Gumlet serves as video infrastructure for more than 6000+ companies. Developers across more than 50 countries rely exclusively on Gumlet to upload, transcode and stream videos at scale.
Since we started building Gumlet as a SaaS company in 2019, we relied on many SaaS tools. Here is (almost) complete list of SaaS tools we are using right now. I have also tried to cover context whenever necessary. Let's dive in!
Essentials ⚡️
Google Workspace
This should come as no surprise but still want to make it clear that any second you spend finding alternative is just a second wasted. We know not everything provided by Google is best but Gmail, Drive and Meet are some of the top used ones.
Notion
It's 2022 and internal documentation can't be democratized without using this. We have added it every single employee is hooked to it. No longer creating, searching, sharing, fixing permissions and again fixing permissions on Google Docs. Everything an employee creates is shared to everyone by default. That's our culture!
Slack
No explanation needed I guess! We ❤️ huddle as well.
Stripe
Our payment processing, invoicing, subscriptions, reminder emails and tax all is handled here. It just works!
Zoho Books
Our accounting and tax filing system. Its APIs are really hard to work with but after it's all set, it works perfectly.
Product Management 🍱
Segment
It's at center of all product management tools I am listing below. Segment orchastrates data movement.
Mixpanel
Every single customer interaction lives here on different dashboards. Pageviews, product usage, engagement, onboarding funnels and even revenue cohorts. This is single source of truth about any customer.
Hotjar
It's self explanatory :)
Google Data Studio
Since we make massive use of BigQuery, our dashboards on that data warehouse are made on data studio. More on the data when we cover BigQuery.
Jira
Product team makes roadmaps in Notion but final granular tasks are added in Jira backlog. This overlaps heavily with tech team as they use it for their spring planning and bug listing platform.
Readme
Our customer facing documentation lives here. This is also bit like Google Workspace. Any second you spend finding alternative is mostly going to be a wasted one.
ChartMogul
Our subscription analytics tool. Stripe does not do this job well but ChartMogul helps us slice our revenue data and make useful dashboards.
Circle
Our newest addition to this list. We have just started using it to shape our community.
Tech 📟
We are covering devops tools here as well as we don't have a distinction in our tech team so far. Everyone manages their own containers 🐳. This section also lists products which are not SaaS but we have included them becuase they are still cloud services.
AWS
We use this to host our mission critical workloads like Web Application and REST APIs. We don't spin instances manually but use EKS which does it for us. We also use S3, Route 53 as our primary DNS and CloudFront as our secondary CDN.
DigitalOcean
We host our media heavy workloads here on their managed kubernetes service. It's pretty reliable but it fails once in a while for short periods of time and we have planned for this in our deployments we make here. AWS data transfer costs kill us because of massive data transfer so we have to use this one.
Wasabi Cloud Storage
We use this for large amount of cheap media cache storage. The storage here has large volume but can be re-generated if needed. Not that it's not the realiable one but they had a massive downtime in 2021. Just being cautious.
BigQuery
This is our data lake. Every single request log goes here and we can trace problems by running analytics in seconds. It also powers our customer facing analytics. We currently store more than 100 Billion rows 🔥
MongoDB Atlas
We used to self-host out database but in July 2022, we moved to MongoDB Atlas. We don't know why we did not do this earlier but this is one of the best investment we made. Peace of mind and features which come with a managed DB are nowhere close to self-hosted. Our entire SaaS runs on MongoDB and Atlas is what keeps us running without a glitch.
Rancher
This is not a SaaS. We self host this but the reason it made to this list is its necessity. Entire company runs on Kubernetes and we can't survive without the multi cluster management provided by Rancher. If you are using Kubernetes cluster, you must give this a try! It's worth it.
Gitlab
Our code repositories and CI/CD pipelines are here. This is probably only SaaS for which we are not paying yet! Free plan is more than enough till date.
Fastly
This is technically infrastructure provider. We have been using CloudFront till last year but the flexibility of VCL and impeccable performance of Fastly just made it irresistible. We value our service quality a lot and not cheaping out on CDN provider.
Envkey
This is used to manage all environment variables and secrets. Their V2 is a much improved one.
Stitch
Our ETL pipelines run here. Things from many sources are dumped to BigQuery using this one.
DockerHub
Their $5 per month plan is perfect to host our private container images. We were using Gitlab for container storage in past but one of the downtimes affected us badly. DockerHub is just impeccable in terms of performance since we started using it.
Newrelic
Product team uses the browser measurement feature to measure performance of website and dashboard. It also alerts if there are any errors for end-users. Newrelic overlaps with tech team because they also heavily use it for logging, APM etc.
UpDown
It's used to monitor all our API endpoints. It's ridiculously cheap service which has been working perfectly since day 1. They also integrate with Statuspage to automatically change status.
Statuspage
Powers our status page.
PagerDuty
Calls us when things are on 🔥
Sales & Marketing 💰
HubSpot
HubSpot has very antiquated APIs and have really weird pricing plans. However, nothing like that is currently available in market for lead scoring etc. We have been using it both for sales and marketing. We are now migrating to Salesforce for sales CRM.
Salesforce
We are migrating to it as of this writing. Reasons are solid integrations, reports and best practices available out of the box.
Ahrefs
Our de-facto tool to plan our SEO efforts. Did I mention we all ❤️ this one.
Zoom
Let's face it, Google Meet has its own problems when it comes to experience. Our sales team and we founders mostly use Zoom when doing external meetings.
Zoominfo
Sales intelligence tool.
Outplay
Sales outreach tool which can personalise messages and automate some of the stuff. We are currently on trial but soon expect to jump.
Calendly
Because life is too short to exchange 5 mails to schedule a meeting 🙃
Ghost
Our default blogging system. It powers our Blog and Learn content. We self host this one to have more control over backend but we have been using this since we started our company and it's perfect for the job. You are reading this blog on Ghost.
Grammarly
This one just prevents ooops moments when writing mails, docs or blogs!
SimilarWeb
Our market intelligence tool.
Hunter
Hunter.io is a powerful email-finding tool that helps us to easily find the email addresses of potential partners, and other professionals. We use it to build and grow our email lists, generate leads, and conduct outreach.
Customer Communications 📞
Crisp
It's our customer support tool since day 1. All mails sent to support@gumlet.com also land here. Our entire team loves this one.
Customer.io
We used MailChimp in past but switched to this since mid last year. We are NEVER going back. It's just perfect tool for drip campaigns, announcements, transactional emails and event driven mail triggers. Once you use it, it's really hard to use anything else.
Useful Ones 🔆
Freshteam
This is our ATS (Application tracking system) and also employee directory. It's not the best one but gets the job done.
Keka
Our payroll management system.
HSBC Banking
All of our banking needs are taken care by HSBC. Not a SaaS but worth mentioning because it's a major part of our day-to-day workflow.
That's it!
Hope you find this list helpful and you build something awesome!
Our world is becoming video first and Gumlet is at center of this revolution. If you are a company who wants to use Gumlet, apply to our startup credits program and if you want to be part of this revolution, please apply for an open position.
