March 10, 2025
Every successful company needs a reliable collection of tools that keep the business running smoothly. At Appolica, we've picked those that help us deliver value quickly, communicate effectively, and automate manual stuff as much as possible.
This article breaks down our company's operating stack (not to be confused with our tech stack for building products) and what powers our day-to-day operations.
Finding the right tools
We don’t look for the best-reviewed software on the market. Our goal is to find what makes our lives easier, what integrates well with our workflows, and what helps us focus on what really matters. We test, we iterate, and we swap tools when something better comes along.
We find potential solutions in one of these two ways:
What do other people use to solve the problem? Tools exist because others have faced the same challenges before. If a company we respect is using a tool successfully, it's worth evaluating. One reason we chose Linear, for example, was because many product-led teams praised its speed and simplicity.
How did we solve this problem in the past? Experience matters. If someone on our team has already encountered and solved a challenge before, we lean on their insights rather than starting from scratch.
Researching and evaluating options happens simultaneously. Some tools are eliminated immediately because they don't meet our core needs. When we were looking for an expense management system, for example, we knew it had to integrate with our accounting tool. That instantly ruled out a bunch of solutions.
Tools should free you for what matters, not create more work
Some companies fall into the same trap over and over: implementing tools that were supposed to save time but created more overhead than they solved. We refuse to do the same.
Every tool we adopt has to pass a simple test: does it create more time for impact than it consumes in setup and maintenance? If not, we walk away from it.
We're ruthless about eliminating tools that create work without proportional value. The best tools are the ones you barely notice because they just work, silently removing friction so you can focus on what actually drives the business forward.
Finance & accounting
Finance should generate insights, not busy work. With 100-120 documents flowing through our system monthly, we've automated the boring parts while keeping human judgment where it matters.
Our process looks like this:
Every invoice or receipt arrives via email and gets automatically routed to Payhawk through a simple automation.
Once a week, our COO spends about an hour reviewing and approving these documents.
After approval, everything syncs automatically to Xero, our financial home base.
Xero then feeds into Causal, connecting our financial data with hiring plans, sales pipeline, and budget forecasts.
This gives us instant visibility into how each decision affects our runway and unit economics. Here’s exactly why we use these tools:
Xero handles our accounting and bookkeeping without unnecessary complexity. It automates bank reconciliations, tracks financials, and integrates with everything we use
Payhawk solved our expense management headaches by combining corporate cards with automated receipt capture and approval workflows. The direct integration with Xero is also a huge advantage.
Causal helps us build visual financial models that are actually easy to understand. Its assumption-based modeling helps us build forecasts that adapt to changing conditions: now our projections automatically update when our Xero data changes, so we're always working with the latest numbers.
Inv.bg handles our local invoicing. We need a local invoicing solution that meets Bulgaria’s compliance requirements. This one does the job.
Project & knowledge management
Your team's tools are only valuable if people actually use them. We've tried dozens of options over the years, but these are the ones that stuck because they made our work easier:
Notion serves as our company’s brain. Every process, decision, and piece of knowledge that matters lives here. Its flexible structure grows with us, allowing teams to create systems that work for their specific needs while maintaining cross-functional visibility. A thing we particularly like is the AI assistant that lets anyone find what they need fast.
Linear is that rare project management tool engineers actually want to use. It stuck with us because teams can customize it to their workflow instead of the other way around. The GitHub and Slack integrations keep our code, tasks, and team communication connected, eliminating those "which ticket was this for again?" moments that used to slow us down.
Slack helps us communicate asynchronously without the need for pointless meetings. Channels keep discussions organized, and integrations keep us informed. At this point, it’s also part of our company culture, as we’ve grown to communicate mostly through custom emojis.
GitHub keeps our code organized, but more importantly, it enforces quality through our PR review process. We built a custom integration that links commits directly to Linear tasks, so context never gets lost between planning and execution.
Sales, marketing & growth
Our growth stack focuses on tools that remove friction from our sales process, help us create meaningful content, and connect with the right prospects at the right time.
Attio uses AI to spot patterns across our customer base that we wouldn’t have time to find manually. The custom reports help us track leads in a consistent way without forcing us into rigid pipelines. We built views that match how our deals actually progress rather than trying to adapt our process to fit someone else’s idea of sales.
Substack powers the CTO blueprint, providing direct connection with our audience without algorithm dependencies. The simplicity lets us focus on content quality rather than platform management.
Framer changed how we build landing pages and websites. We redid our entire website in a week with zero developer input. Being able to iterate quickly on design and copy without engineering bottlenecks means we can test new messaging whenever we want, not just when we can schedule dev time.
Canva lets non-designers create decent-looking assets whenever they need them. Our designers use it too for knocking out simple designs quickly. The templates save hours of work and ensure everything still looks like it came from the same company.
