Which tools to use to build your SaaS business in 2024?

The landscape of tools available to SaaS entrepreneurs developing their business is always changing and it feels like there are a thousand options. Quite frankly, I find it a bit overwhelming.

After sifting through dozens of articles by entrepreneurs, asking around, and testing tools myself, here is a curated list of tools to consider to build your SaaS business in 2024.

TLDR; Here are the main tools you should have (in my opinion)

• Admin, planning, wiki: Notion
• Comms: Slack (if working as a team) & GSuite
• Landing Page: Webflow
• Marketing automation: ConvertKit
• Design: Figma
• DevOps: Github/Vercel
• Customer support: Intercom
• Tech stack: depends a lot on your specific needs and skills, see The Tech Stack of a SaaS builder

Admin, productivity & collaboration

These tools are not directly linked to building or marketing your SaaS product, they are more for you and your team to stay organized, which is just as important.

Notes, wiki, planning, etc

This comes as no surprise, but I would say the #1 tool you should invest into (unless it's just you and you can have the free version) is... Notion

Notion is a highly flexible tool for notes, tasks, wikis, and databases, keeping everything organized in one place.

An alternative is Slite, which I have not personally tested, but it looks very promising.

Project Management

Project management tools help in tracking the progress of different tasks and managing the different work streams.

I would use Notion, but you can use a dedicated tool such as ClickUp.

Alternatives: monday.com, Asana, Trello

Communication

GSuite for email is the minimum - set up a custom email with your domain to use across your landing page, support page, etc.

If you're part of a team, then setting up Slack or Discord will prove useful for async collaboration.

If you need to communicate ideas visually, try Loom for recording yourself while sharing your screen.

Marketing

These are the tools you need to attract and retain customers.

Landing Page

There are many options to build a landing page in a no-code way, allowing to quickly iterate (especially when you're not that comfortable with front-end development).

My favorite is Webflow because it is very flexible and has great templates.

But there are many alternatives: Wix and Squarespace are in the same vein whereas Feather, Potion, Glide are lower-effort but allow for less customization.

Email marketing automation

Often enough, you might want to send emails to your users or prospects - whether it is after they sign up on your landing page or after they've used your product for the 1st time. As you're obviously not going to send out those emails manually, you need email marketing automation software to do that.

There are many popular options there - I have a slight preference for ConvertKit but I couldn't explain why. You can also use alternatives such as Mailchimp or Sendinblue.

Social Media Management

Marketing your SaaS product sometimes means having a social media presence. You can manage this manually, or you can use tools to schedule posts and analyze engagement.

A simple option I like is Buffer, but you can also use more holistic platforms such as Hootsuite.

Content Marketing

A good practice when setting up a SaaS business is to do content marketing to attract inbound leads. This means creating content relevant to your target audience, that you can then share more broadly.

Good SEO could also help surface your content and attract new visitors - but that's a whole other topic (that we will of course discuss on Saaspreneur Club).

All of this content needs a home, generally in the form of a blog. You could use Webflow here as well, or use a dedicated blogging platform such as Ghost.

Depending on the type of your business, simply sharing content on Social Media or external blogging platforms such as Medium might be enough!

All-in-one

I've personally never tested all-in-one marketing platforms, but there are options like Systeme.io that allow to create landing pages and blogs, run email campaigns and marketing automations all in one place.

I think these platforms are more for content creators that need a powerful solution to handle all of their business at once and might be overkill for a SaaS business.

Design

Good design is crucial for the success of any SaaS product as it can significantly influence user acquisition and retention.

UI/UX design

To design your app interface and user flows, I think there's nothing better than Figma. It is not always necessary and you might be fine with sketching out your UI on a piece of paper, but I find that designing the interface properly makes development much faster because you don't have to make new decisions every minute.

Alternatives: Sketch, Adobe XD

Illustrations

To enhance the visual appeal of your landing page, or to add some life to your product, you can add nice digital illustrations. A popular library of beautiful illustrations is Undraw, but there are other alternatives such as Drawkit.

Icons

It's important to have clear and consistent icons across your app and/or landing page. Don't reinvent the wheel - just pick from the many existing icon libraries available for commercial use. You can check out Iconify to find the right fit for your project.

Image creation

For your landing page or marketing content, you will need at some point to create images. You could rearrange existing illustrations, paste them on a nice background and add text with a tool such as Canva, or you could also generate images with AI with a tool like Midjourney or DallE (available through ChatGPT).

Alternatives: Photoshop, my personal favorite, but it is quite expensive

Dev productivity

Developer productivity tools allow for more efficient coding which can speed up the development process and be a competitive advantage for your SaaS business.

Planning, Project Management

To plan out your development cycles, you can use Notion or ClickUp as well but a tool I particularly like which has a good free plan is Linear. It is made for devs, so it is opinionated in a good way, in addition to being beautiful. This makes it easy to track progress and plan efforts.

Boosting Dev Speed

If you want to dramatically improve coding speed and produce more consistent, clean code, you should invest in a tool such as Github Copilot which acts as a pair-programming partner in-editor.

