As the web has grown probably one of the most powerful impacts has been the advent and proliferation of software as a service (SaaS) applications. Call it cloud computing or any one of the other hundreds buzz terms that exist, it’s been a game changer for sure. No more installing and managing fat client software. You can get immediate access to world class apps and implementation has never been easier. Despite this I still see a lot of companies struggling with certain processes that could be easily addressed by leveraging SaaS apps. I often recommend the same ones over and over again which is why I came up with this master list of apps we use to run the business so it can serve as a reference for others. This is not an end all list as there are plenty of great ones out there that we aren’t currently using. It should also be noted that a fair number of them are applicable only to a digital agency or software development firm. I have indicated these ones with a [DA] next to it vs [All]. So take a gander, see what you are missing out on and what you are already using. If there are some great ones you think should be added, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

1. Google Apps [All] – We use Google for loads of things, from Analytics, Adwords, Remarketing, TagManager, Plus, Mail, Calendaring to what I think every organization should be using minimally on an app level – Google Apps (lately referred to as Google Work and also commonly referred to as Google Drive). So even if your mail/calendar is hosted elsewhere and you’re happy with it, minimally you should be using Google Apps. It’s the equivalent of MS office but much more, with the ability to easily share and collaborate with others with everything centralized and no need to ever hit save, because your files are being saved as you work. If you do have a file shared, your collaborators can see your changes being made real time and vice versa. Its a snap to export files out to any MS format, pdf and more. We use Google Apps in a number of scenarios including: managing proposals, presentations for demos, detailed punchlists for projects, meeting notes, key internal company documents, sharing out end of month billing instructions for bookkeeping, tracking recurring revenue and so much more.
2. Amazon Web Services [DA] – Commonly referred to as AWS, it only makes sense that the world’s largest internet retailer built their own massive infrastructure that they then make available to others on a subscription basis. While there are loads of services available through the AWS console, we primarily use 2: SES & Cloudfront CDN. SES stands for Simple Email Service and we use it to route transactional emails generated from any of our sites. This ensure high deliverability, all sorts of filtering technologies to prevent spam or malware from being sent and keeps the load off of our web servers, which shouldn’t be sending emails to begin with based on best practices. We use Cloudfront CDN for our content delivery network. In English this means common files on sites we run such as images, javascript files, css files, etc. are stored and replicated across Amazons infrastructure. This means that the user in England who is pulling up your site is having core files served up to him from the nearest Amazon edge which results in the site loading faster and your UK user saying, “This site is brilliant!” vs. them describing your site as “rubbish” or “bollocks”.   A faster loading site not only provides a better user experience but is also one of the many factors in search engine ranking algorithms. Even if your site visitors are not geographically dispersed, both of these services are solid components if you are taking your website seriously.
3. BrowserStack [DA] – In many ways web development hasn’t gotten any easier over the years although conventional wisdom would tell you otherwise. So many different devices, browsers and operating systems, yet the expectation is your site should work flawlessly across all of them.  At any given time there are minimally 3 versions of Internet Explorer (make that 2 since technically the latest MS browser is called Edge, not Explorer).  In some cases we support up to 5 versions of MS browsers depending on the site. Yes, as painful as it is, we do have some sites where 6% of the users are using IE8 running on XP! This isn’t the norm, however when you do have 6%, it’s enough traffic that you need to accommodate.  We are only talking MS browsers, never mind Safari, Chrome & Firefox or all the mobile devices! BrowserStack to the rescue! We use it to emulate all the various browsers/operating systems/devices to make sure our sites are tight across any of the scenarios.
4. Dropbox [All] – This is basically an online drive that you can access from anywhere to store and retrieve files. You can easily share out folders, files, etc. at a granular level. We typically establish and share out a Dropbox folder for any project we initiate which allows the client to load up logos, photography and any other digital assets. Technically the same thing can be accomplished using Google Drive, however we find this easier for clients that do not have an established and regularly used Google Account (gasp!).
5. Harvest [All] – Tracking time is very important in our business. Our team members spend time working on projects that are fixed price, other time spend on tasks associated with a recurring fee, time on internal efforts, time on t&e efforts for clients. Regardless of what they are working on I need to be able to see the time spent. We use Harvest for time tracking. At any given time I can easily see how many hours we have into a project. At the end of the month I easily run a report on t&e work performed, export it into a Google Sheet and have my bookkeeper bill accordingly. Harvest makes it very easy for our team members to track time whether they decide to use the browser interface or the nifty Chrome plugin that allows them to choose a client and project and start the timer. You can get very granular with project assignment and delegation and all sorts of features that we haven’t even used yet and likely will never need to.
6. Slack [All] – I am hard pressed to think of any company that shouldn’t be using Slack. The concept and functionality isn’t necessarily new or earth shattering, but as with many things it is timing and readiness of the market that has driven its success. As of Feb 2015 it has been bringing on about 10,000 new users a week. Slack provides direct chat and the ability to easily setup private groups and channels for whatever purpose you desire. We use it for direct chat and then setup channels devoted to projects and more. This is especially useful as we get close to launching a site and we need a dedicated channel that team members can constantly update real time as the action gets fast and furious. Other channels are more broad, such as #KnowledgShare, #Operations, #CodeTips, #SitesWeLove, you get the idea. When you or anyone of your team members have a great idea or find a useful resource, it no longer gets lost, forgotten or not even shared. Other channels we have get updated programmatically, for example the channel #SupportNotifications is updated with any activity on our Trello board for support tasks. No one posts directly to this channel but it is an extremely useful to see what is going on as any activity pushes a new entry to this channel. Same deal goes for being aware of any mods made in Dropbox. Through our experience with Slack, it has also fostered culture and comrade re. Our #Random, #WhatsPhoLunch and #OfficeQuotes are channels that have facilitated this. The content in these channels often induces belly laughs! Our one team member who works remote now feels much more dialed in as a result. Everyone feels more dialed in with Slack!
