My App Stack is a new series where we sit down with top CMOs, CROs, CTOs, and CEOs to find out what apps they actually use to run their businesses. I always learn a lot from these. These are essentially a list of best practices from each leader. Last time I had a great chat with Remote's CEO, Job van der Voort. Please check it by all means. here.
This week we're featuring Rik Haandrikman, Vice President of Marketing, RevenueCat.
#1. What is the core stack of your current app?
Notion is our knowledge base, and for a long time it was also where we did a lot of task management and created some rudimentary CRMs for various purposes. It's still my “source of truth” for things like processes and meeting notes, but I've since moved task and project management to Linear. It's primarily built for product and engineering teams, but we interact with both on a regular basis (both internally and as an audience), so it makes sense to us.
A lot of data is brought into Looker for dashboards and analysis. Looker is not only easy to use, but also offers great depth of functionality.
We use Salesforce, Crossbeam for account matching with our partners (who we're big fans of), and we connect SFDC to 6Sense for account-based and intent-based marketing. We use Intercom (for now) for trigger-based onboarding and activation messaging, as well as customer communications and newsletters.
We use Livestorm for our webinars (we recently started streaming to social at the same time) and Slingshot for warehousing and shipping our swag.
The website is on WordPress (a hardened instance) and Circle is powering its online community, recently switching to Docusaurus to host its documentation and using Transistor.fm for its podcasts.
Figma is where we collaborate on designs, and ChatGPT is increasingly useful for both design and writing work.
We are in the process of onboarding Vitally to better support our especially large managed customers.
Most relevant to our field (a “very mobile” field) is Appfigures, which provides insight into app performance. I recently connected it to Salesforce to enrich the data and it has been very helpful.
#2. What's the #1 new app you've added in the past year?
Vitaly is still in its early stages for us, but it's an amazing improvement over our homegrown dashboards and Notion-based CRM.
#3. Other than your own app, what app would you never let anyone take away from you no matter what?
6 sense. We were early adopters of his 6Sense and used it to create targeted campaigns based on company category, intent stage, and job title for individual contacts in our account. This allows paid digital efforts to be relevant (because they are targeted), relatively low-cost to maintain (because it is all programmatic), and powerful in tandem with building a sales team. We were able to advance the inbound movement.
#4. What are your top “undiscovered gems”, apps that you love but others may have never heard of?
Slingshot was great. Developers are a huge audience for us, and 'swag' is a shared language that allows us to collaborate with developers wherever they are. We've tested many platforms, and Slingshot has the right combination of “superior service” and platform features to reliably ship shirts, socks, and stuffed animals all over the world.
__________
Rik Haandrikman is Vice President of Marketing and head of the Success team within RevenueCat, a platform built to help businesses launch, support, and grow subscriptions across mobile and web. He has spent the past 20 years working with startups of all sizes and stages, driving growth, building communities, and producing irresponsible amounts of swag. His natural habitat is the intersection of marketing and technology, and he has a perfect home for mobile developer tools.