Fueled’s Go-To-Market Sales & MarTech Stack

Let’s Share Recipes

Ironically, in launching Fueled, a purpose-built Customer Data Platform for eCommerce marketers, the last thing I have time for as CEO is building out our GTM sales, customer engagement, and marketing automation tech stack.

You’d think that after 15 years of working tirelessly as a technical growth marketer, and in building a SaaS automation tool, setting up this stack would be a thrill. We finally get to do this right!… But let’s face it, our team is in startup mode and all I can think about are product features, fundraising, and selling to our initial customer base.

Still, learnings and startup solutions are important to share — and in doing so, I’m hoping some of you might share with the community as well. So, here goes: Our short list of technologies in engaging with customers and leads at Fueled.

Start with a CRM? Nope! Good Ol’ Notion…

This might be a mistake. I’m curious what you think. But I don’t have time right now to slog through wiring up a sales CRM for the team. This might change in the future. I know HubSpot is inexpensive to spin up. I’ve done plenty of Salesforce deployments (cold shiver…). And I would absolutely love to launch on Outreach.io, but I can’t justify the expense at this moment. (Outreach, if you’re reading this, shoot us an awesome startup discount code or something…)

Instead, we are managing our leads and partnerships in Notion.so.

We leverage Notion for a lot of things at Fueled:

• Internal team wikis

• Product roadmaps

• Customer-facing portals and data catalogs

• And even our learning/knowledge base website, using Super.so to polish things up…

With Notion, we can pipe in leads from Typeform and workflow potential engagements through a column-based project board, similar to how you might manage deals in a simple tool like Trello. We can even do lead scoring as opportunities flow from column to column in our deal cycle.

Is Notion a perfect solution for CRM? Not at all. But right now, at the dizzying pace we’re moving, being able to manage leads in the same tool that I’m managing all of our client engagements and product roadmap is a huge win. I document more stuff when I cut down on tools. Notion - One workspace. Every team. *We're more than a doc. Or a table. Customize Notion to work the way you do.*notion.so

Super.so for Micro-Sites

I’m personally a terrible software developer. Our main website is built in Next.js and I can hack away at it when necessary. I love the performance of Next and the simplicity of hosting beautiful websites on serverless-first platforms like Vercel and Netlify. But let’s face it, sometimes you just want to toss up a website in an hour or two and, for a lot of us, that’s just faster with a content management system.

Enter Super for Notion…

We leverage Super for our learning center: https://learn.fueled.io. Super is a site builder that sits on top of Notion pages. From start to finish, I was able to stand up this site during two Star Trek Strange New Worlds episodes on a Saturday night.

And what’s great is that, again, because I’m in Notion all day long, I can add product documentation to our learning center whenever a question comes up from a client or our team is thinking through new CDP use cases. Super - Build websites with Notion *Everything you need to build fast, functional websites with Notion. Custom domains, themes, password-protection, and…*super.so

Typeform for Lead Forms & Surveys

While we are excited about new tools in the customer survey and form creation space (like Tally), Typeform is our workhorse.

I wouldn’t say that Typeform’s aesthetic is blowing minds anymore. But it’s known, consumers are used to it, and therefore it reduces friction in collecting leads and surveying customers. It just works. (And the Javascript library for embedding is pretty slick.) Typeform: People-Friendly Forms and Surveys *Uh oh! That typeform doesn't exist. Why not make your own? You don't want to make a boring form. And your audience…*typeform.com

RudderStack & MixPanel

We leverage RudderStack and MixPanel together for attribution, data pipelining, customer journey analysis and advanced segmentation.

If we could afford a Bugatti, I’d definitely be leveraging Segment and Amplitude instead. For B2B applications, Segment is by far our favorite customer data platform. And you don’t get better than Amplitude when it comes to applying machine learning to predict cohort behavior and building predictive cohorts.

But for now, RudderStack is fine. And I really do like that it allows you to transform event data between your sources and destinations. That comes in really handy when quickly sprinting out webhook-based source integrations for tools like Typeform.

And while I want to support open SaaS journey analytics tools in the space like Countly and PostHog, MixPanel’s free plan and startup features are just quick and easy to get up and running. Customer Data Platform for Developers | RudderStack.com *RudderStack is the easiest way to stream data from your website or warehouse. With RudderStack, you can easily collect…*rudderstack.com Mixpanel: Product Analytics for Mobile, Web, & More *Insights Report See which features are popular and how many power users you have. Funnels Report Build retroactive…*mixpanel.com

Customer.io for Marketing Automation & Email

I am a huge fan of Customer.io for technical teams and product startups. The value they offer teams that can put in a little elbow grease is unmatched.

In our eCommerce consulting practice at our sibling company, Inclined, we generally recommend Iterable for mid-market brands and Klaviyo, obviously, for SMB and emerging brands. But if you understand CDP integrations and don’t want to pay for a lot of onboarding and customer support, Customer.io is feature-rich, reliable, and cost-effective. Your Customer Engagement Platform *Trigger email, push, SMS, webhooks, and more with Customer.io. Gain control over behavioral data to personalize…*customer.io

Intercom for Customer & Lead Communications

There are a number of neat customer support solutions on the market, like Front and Gladly (both of which we love). And there are many awesome B2B customer chat/conversation solutions, like Drift.

But Intercom solves for most of these requirements pretty darn well. Is Intercom’s chat client perfect? No. Is its issue/ticket tracking UI the easiest for support teams, not really.

But at this point, Intercom integrates with just about everything. Customers are familiar with it, which cuts down on friction at critical communication points, and it has an extremely generous startup program.

In streamlining a GTM strategy, Intercom is just a no-brainer for us. The Engagement OS | Intercom *Build lasting customer relationships with Intercom, the Engagement OS.*www.intercom.com

Partnerhub for Partnerships-Lead Growth

Perhaps not something most SaaS startups think about on Day #1, but as a concierge SaaS (ie, a SaaS product that’s installed by us, on behalf of our clients) and an “under the hood” tooling solution for acquisition and lifecycle marketers — agency partnerships are core to our go-to-market strategy.

While we will soon implement PartnerStack (deal flow), PartnerPage (partner listings), and all the usual suspects in this growing space, our first stop has been the newly-founded Partnerhub — which has been designed to surface meaningful partnership opportunities and deepen relationships between product companies and agencies. Especially if you work in the eCommerce agency/SaaS world, check it out! Partnerhub for partnerships-led growth *Most PRM's are great for two things; push communication like email blasts or distributing assets, and distributing…*www.partnerhub.app

Other Shiny Things We’re Excited About

A founder can dream, right? In wrapping up, here’s a quick (somewhat random) list of a few additional technologies and tools I look forward to implementing as part of our sales, marketing, and customer engagement stack:

• Clearbit :: Customer/lead data enrichment. Who doesn’t want to learn more about their customers automagically when they fill out lead forms?

• Outreach.io :: As mentioned above, it really is the Cadillac of sales enablement platforms. Its integrations are awesome. And I really like how you can chain it together to quickly close deals and trigger automatic onboarding workflows.

• neo4j :: Admittedly, this one might feel random for most. But I do believe that graph analysis is the future of predicting customer behavior. (I’ll write something up on this later…))

Fueled is a purpose-built Customer Data Platform for eCommerce marketers. If you want to talk more about data strategies, customer analytics, and/or marketing automation and advanced segmentation for eCommerce. Let’s chat!