BugHerd has been around and in development since 2011. In startup years that’s 345.
If you’ve been working in tech startups that long, you’ll have seen a lot of SAAS products come and go. You’ll know that there’s always some new fan dangled tool promising a better or more efficient way to work, a new one to replaces resources you can’t afford, and tools that basically already exist but come with shiny new skins.
There are some products, however, that are exceptional at helping us build our software and do our jobs more effectively. These are some of the products we love, recommend and encourage others to try. Our visual feedback tool wouldn’t be what it is today without them…
Design and Development
WEBFLOW
Webflow enables anyone to design, build, launch, and manage modern, responsive websites — without writing a line of code. Start from a blank canvas, UI kit, or template to build exactly the website you’ve always wanted.
BugHerd uses Webflow to free the marketing and content folks from the constraints of developer timelines. It’s also instrumental for testing & iterating on website messaging without having to get the dev team involved. We think it’s great!
SKETCH
Sketch helps more than one million designers — from freelancers to some of the largest companies in the world — to transform their ideas into products. Sketch is a digital design platform that empowers designers to share and collaborate on their designs and work better, together.
Sketch has always been essential for our design process at Bugherd. Whether it was throwing together a rough design concept, to laying out the full app. Sketch keeps the designs organised, and simplifies the hand over to devs. We cannot even begin to express how much we love it.
BUGSNAG
Bugsnag is an error monitoring tool that groups similar types together. This way, low impact errors that occur commonly don’t trigger alerts or get in the way of a team identifying and prioritizing urgent errors. Using Bugsnag means that developers will often already be working on a fix for an error even before customer support has read the support email related to it!
Bugsnag is where all the BugHerd mistakes go. Server-side errors, client-side errors, deployment problems all get reported to us via Bugsnag and are funnelled into a Slack channel to alert someone (usually a dev) at BugHerd.
ZAPIER
Zapier gives non-technical people superpowers letting them do things traditionally only in the domain of trained software developers. It is an online automation tool that connects apps, such as Gmail, Slack, MailChimp, and over 1,000 others.
BugHerd uses Zapier in two ways. Zapier allows customers to connect their BugHerd account with hundreds of external services such as Trello, Jira, Asana and others. Additionally, Zapier is used to automate workflows between many of the tools used every day such as Airtable, Slack & Intercom. Zapier allows BugHerd to build a custom process with the tools we love without needing to involve developers.
Communications & Customer Service
VERO
Vero is a messaging platform that helps businesses engage customers and grow their business. The platform empowers teams to use their data to create, test and improve their automated emails, push notifications and custom interactions, to deliver better customer experiences.
Vero sends all the BugHerd automated lifecycle messaging to users. From their initial welcome email, onboarding messages and event tagged notifications. i.e. if you don’t complete a task or login for a while, it’s Vero that sends the email notification.
INTERCOM
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that helps drive business growth through better relationships across the customer lifecycle. More than just live chat, with powerful workflow and automation technologies, and an open ecosystem of apps – all powered by live customer data.
Intercom is the communication channel between BugHerd and customers within the “user experience program”. Used to gather feedback and input that helps to drive product decisions. This allows functionality and feature testing to optimise and enhance the product without having to rely on back and forth emails. Intercom is also utilised to send a customer satisfaction survey to users that aren’t communicative on email.
BEAMER
Beamer is a notification centre and changelog tool that lets you send announcements to users and site visitors for important updates, new features, latest products, special offers and more. Beamer is used by more than 5000 websites and apps including Drift, Chargify and Buffer.
BugHerd needed a way to deliver communications in a noticeable but not too “in-your-face” way. Beamer is used to send release notes to customers in a relevant way without appearing too spammy. Beamer notifies users when a fix or a new feature is released.
ZENDESK
Zendesk is a customer service and help-desk tool that helps manage customer interactions across phone, chat, email, social media, and any other channel you can imagine, all in one place.
BugHerd uses Zendesk’s “Support” and “Guide” products to keep track of inbound customer support in-app (via Elevio) and via email, as well as delivering support documentation through support.bugherd.com. Zendesk has been integral in helping to maintain responsive and personal relationships with customers as growth occurs.
ELEVIO
Elevio acts as a 24/7 automated support team, intelligently delivering in-app help to the right customer at the right time, and actively deflecting incoming support tickets. They use data to help constantly improve products and documents, leaving no customer behind.
BugHerd uses Elevio to bring support documentation and customer support channels directly into the app. Elevio provides contextual help links throughout BugHerd that give customers the answers they need without needing to link away to support docs. If customers can’t find the answer they’re looking for, Elevio integrates with the support platform (via Zendesk) to give customers an easy way to contact the support team from directly within the app.
Analytics
SEGMENT
Segment is a single platform that collects, stores, and routes your user data to hundreds of tools with the flick of a switch. Easy!
BugHerd uses Segment to implement event tracking once and then forward the data to a variety of tools used by different functions of the business. For everything from website tracking to customer communication and emails. Segment has saved countless hours of developer time, reduced complexity on the tech stack and has allowed more experimenting, leading to better (and faster) decision making.
GOOGLE ANALYTICS
Google analytics is used to track the website activity of the users and is the most widely used web analytics service on the web. It integrates with pretty much… everything!
BugHerd uses Google Analytics to track the core metrics of website performance. Setup with handy dashboards for at a glance information, it tracks key metrics like unique site traffic, channel breakdown, search queries and performance, and custom goal tracking (in BugHerd’s case, sign-up to trials). It’s also an essential tool to track site health by monitoring bounce rates, page load times and customer behaviour
AMPLITUDE
Amplitude is a Product Intelligence platform that tracks over 7 trillion user actions every year to help digital product and growth teams instantly understand user behaviour, build engaging experiences, and grow their business.
BugHerd uses Amplitude to monitor the health of marketing, onboarding and product usage, to socialise these results with external stakeholders, and to answer any ad-hoc queries around user behaviour. The amplitude dashboards form the starting point for fortnightly discussions on the success of ongoing marketing and product efforts.
This is by no means an exhaustive or prescriptive list of all the tools used to build our software, just a choice list of products that make our lives easier.
What products can you recommend, or can’t live without?
Tell us @bugherd.
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