Serial entrepreneur Amanda Moskowitz has been running into this problem for 10 years. After starting company after company, she always needed to consult other founders for the best software, payroll and HR tools.
Today, she’s launching a platform to solve this exact problem. Stacklist is a recommendation platform for enterprise software tools culled from interviews and surveys with entrepreneurs across the industry.
“Over 70 percent of the time, entrepreneurs make their decisions from the recommendations of trusted peers,” she said.
Stacklist interviews founders that are anywhere from seed stage to Series B. It’s heavily curated and not from generally contributed user recommendations.
“Right now we’re really staying focused on making sure the quality of the input is high,” she said.
They have more than a hundred tools reviewed on the site in more than a dozen categories from e-mail marketing to credit card processing to HR. Stacklist comes as enterprise software has become increasingly fragmented over the last decade. Rather than relying on one massive corporation like SAP for business intelligence, younger companies are swapping dozens of tools in and out.
Moskowitz said that startups, on average, have 13.5 business tools in their Stacklists, with the most popular categories being project management and analytics.
“We’ve gone from a Swiss knife, to disparate sets of tools,” she said.
Unsurprisingly, the most popular tool among Stacklist companies is Slack, along with Quickbooks, Mailchimp, Google Analytics and Google Drive. But Indinero, Keen.io and Segment are also on the rise, Moskowitz said.
Zendesk leads the customer service category with 40 percent of Stacklist companies relying on a customer service tool using the San Francisco-based company’s software.
There is no obvious leader in recruiting tools, with companies like Greenhouse, Upwork and Jazz sharing the top spots followed by Workable and Lever. About 10 percent of all companies rely on AngelList to post jobs.
With HR, the most popular tools are Trinet, Zenefits and Justworks. Zenefits leads among companies with one to nine employees, and Trinet leads with bigger companies that are 10 to 50 employees large.