Essential Infrastructure Tools Every Startup Needs

When launching a startup business, some key tools help you build the infrastructure for success from the outset. These encompass a variety of different functions and cover several different areas of the business, from the technological infrastructure of hosting and backend requirements, through to financial tools for early success. There are several factors that you should build from the ground up, across all areas of the business, in order to scale successfully. 

This article will detail the many different elements that make up a sustainable and strong infrastructure stack that prioritises cost-efficiency, integration, and scalability. 

Code, hosting, and backend infrastructure

The best places to start when talking about infrastructure are the code, hosting and backend requirements. No startup business can run successfully without having a strong digital presence with as much uptime as possible.

AWS remains the favourite option with startups for their cloud hosting requirements due to the startup credits that are often utilised and the fact that it can scale your backend infrastructure easily as required once you begin to grow the business. 

To ensure everyone is working on the very latest version of code development, GitHub is the industry standard for collaborative coding. However, an underrated feature is the issue tracking and version history, allowing you to simply roll back to a previous edition of the code in case you run into insurmountable issues with new builds that require more time to fix and re-roll out. For front-end deployments, Vercel is seamless, providing serverless functions, and is perfectly suited for those web apps that benefit from this type of building instead. 

A final topic when it comes to technological infrastructure is getting yourself set up with the best proxy provider that is available for your business. It can ease connection issues if all members of your development team are accessing the server and the coding partner through one unique IP address. Using a company that can provide 24/7 customer support and plenty of access points, in case you need to adjust your server location in the future, is the way to go.

Productivity and file-sharing infrastructure

For everyday productivity requirements, there are three standout options which most startups defer to: Google Workspace, Slack, and Calendly. These three tools work in tandem and completely seamlessly at all levels of the business. 

Most businesses lean on Google Workspace to provide their email server, as well as a shared document hub, and for arranging short video meetings between teams and individual colleagues. In terms of real-time communication, Slack is by far the leading candidate due to its ability to set up specific channels for different departments, projects, and functions, whilst also allowing colleagues to message each other from both their mobile and desktop devices.

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Your sales and business development teams will love Calendly. This app is designed to schedule customer demos or investor meetings automatically based on the general diary availability of the relevant members of the team. For example, each salesperson can have their own individual demo calendar available for warm leads to book, reducing the need to email back and forth to request a session and then confirm details.  

Finance, banking, and revenue infrastructure

A business can’t run successfully unless its financial faculties are also firing on all cylinders. This is one area you must get right from the outset; otherwise, you can cause yourself unexpected, long-winded work down the line. 

The preferred banking platform for startups is Mercury, as it offers fee-free checking, easy and intuitive expense tracking, and even virtual cards to be used by different teams in the business. Paired with this, Stripe is non-negotiable. Known for being the leading provider in handling payments, subscriptions, and financial automation of the box. 

Once you have these two items in place, you should also ensure that you have an accounting partner that integrates seamlessly. Our choice in this regard is Xero, as it is designed to integrate seamlessly with both Stripe and most leading bank feeds. By having a bank, a payments partner, and accounting software that all speak to one another fluidly, you can greatly reduce the time your business spends on running its accounts. 

Operational & project management infrastructure

When it comes to the day-to-day running of the business, and in particular when onboarding new people to the business as it grows, an important factor to sort out early on for ease of scale is your operational and project management facilities. In this sense, how do you set yourself up for success when it comes to sharing company knowledge or organising and planning engineering developments?

Many companies turn to Notion, an all-in-one workspace that can also act as your company's wiki, home to any meeting notes, and a documentation center. This means that Notion acts as your knowledge base, which people of all levels can access at any time. Perhaps you’re ready to work on a new product or feature launch, and the marketing team needs to understand how it works to best sell it to your public. They can access the latest meeting notes and documentation for the product release and adapt it as required for their marketing materials, without taking up unnecessary time for the project leaders who need to focus on keeping all wheels turning with their development teams. 

Talking of development, many businesses also use Linear. It is the gold standard for organising engineering-focused sprint planning, as well as bug tracking and streamlining workflows to ensure that the right people are focused on the right areas to roll out a successful update on time. 

Analytical & customer relationship infrastructure

One final factor to get ahead of before you have to commit too many hours to playing catch-up is in your analytical and customer relationship tools. In essence, if you have a multipurpose CRM deployed from the outset, you will be able to better understand your customers right from the jump, whilst also having strong visibility of leads and what converts them to a customer or sends them to your competitors. 

HubSpot is the leading tool for managing customer pipelines, driving sales outreach, and informing data-driven marketing. This CRM tool acts as the “single source of truth”, connecting all your business data and unifying your teams in the same task of acquiring new customers. 

^{Supplementary reading: Creating and Delivering Value to Customers}

Whilst a CRM can give you unified information about your customers and leads, you can also achieve the same level of visualisation for your product. PostHog is a tool that combines product analytics, session replays, and even feature flags, whilst also being a privacy-conscious platform that anonymises user data while still allowing developers access to common issues.

Make the most of free tiers of infrastructure tools

Having a strong foundation in these five infrastructure areas from the outset will give your business the ability to scale as required. In fact, most of the providers that we have listed above have free tiers available for their tools, or a low-cost entry-level price that will be very accessible for any start-up.

Lean heavily on these versions of the tools and only upgrade to any paid package, or premium-level tool, when your business actually hits the genuine volume limits applied by the free levels of the tools, or if you reach the point where upgrading a tool can directly accelerate your time-to-market or access to revenue.