Tools like Zendesk and Desk.com [1] are really overkill for an early stage startup. They're pricey and the ramp up time is a little killer. They are really buil

Tools like Zendesk and Desk.com [1] are really overkill for an early stage startup. They're pricey and the ramp up time is a little killer. They are really built for people who spend the majority of day doing Customer Support. If you're pre-launch, there really isn't a strong reason to do anything but email-based support. HelpScout is a good alternative to automate some of that. Jira, on the other hand, can be very useful for internal task management. Exporting from your support platform to Jira automatically is useful in this case, but again, only if you have someone doing full time support. Otherwise just open your own tickets after you gather customer feedback and can write a coherent ticket that someone can use to write code against. [1] I currently work at Desk.com, where we use Jira on the engineering team, but our own customer support team uses Desk.