Ahrefs is our go-to SEO tool because it has better data than anything else we've tried. Additionally, instead of overwhelming us with metrics that don't matter, Ahrefs shows us the handful of opportunities actually worth pursuing.
Apollo made sales prospecting easier. While there are valid concerns about its data quality, we've found it good enough for our needs. It helps us find the right people quickly without endless LinkedIn searching, and the integration with our other tools makes the workflow convenient.
Clay connects the dots between our prospect tools. It enriches our leads with data from multiple sources, so our team knows who they're talking to before the first touchpoint.
HR & operations
Great products start with great people. Our HR and operations stack cuts the busywork so we can focus on building culture and making smart decisions. Here's what we use:
Peopleforce manages both our hiring funnel and employee lifecycle, providing a single source of truth for HR data. Before implementing it, our hiring process was spread across several different tools - now candidates move seamlessly from application to onboarding in one system.
DocuSign + DocSend handle our contracts and agreements. DocuSign ensures fast, secure signing, while DocSend tracks engagement - so we know when a document has been opened, how long it’s been viewed, and if follow-up is needed.
Google Workspace simply works, which is why we keep coming back to it. We've tried fancier alternatives promising better collaboration, but our team just needed email, calendars, and storage that didn't get in the way.
Lu.ma fixed our internal calendar chaos. Instead of events getting lost in email threads or random Slack announcements, the tool gives everyone a single view of what's happening company-wide. The interface is clean, new team members figure it out without training, and the RSVPs actually help us plan the right-sized rooms and enough snacks for in-person gatherings.
Slido makes our all-hands more engaging through polling and Q&As. It gives everyone a voice, as the tool’s anonymous questions feature helps our team members ask what they really want to know about company finances or strategy changes without worrying about how it might sound. Slido has made us more transparent because hard questions actually get asked and answered.
Firefiles lets us share meeting recordings easily so team members can catch up asynchronously. Instead of scheduling repeat meetings, people watch the recordings when it works for them. This cuts our meeting load significantly while ensuring everyone stays in the loop. Additionally, having a permanent source of truth means that when questions come up, we can point to the exact moment in the recording instead of relying on someone's notes or memory.
Automation & integration
Time spent on repetitive tasks is time wasted. We automate where we can so we can focus on high-impact work. Here’s what we use:
Zapier handles straightforward automation between our tools, reducing manual data entry and keeping systems in sync. A good example for this is when a new lead comes in through our website, Zapier automatically creates a contact in Attio, notifies the sales team, and kicks off our qualification process.
n8n handles the automations that are too complex for Zapier. While Zapier works for simple A-to-B connections, n8n lets us build multi-step workflows with conditional logic that would otherwise require custom code.
Building our internal AI agents
Sometimes, the perfect tool doesn't exist. Instead of forcing our workflows into someone else's product vision, we build custom AI agents for high-value, repetitive tasks that commercial software can't handle (yet).
Our rule is simple: buy for common problems, build for unique ones. When a process is generic (like accounting or CRM), we'll pick the best commercial tool. But when our needs are specific or connecting existing tools creates friction, we build internal solutions.
We needed a tool that researches prospects and enriches them with specific data so we can add (meaningful) personalization to our outreach efforts. No commercial solution handled our exact workflow, so we built a custom AI agent that:
Identifies target companies and contacts on LinkedIn matching our criteria (founders, C-level tech leaders at early-stage startups with 1-50 employees);
Analyzes company websites to determine if they're product-based startups (looking for keywords like "platform," "SaaS," "API," "pricing") while filtering out service companies;
Enriches contacts with email information using Clay/Apollo;
Adds recent funding data from Crunchbase (round type, amount, and date);
Exports everything as a structured CSV with all relevant fields;
Generates personalized outreach emails based on the gathered data.
What used to be a (mostly) manual process now runs with minimal oversight. The agent isn't fancy, but it solves our specific problem.
Final thoughts
A company’s tool stack shapes how your team works more than most founders realize. Bad tools create daily friction that kills productivity. Great tools fade into the background, letting your team focus on what actually matters.
After years of testing, replacing, and fine-tuning our operational stack, here's what we've learned:
The best tools solve real problems, not imaginary ones. We don't adopt anything unless it addresses a specific pain point that's slowing us down right now.
Tools should adapt to how you work, not force you to change your process. This is why we chose Linear over more rigid project management tools, and why we configure everything to match our natural workflows.
Simplicity beats features almost every time. We've repeatedly chosen simpler tools over "enterprise-grade" alternatives packed with options we'd never use. The cognitive load of a complex tool is a hidden cost that most companies underestimate.
Our stack will keep evolving as we grow. The tools that serve us today might not be the right ones a year from now. We're not precious about any particular product - if something better comes along or our needs change, we'll switch.
The ultimate measure isn't which tools you use, but how little you notice them. The best technology decisions are the ones that let your team forget about the tools entirely and focus on building something people want.
