Founders are always looking for more leverage everyday.  Mainly, we want to focus on building things that our customers want and eliminating other stuff that gets in the way of that objective. We use nearly 25 different software tools to run Journey today, which is average for companies below 50 employees.

As Journey helps founders get funded or build repeatable sales/onboarding processes, we've met a lot of awesome founders lately and wanted to share some of them with our founder audience in case they can help you gain leverage: 

1) Party Round is building an automated fundraising tool to generate & send docs, collect signatures, and receive funds.  The fundraising game is changing at rapid pace where founders can raise large sums of capital from angels and their communities, thus tooling to support this is necessary.  The team at PR is thoughtful about design and marketing given the hype they have created via Twitter with memes & drops- definitely check them out if you are raising a party round, pun intended.

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2) Pump is building the "Twitter for investor updates" as cap tables explode in size due to the trend referenced above.  Everyone knows VC twitter is where founders & investors hang out, but with Pump there's more privacy/segmenting to bring investor updates out of the monthly email to more quick hits, living in the mind of your cap table rent free daily.  The team at Pump has attracted a lot of top tier investors and founders in a short period of time.  If you're thinking of new ways to shake up your investor updates or share your momentum with prospective investors, start pumping.

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3) Pallet is building infrastructure for modern hiring, not necessarily targeting founders/startups, but let's be honest - we're all hiring.  The team at Pallet brings job boards to engaged communities offering a new channel for accessing talent where talent spends time. Next time you're begging a FAANG engineer to join your startup, consider a job posting within a community matching your target audience for a role.  For example, we posted engineering roles in Refactoring and I'd imagine Lenny's would be a great place for product folks.

Bonus

Angel List dropped "Angel List Stack" yesterday during their conference which is everything from incorporation, banking, and equity management tools.  They basically launched Stripe Atlas, Mercury, Carta, Brex, and Docsend in one platform. As an OG helping founders, Angel List continues to ship amazing products at breakneck speed.