A two-person startup already uses twenty-eight other tools

IMO many people end up with a tool fetish, but some of these tools aren't worth it in a small startup:

1. You don't need Slack ($13 / month) as a two person startup — just do email and Skype

2. Notion ($16 / month) — this sounds like a glorified shared note taking app — just use Google Docs, or Dropbox Paper, or text files in a Dropbox folder

3. Sentry ($26 / month) — OK, this might be worth it, but if you have a high volume then it gets expensive — we host our own Sentry instance and past the initial setup it has mostly been a hands off deployment

4. Cloudflare ($20 / month) — not sure why they felt the need to go with the Pro account, maybe they have a lot of page rules, but for us the free account has been more than enough

5. LinkedIn Sales Navigator ($80 / month), SalesQL ($29 / month), Hubspot ($45 per month) — these are sales tools that should pay for themselves and evaluating that is easy, they either get you the leads to monetize or they don't and if not, then they aren't worth the monthly subscription

6. Figma ($24 / month) — I have mixed feelings about it, I haven't seen instances in which such software helped; might be worth it if the results are tangible and it saves you the cost of a designer; this too should be easy to evaluate and if it gets you the same results as drawing on whiteboard or paper, then get rid of it

This is part of the reason why I like working in a B2C company. B2C has it's own set of problems, but we aren't dependent on a small group of unprofitable companies.

One thing that's been really interesting is seeing how many SaaS tech companies products just don't work for us at all, for example Intercom.

Intercom is a great product, but all of their pricing is centered around how many people use your site. If you have a high-touch sales and support pipeline where a customer is worth $$,$$$s, Intercom's pricing makes sense. If you have hundreds of thousands of customers worth $$s, that's still a workable business, but Intercom's pricing is a complete non-starter.

They aren't the only one. I do wonder if they truly understand how much they are locking themselves out of some markets. Another example was the quote we got from Grafana Cloud that was more than our AWS bill.

Your CFO got sold ... twice. Concur and NetSuite are both enterprise level software that a company with 50 FTEs does not need.

NetSuite is a never ending money pit with varying results. I dealt with a very similar situation, in which a project manager("VP") talked our owner into using NS, but it was over $100k/year and commitments were 2 years per seat at something like $5k. He ALSO wanted to do the roll out himself. 6 months later, it was still not functional.

I got pulled onto the team to help. We made _some_ progress and I hired and managed 4 remote programmers to write all the plugins and customizations we would need to make it work with our model (multi-channel e-commerce, multiple warehouses/locations). It was a nightmare all-around and completely unnecessary. PM/VP left the company because he couldn't do the job and we were stuck with a half-assed implementation at that point.

It's been around 4 years since the first day, I am no longer with that company, and I am sure they are still struggling with NS and employing multiple developers to keep things going. Good for the devs, bad for biz. I am willing to bet it's never returned a single dollar on the investment and cost them far more than they wanted to spend. If you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel at this point, cut your loses, and don't get another "solution-in-a-box".

The Teams UI has some huge blind spots.

Now, you can finally sort-of-almost-reliably switch between different accounts. This used to just not work, for me.

But you still can't see what account you're actually logged in with. I can only see my initials and name - and my initials and name's the same for all 4 MS accounts I have (private/family, employer, client 1, client 2).

When you press "back" from an open document, you don't go back to the folder you opened it from, but to the root of the document library.

The conferencing generally works OK-ish, but sometimes it just used another audio device that it says in the settings. The simplest solution is to reboot. Sometimes it works to switch device, re-start teams, and then switch device again.

This “berniespeak” needs to go away. It’s divisive and further entrenched people into polarization. There have been plenty of people from the “bottom 90%” that entered a new income bracket thanks to technology. Let’s celebrate it instead of generalizing it to conform to a politicians ideological battle against the “wealthy”