UPDATE: This story has been moved to my own domain:

There’s a small bubble in startups where we all consume each other’s products. SaaS startups tend to be extreme about it, using tens of other SaaS products to run the company. Factorial is no exception.

We started the company with a handful of essential tools and platforms to launch our first version of the product, and have progressively been adding products to the point where it’s hard to list them. Today we’ll take a quick look at the five tools we can’t live without, and leave a full list at the end.

1. Intercom

Sales, customer support, marketing and product

Intercom is a fantastic Swiss-army knife for a young startup. Everybody in our company has access to it, and we all use it for different purposes: sending on-boarding automated in-app messages, targeted e-mail campaigns, one-off announcements, customer support and product feedback.

Installing intercom takes seconds, especially if you do it using Segment.com as we did. The best part of Intercom is that you go very quickly from nothing to a performing drip campaign, direct customer contact and it even provides a very basic sort of CRM.

Here you can see one of our campaigns for Spanish admins via in-app message. Intercom even allows us to A/B Test our messages and compare their performance.