The Tools & Stacks We Use To Run Startup88.com, Day Job & Side Projects

Thought it might be useful for you to know what tools we use to run Startup88.com and also a lot of projects we work both in the day job and my side projects.

Startup88.com

Startup88 is hosted by Flywheel who I highly recommend

• For small projects we use Trello.com to allow us to capture ideas and then prioritize them.
• Everyone runs on Slack and Github and Trello are both configured to push any changes made into the Slack Channel.
• Startup88.com runs on a self hosted WordPress installation powered byFlywheel. The key plugins we use on WordPress are
• Sumome.com (this has increased my email sign ups from 2-3 to 50-60 a month)
• Yoast SEO & Analytics Plugin
• Optimizely for A/B testing signup copy
• Google Analytics for tracking traffic
• Google Adsense for Advertising
• Mailpoet (warning do not use this, trying to find a good replacement)
• Leadin by Hubspot (captures all available social network data about a person who signs up as well as what pages they visited and how many times)
• Custom plugin that we developed which takes a form entry and turns it into a WordPress Post
• Livefyre for handling comments
• Askimet for catching spam in comments, forms and forums
• Wangard for catching Sploggers (Spam Bloggers who register as fake users)
• Buffer App for cross promoting all our posts to multiple social networks at the same time, saves an enormous amount of time.
• Tweet Jukebox for scheduling large quantities of Tweets long into the future
• Mandrill for Transactional Email, I like their visual guides and reputation metrics so you know how you are going. If you don’t get your email list right, configurations correct and strip out all the bounces, unsubscribes, spam complaints and rejections then your email newsletter ends up getting rejected. Mandrills tools and reports are great for managing this and they can handle 10000s of emails a day.
• PicMonkey.com for fast editing of images, resizing, cropping.
• Canva for more detailed layouts or banner ads.
• Atom for the odd bit of incompetent coding
• Tweetdeck for managing multiple twitter accounts
• Spotify for making my 3 hrs of train commute bearable

Day Job & Side Projects

• Google Docs for managing shared documents, checklists and presentations
• Firebase for real time database supporting updates to 10,000s clients simultaneously and client authentication
• Google Cloud for hosting code
• We use Github.com to allow us to version our software and manage multiple users working on the one code base.
• Bitnami great for launching preconfigured instances of just about every software stack you might want to run either locally or on your cloud server.
• NodeJS for non blocking crawling
• AngularJS for 3 way binding front end.
• NLTK (Natural Language Tool Kit) for Natural Language processing, tokenising, stemming
• Word2Vec for Clustering results
• Skitch to occasionally get a point across visually
• Python for running the Clustering and Machine Learning code
• MongoDB as a backend database working with NodeJS
• For larger projects we use Atlassian’s Jira for project management and Confluence for documentation
• I get all my contractors from Freelancer