Having done this many times over the last few years, as either technical co-founder or technical director, I've often wondered whether a list of useful sites/to

Having done this many times over the last few years, as either technical co-founder or technical director, I've often wondered whether a list of useful sites/tools would be worth putting together. You mentioned a particular need for financial backoffice software... After a long and painful investigation, I settled on Xero (http://www.xero.com http://www.xero.com), and I've never looked back. Here is a brief list of other services I rely on absolutely: Google Apps - Office platform (6 companies using) AWS - Cloud infrastructure (5 companies using) Mailchimp & Mandrill - Email delivery (5 companies using) Zapier - Automation (5 companies using) Buffer - Social Media automation (5 companies using) Github - Source control (5 companies using) Braintree - Subscription payments (4 companies using) Stripe - Credit card payments (4 companies using) Geckoboard - Status monitoring (3 companies using) This is not intended to decry any providers I haven't mentioned, this is just a list of my go-to companies/services that I use to get new companies running fast.