UserVoice's company blog covers its customer feedback product, support practices, and how it runs its agile process with Trello.
HN mentions are mostly about the UserVoice product, which commenters suggest for feature requests and support, plus a job posting.
Awesome, great to see Instrumental (https://instrumentalapp.com/) in your list. I'm one of the folks working on it, would love to hear your thoughts on us.
Some quick reviews of some of the products listed:
* Lighthouse (http://lighthouseapp.com) - Bug Tracker - good for keeping track of simple stuff last I used it (~2 years ago), but Github Issues obviated its use for me.
* Pivotal (http://www.pivotaltracker.com/) - Project Management - great tool, not trivial to keep well managed tho. Easy to let your project get out of hand with tons of tickets, requires some discipline in its use.
* Trello (https://trello.com/) - Project Management - simple, fast. Really great for keeping tasks focused on a small team, I'm not sure how it would suit a larger team though.
* Airbrake (http://airbrake.io/) - Error Handling - You didn't have this in your list, but it deserved a mention. It's okay for server side error handling, its client side stuff leaves something to be desired though. More often than not their hosted JS lags on load, causes your page load times to go up as well. Doesn't currently offer a supported hosted version.
* Stripe - (https://stripe.com/) - Billing & Payment Processing - Does just about everything right imo. Great documentation, great interface, website is well engineered. Analytics / reporting would be awesome tho.
* Intercom - (http://intercom.io/) - Support/Help Desks - I seriously love Intercom. For managing a team of people doing outreach to users, it…
Ok, so this is what happens to startups, step two survive.
The first thing you need to do is get her to either sign a non-compete, sign away the company, or make you an offer to buy out her shares. Something legal might be necessary. If she is willing to sign a non-compete, and finish the project that is what you want, else, options 2 and 3 are on the table.
Next you need to finish your project. http://uservoice.com/ provides an outsourced software feedback engine for a website. If your feedback engine is more specific to your business process then you need still need to hire a developer.
At this point in the process, if you need to find a technical co-founder, i would skip it and go right for a freelance developer. You have developed most of the idea, and now you just need to round the corners, this is a perfect job for someone that just wants a pay check. I suggest 2 options to finding a developer.
Option 1, go your local colleges TODAY! and talk to career services. You might be able to find a programmer that can pick up fairly quickly what your previous developer did. You might be able to get away with $10-$20 an hour.
Option 2, i have heard of good things from http://programmermeetdesigner.com/, or another place to pay someone for a project.
Ok, so the final thing you need to do is to raise more money. Either sell the app now on a trial basis or something. You might be able to get some cash in the door to help with legal fees, and to pay your new…
What we use at graphdat.
Source code: http://www.github.com
We could host our own server, but github is really convenient and our SDKs are open source so its easier.
Workflow & Issues: http://huboard.com/
Given we use github, huboard makes it easy to mange the issues
Build: http://jenkins-ci.org/ and https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano
Such a nice setup, we host our own jenkins server, I have seen some links above to Travis, might give that a spin.
Tickets & Wiki: http://www.uservoice.com
Its a love/hate relationship with uservoice. They make some things easy, others are so arcane. I'm adding in a wiki article right now with some images in it. But uservoice doesn't let you host an image, so I put it into an S3 bucket, add the link to uservoice and there is a security error. I go back to the bucket, reset the security settings and uservoice is caching the image error and wont let me add the images, so I need to edit the source. So hard for something so simple.
Team Communication: https://www.flowdock.com/
We were using Campfire, but we like flowdock much better. Threaded conversations are still tough, I actually miss Google Wave. We had 1 wave a day, it starts to grow on you.
Log Aggregation: http://graylog2.org/
Very cool once you get it all working together
Server Metrics and Application Analytics: http://www.graphdat.com
We dog food our own product, so it's our servers on the homepage..
Some other notable candidates:
'your personal website':…
CloudKick ( http://cloudkick.com ) - Configurable server monitoring with SMS alerts. Love this service.
CoTweet ( http://cotweet.com ) - Shared Twitter account management. Great for support and guerrilla marketing.
Uservoice ( http://uservoice.com ) - User feedback and support management.
Dropbox ( http://dropbox.com ) - File sharing - we share the business dropbox with our individual dropboxes to share files.
Droplr ( http://droplr.com ) - Screenshot capture and sharing. Also allows for file sharing.
As mentioned by others:
GitHub ( http://github.com ) - VCS
Google Apps ( http://www.google.com/a ) - Email and documents.
Pivotal Tracker ( http://www.pivotaltracker.com ) - Project management and issue tracking.
Wordpress ( http://wordpress.com ) - Blog.
These are very specific to Rails, but extremely useful:
New Relic RPM ( http://newrelic.com ) - Deeply integrated Ruby on Rails app monitoring and performance measurement. Immensely helpful for troubleshooting and analysis, including slow query detection/explanation, etc.
Hoptoad ( http://www.hoptoadapp.com ) - Rails exception monitoring and alerting.
When we first started the process I was evaluating both Tender Support (http://tenderapp.com/) and Uservoice (http://uservoice.com/fullservice). Overall I preferred the way that Uservoice worked although there were a number of limitations at the time to how you could brand your help page.
Then we moved to Zendesk and used them for several months. Overall we were incredibly pleased with the process, although I was not a fan of their public support portal unless you use their API to roll your own.
Three weeks ago we setup an Assistly account and were instantly blown away at how they simplified the process of providing support, and added the ability to easily create complex business rules. When you're using Assistly it feels more like an native application full of keyboard shortcuts rather than a website. In short Assistly isn't a chore to use.
Plus, Assistly has some of the best support for their customers.
This is one area where they could learn something from Microsoft. Microsoft use UserVoice for product feedback. Outdated list of UserVoice product sites:
https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/o365guy/2018/01/02/submit-product-feedback-or-feature-requests-to-microsofts-virtual-suggestion-boxes/
UserVoice allows voting on what issues impact people most and allows the company to provide feedback to those issues/ideas. This isn't to say that a company must do all upvoted ideas, Microsoft certainly don't, but it is a useful outlet for both parties.
Microsoft aren't the only major company using UserVoice: https://www.uservoice.com/customers/ and there are competing services offering similar benefits. The concept is maybe more important than that specific product.
Apple seems to lack basic communications channels in both directions. This is a problem regardless of company policy.