Alternatives: Refact.ai, or ChatGPT but the experience is less seamless as it's outside of the editor

Dev/Product

This is the meat of your SaaS business: the actual product. You can go the no-code/low-code route or decide to build everything yourself - either way, you have options.

No-code/Low-code

The easiest way to put a SaaS product out there is using no-code tools. A personal favorite is Softr, but in general I find no-code tools a bit restrictive. A very flexible low-code alternative is Bubble - I haven't really used it that much but it seems to be flexible enough to build any kind of application. The learning curve here is apparently pretty steep, so I would rather just code!

You can also build a SaaS business by using a combination of tools such as Airtable and Zapier, and if you don't mind constrained UIs you can use Retool (which is usually more for internal-facing applications).

Code

If you want to build a full-fledged product, fully customizable, and own your application - you might want to build it with code.

Here, what you choose to use (the language, the framework) is very personal.

It really depends on your preferences, skills, and needs.

I would recommend using a JS/TypeScript framework such as Vue, React or Svelte (which is the new cool thing) for the front-end, and even better, an all-in-one framework such as NextJS or Nuxt.

For you back-end tasks, it really depends: if you're building an AI SaaS platform, then you might want to go with a Python framework, such as Flask, or FastAPI.

Otherwise, you can go with the more classic NodeJS frameworks - Express or Koa for example.

DevOps

To streamline pushing code to production, you need a strong DevOps pipeline. That way, each time you push new code, you don't have to do annoying manual steps to get the new version our there.

Platforms like Vercel make it incredibly easy to build apps & deploy to production, but you can also use a more traditional CI/CD pipeline, for example using Github pipelines.

Alternatives: Netlify is similar to Vercel in terms of ease of use, whereas Gitlab is a Github alternative.

Other services

There are many other services your SaaS product could use. For a comprehensive overview, check out The Tech Stack of a SaaS builder.

Sales

This part is really optional, I would say it's only if you're building a high-ticket B2B SaaS business. Most Saaspreneurs will be fine doing marketing only and relying on product-led growth rather than engaging in a sales process.

CRM

To keep track of the sales process, you might need at some point a CRM, even though I think it is overkill for most SaaS businesses. If you do need to track prospects, you could very well do it in Notion, but if you want a more dedicated tool, you could use Pipedrive or Hubspot.

Prospection

If you want to prospect efficiently, you might need a tool to find relevant profiles. Here, the OG would be LinkedIn Sales Navigator. You could also do this manually if you want high-quality prospects, but beware - it's time consuming.

Alternatives: Scrapper

Cold outreach

Once you have your list of prospects, you can reach out to them. Again, as you want to be efficient and not spend much time on this, automation is the way to go. For this, you have tools such as Lemlist or Waalaxy.

Ads

Advertising platforms like Google Ads and Meta Ads can be pivotal in driving targeted traffic to your landing page. If you don't want to rely solely on content marketing, you can try setting up Ad campaigns.

Analytics

Understanding your users and how they interact with your product or landing page is crucial for continual improvement and ensuring that your offerings meet user needs effectively.

Collecting data

There are multiple ways of collecting data on user interaction - the most famous is probably Google Analytics but there are GDPR-friendly alternatives such as Plausible.

Tools like Segment, Amplitude and Mixpanel offer advanced analytics capabilities, including detailed user segmentation and event tracking to understand user actions in-depth.

Visualizing data

Once you have collected data on user behaviour, you might need a good visualization tool to extract insights from this data.

If you use Google or Firebase Analytics, you can build a custom dashboard with Google Data Studio, but if you use Plausible, there are built-in dashboards.

Alternatively, there are tools specializing in extracting insights for SaaS products, such as June.so which integrates with the advanced analytics tools mentioned above.

User Interactions

Building a relationship with your users and helping them when needed is key to retention and turning first-time users into loyal customers.

Product Onboarding

There are many ways to build a great onboarding experience to make sure users come back to your app. You can build it from scratch with open-source libraries, or use a tool like Intercom or User Pilot which specializes in user onboarding by offering targeted in-app messages, tours, and feedback tools to help with product adoption.

Gathering feedback

An easy way to get feedback on your product is by integrating an in-app feedback loop. This could be in the form of a live chat with targeted messaging, which you can do with Intercom.

Another way to get feedback on what users like or dislike about your product or landing page is to look at their behaviour - Hotjar allows you to do that with heatmaps and sessions recordings.

Customer support

Providing excellent customer support is essential for maintaining user satisfaction and resolving issues promptly, and for this, I would say Intercom is, once again, the go-to tool.

Alternatives: Drift, Zendesk

Yes, that's a lot. You don't need to use all of this. But choosing the right set of tools is crucial for the efficiency and scalability of your SaaS business.

It’s about finding the right balance, the things that work well for you (or your team), your product, and your market. Start with the basics and gradually add more specialized tools as your business grows and evolves.

As you experiment with different tools and processes, keep track of what works and what doesn’t. Stay flexible and be willing to adapt to new technologies if needed.

Remember, the ultimate goal is to build a robust product that solves a problem and satisfies your customers’ needs effectively, not having the perfect toolbox. You just need to find the tools that get you closer to that goal.

Good luck on your journey to building a successful SaaS business!