magically in the background.
Quickbooks
Gusto
Email, Chat & Social Media
Anyone trying to scale an online business knows the importance of emails, chats and social media. The following tools have helped me to grow WP Buffs into what it is today.
ConvertKit
ConvertKit is what we use for all our email automation. By tagging subscribers, we can easily segment our audience and send people emails they actually enjoy reading.
RightMessage
RightMessage makes changes to wpbuffs.com based on how a subscriber is tagged in ConvertKit. Now, direct customers, freelancers and agencies will all see something different when they click through to our website. This personalization means more targeted messaging and significantly higher conversion.
15Five
15Five helps us take feedback from our team to another level. This tool lets us drive a high-performing culture in a systematic way, keep our whole team on the same page, and helps us keep our velocity high.
HubSpot
Boomerang
Buffer
Sumo
Sumo is our tool of choice when it comes to email collection. New visitors > email subscribers > new customers is our primary marketing channel and Sumo helps us convert email subscribers in a non-invasive, positive way.
Analytics
Tracking the performance of your online efforts gives insight into what is working and what needs improvement. These are the tools we use to track our analytics.
Hotjar
Baremetrics
Baremetrics takes all the data in our Stripe account and spits out highly actionable data that’s essential for business growth. It gives us LTV, MRR, ARPU and much more in real-time and I can now spend my time making changes to improve in those areas.
Hitmetrics
Website Management & SEO
SEO drives organic visits that make up the bulk of our traffic. A properly managed and optimized website is crucial to the success of any online business.
ManageWP
Zapier
Are you using two pieces of software that you need to connect or talk to each other? Chances are Zapier has an integration for them. This app is the glue that holds a few of our systems together and allows them to function seamlessly as one.
Advanced Web Rankings
SEMrush
Another of our big inbound marketing tools is SEMrush*. It’s strongest in helping us do keyword analysis as well as competitor research so we can know the exact kind of content to write that will drive the most qualified traffic to our website.
Writing & Editing
A blog does wonders for organic traffic, and the article you’re reading right now wouldn’t be possible without the following SaaS products.
Copyscape Sentry
Copyscape Sentry protects all our online content from being plagiarized by those who want to pass it on as their own work.
When somebody steals our content word-for-word, Copyscape finds it and sends us a warning so we can submit that page and website to Google. This keeps our content, our strongest marketing asset, undiluted and original.
Text Expander
I get annoyed when I have to type the same sentence or message over and over again. TextExpander solves that problem for me completely. It gives me small snippets of text that I can write and expands it automatically into full sentences, paragraphs, and even code snippets.
G Suite
When it comes to email, data storage, shared calendars and Google docs, I need them all to run my businesses. G Suite is the easy choice here. It’s cheap, powerful, and easy to use when it comes to both basic and advanced features.
Canva
Creating graphics for your blog posts and social media accounts can be a drag. Unless you have the right tools on hand. Canva is my go-to quick and easy image creation tool, ideal for making infographics, blog headers, and customized images to add to tweets.
With so many free templates to choose from, Canva is one of the most popular SaaS tools, and a must-have resource to have on hand when you want to make your content pop.
Miscellaneous
These are all SaaS tools for startups that are just as useful, but that didn’t really fit in the categories above. You can expect to find a little bit of everything here.
Printful
We love our Bufftastic tee shirts and even buy them for customers, partners, and email subscribers! We use Printful* to easily order customized designs at scale. And they’re oh-so soft.
Romwod
😎 For real though. I'm stealing some of these #SaaS suggestions and using them myself. #WordPress Click To Tweet
Which SaaS Products Work for You?
Hopefully, this SaaS applications and the descriptions of how we use them here at WP Buffs will inspire you to evaluate your workflow to see what aspects could use some assistance or refining.
No two companies are exactly alike, so what works for us might not work for you. Ultimately, you’ll need to try some of these tools on for size to see if they’ll address your needs.
Want to give your feedback or join the conversation? Add your comments 🐦 on Twitter.
