Starting a company used to be incredibly hard — you had to buy up a ton of software licenses and hardware, like SharePoint and Oracle servers, to get anything off the ground.
Nowadays, it's still incredibly hard to start a company, but thanks to a whole suite of new cloud-based applications that simplifies everyday tasks, it's less of a headache.
And more often than not, you'll find a few favorite mission-critical applications among Silicon Valley's newest wave of red-hot startups.
There's a new site called WeUseThat that's profiled a number of the top rising stars in Silicon Valley to find out which apps are their favorites.
We've assembled the best for you below.
Stripe
Startups using: Most newer startups, including Beeminder
Stripe is rapidly becoming the go-to payments option for any new startup. It's a few lines of code that you add to your software that immediately enables you to accept credit card payments.
It's one of the easiest payments solutions in the world, and the terms are much nicer than some typical credit card companies.
Twilio
Startups using: Beeminder
If you want your application to have anything to do with phone calls or text messages, Twilio is the go-to API. It lets you plug your service into a phone line that can accept phone calls or deliver text messages.
The best example was GroupMe in its earliest days, which let you send text messages through its service to multiple recipients, creating a text message "chat room."
Rapportive
Startups using: Beeminder
If you can't afford an expensive customer relationship management suite, Rapportive is a great option because it shows profiles right inside your email inbox.
Most startups today use Gmail, and Rapportive assembles a lot of information about an incoming contact and displays it neatly in your inbox.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider
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