7. Trello [All] – A few years ago we started our search for a new solution for managing tasks and projects. We had been using a web based app that I had written that was getting the job done but lacked many new features available and was ready to be retired. We checked out a lot of great tools like BaseCamp, Asana and others before settling on Trello. We are glad we did. Trello is highly visual and structured with Boards that contain lists and under those lists are cards. It is incredibly flexible, allowing us to create a board for a given project, assigning it and then setting up lists and cards accordingly. Digital design, development and marketing is comprised of many small tasks. Trello does a great job in allowing us to have a place for all of these tasks in an intuitive format that allows us to share, mark stuff as complete, etc. We use it now for more than managing projects, we have used it to automate support, track publishing schedules and more.  It’s a snap to allow certain clients access to their own board so they can see what we are working on and add feedback and tasks.
8. Meldium [All] – So while we are talking about all of these great apps we should bring up the big challenge it can represent for organizations and that is access. Many apps are team based so each user has a login but how about the ones that require a single username/password to access and many team members need to access? We use Meldium to provide a single point of access to these apps. Our team members log into Meldium, see all the apps they have access to in a nice tidy dashboard. They click on the app to access and off they go to the app in a new window without ever having to know or supply username and password. This is incredibly useful and keeps things secure. I have a separate post dedicated to Meldium for further reading.
9. Invision [DA] – Invision is a great tool we use for sharing designs and prototypes with clients.  Gone are the days where we used to send over flat images and have to explain how interactive components like animations, clicks and mouseover events work. With Invision our clients can see how things will work and can comment directly on the designs using their contextual feedback tool that also supports threaded conversations.
10. SharpSpring [All] – We use SharpSpring as our marketing automation platform. It handles our forms, email marketing, user workflows, customer relationship management and so much more. We found SharpSpring while doing careful analysis for an MA solution for ourselves. SharpSpring has proven to be a great platform and is a fraction of the price of others such as Hubspot, Marketo and Infusionsoft. You can find a more in depth post of our experience and love of SharpSpring here.
11. Zapier [All] – When a potential client contacts me and mentions that they need an API built or API integration I get excited because we are great at this and working with API’s raises the behind the scenes complexity, not everyone can do it. We can and we do it extremely well. For those of you yawning and not sure of what I am talking about, API stands for Application Program Interface. You can think of an API as a set of instructions for interfacing with an application. It’s like glue, it allows different systems and apps to easily “talk” to one another. All of the previously listed apps provide their own API’s. Zapier allows you to connect apps together without knowing a thing about API’s with its point and click interface.  You can use this to automate all sorts of stuff between applications. For example, when a new client is brought on board I have my bookkeeper set them up in Quickbooks. When she does this, unbeknownst to her the new client is also added in Harvest so team members can book time to the client and a Trello card is automatically setup for the client just waiting to be organized. This automation took minutes to setup in Zapier and saves us time! Other “zaps” we have created automate our support process as when someone emails support@ the message makes its way to our support board in Trello that the whole team has access to and is assigned and worked on from there. We have loads of Zaps and still so many more that we can use.
12. Moz [DA] – Any digital marketing professional worth their salt will at the very least know about Moz if not using it religiously. With Moz you have analytics that work in conjunction with Google Analytics and goes far beyond so you can measure and improve your site’s visibility and rankings. You can see how your efforts are or are not working over periods of time. It has great tools for competitive analysis so we can see what they are doing and how you are comparatively ranking for keywords. While it is a complex app and there is a lot to it, Moz is able to give you insights that you can easily act on to boost traffic.
13. Blitz.io [DA] – Blitz allows us to load test the applications and websites we build. We can easily create different load test scenarios, bursting up to 200,000 concurrent users against our sites in seconds from different regions around the world. This is particularly useful when we have clients ready to implement aggressive campaigns to drive traffic to their sites. We want to make sure their site is ready to handle the spikes of traffic.
14. Mouseflow [DA] – You can certainly get a lot of info regarding user behaviour and activity using Analytics and other tools. Have you ever released a new feature on your site and want to see how users are interacting with it.  With Mouseflow, not only do you get great heatmaps but it video records user sessions so you can see exactly how users are interacting with your site. You can see where they click, scroll, pause to take in content, fill out forms, etc.
15. iThemes Sync [DA] – The majority of our sites run on the WordPress CMS platform. Sync allows us to manage updates to the WordPress core and plugins plus user management all in one place.  This is critical as it’s extremely important to keep updates current as malware is regularly released that targets WP and plugins. Having to login to each site individually to make updates was incredibly time consuming. We no longer do that thanks to iThemes Sync.

We use many SaaS apps beyond this but wanted to share the core ones we use and how we use them. Hopefully this gives you some ideas and inspiration on improving your business and processes.