Launching a SaaS business is one of the most rewarding—and demanding—journeys a founder can take. The first year is full of critical decisions: from shaping your MVP to acquiring your first customers, from handling support tickets to launching new features. With limited time and resources, you need the right tools that can scale with your ambitions while keeping operations lean and efficient.
The tools you choose in your first year are more than just productivity hacks—they’re strategic assets. Below is a carefully curated list of 10 essential tools that every SaaS founder should use in their first year, along with real-world context on how and why they matter.
1. Changelogfy – Keeping Users in the Loop and Building With Feedback
One of the most overlooked aspects of building a SaaS product is how you communicate change to your users. When you launch a new feature, fix a bug, or improve performance—your users deserve to know. And if you want to retain those users, you need to involve them in the journey.
Changelogfy helps you do both.
What It Does:
Changelogfy is a changelog and user feedback management platform. It allows founders to publish updates, share roadmaps, and collect feature requests—all from a single, beautifully designed portal that integrates easily into your product or website.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
Transparency breeds trust. Whether you’re a solo founder or a small team, users want to know that progress is being made. Changelogfy provides a dedicated space to:
- Publish release notes without needing to write blog posts or code custom solutions.
- Collect user feedback and suggestions, helping prioritize the roadmap.
- Display a public roadmap to align customer expectations with product development.
- Close the loop by notifying users when their requests are built.
It’s especially useful when trying to build in public or foster community-driven development.
Best For: Early-stage SaaS founders focused on transparency, customer-driven growth, and fast iteration.
2. Notion – Organize Your Brain and Your Business
Your first year will be chaotic—ideas flying in from every direction, customer insights piling up, product ideas evolving daily. Notion is your central nervous system for managing it all.
What It Does:
Notion is a collaborative workspace that combines notes, tasks, databases, and wikis into a single tool. It adapts to how you think and work, rather than forcing you into a rigid system.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
Notion’s flexibility is unmatched. You can:
- Document product specs and meeting notes.
- Create internal wikis for processes, onboarding, and operations.
- Build custom dashboards to track goals, launch plans, and progress.
- Store investor updates, pitch decks, and legal documents in a clean, searchable space.
It scales with your team as you grow. Whether you’re a solo founder or a team of five, Notion helps you stay focused and aligned.
Best For: Founders who need one space for everything—from ideation to execution.
3. Figma – Design and Prototype With Speed and Collaboration
In your first year, design is not a luxury—it’s a necessity. Whether you’re building an MVP, pitching a feature to investors, or testing UI with early users, you’ll need clean, functional interfaces.
What It Does:
Figma is a cloud-based interface design tool that allows real-time collaboration between designers, developers, and stakeholders.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
Great products are built with fast feedback loops. Figma:
- Lets you mock up full user flows and interfaces without writing code.
- Makes it easy to create prototypes you can test with users or investors.
- Enables live collaboration, so your designer, developer, and PM can work together in real time.
- Integrates with design systems to maintain consistency across pages and components.
It’s used by startups and enterprise teams alike for one simple reason: it removes friction from the design process.
Best For: Founders creating product UI, onboarding flows, landing pages, and design systems on tight timelines.
4. Stripe – Power Payments and Subscriptions
Monetization is not optional. If you’re building a SaaS, you’re most likely going to need recurring payments, one-time transactions, usage-based billing, or freemium tiers. Stripe makes that entire infrastructure effortless.
What It Does:
Stripe is a global payments platform that offers APIs and no-code tools for processing payments, managing subscriptions, handling invoicing, and managing tax compliance.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
Stripe allows you to start accepting payments and subscriptions within days. You don’t have to build your own billing engine, deal with PCI compliance, or handle tax headaches manually.
You can:
- Offer flexible billing plans with metered usage, trials, and coupons.
- Set up customer portals for billing history and plan changes.
- Generate compliant invoices and collect tax (with Stripe Tax).
- Integrate with your backend seamlessly for full automation.
Whether you’re charging $10/month or $10,000/year, Stripe scales with your pricing strategy.
Best For: SaaS founders who need a reliable, scalable, and developer-friendly way to get paid.
5. Intercom or Crisp – Customer Support and Onboarding
Acquiring users is one thing; supporting and retaining them is another. Live chat and onboarding automation are critical to ensuring your users succeed with your product—and stay longer.
What They Do:
Both Intercom and Crisp are customer messaging platforms that combine live chat, in-app messaging, email campaigns, and help centers.
Why They’re Critical for Year One:
Your first users need hand-holding. They’ll have questions, confusion, and suggestions. You need to be there when they need you.
These platforms allow you to:
- Embed live chat into your app or site for instant support.
- Create onboarding messages triggered by user behavior.
- Collect feedback through conversation histories.
- Manage support tickets and knowledge bases as you grow.
Intercom is more advanced, while Crisp offers a budget-friendly alternative with solid core features.
Best For: SaaS founders who want to reduce churn by delivering exceptional support from day one.
6. PostHog – Understand User Behavior in Real Time
You can’t grow what you don’t understand. Knowing where users drop off, which features are ignored, and how customers interact with your product is key to prioritizing what to fix or build next.
What It Does:
PostHog is a product analytics platform that includes event tracking, session recording, funnel analysis, feature flags, and even A/B testing—all in one tool.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
Unlike general analytics tools, PostHog is built specifically for product teams. You get insights like:
- What features are used most or least.
- Where users drop off during onboarding or checkout.
- Which pages or flows are causing frustration.
Bonus: it’s open-source and privacy-focused, which is a huge win for GDPR-conscious startups.
Best For: Founders who want full visibility into product usage and user behavior.
7. Linear – Streamlined Issue Tracking and Sprint Planning
When your product starts gaining traction, bug reports, feature requests, and development tasks will begin to pile up. You need a system to manage it all that doesn’t get in your way. That’s where Linear comes in.
What It Does:
Linear is a fast, modern issue-tracking and project management tool built specifically for software teams. Think of it as a sleeker, developer-friendly alternative to Jira.
Why It’s Critical for Year One:
In your first year, you’re shipping fast. Linear matches your pace with:
- A blazing-fast interface that keeps productivity high.
- Support for kanban boards, sprints, backlog triage, and custom workflows.
- Deep integrations with GitHub, Slack, and other dev tools.
- A focus on clarity—so tasks don’t get buried or lost.
With Linear, you’ll always know what’s being worked on, what’s blocked, and what’s ready to ship. It helps founders stay focused, especially when juggling roles between product, engineering, and customer support.
Best For: Technical founders and lean SaaS teams that need clarity and speed in their development workflow.
8. MailerLite or ConvertKit – Email Marketing and Lifecycle Automation
Many SaaS founders wait too long to build their email list or automate communication with users. But email remains one of the most effective and affordable marketing channels—especially for early-stage products.
What They Do:
Both MailerLite and ConvertKit are email marketing platforms that allow you to build subscriber lists, design newsletters, and set up automated workflows.
Why They’re Critical for Year One:
Your early users are your best marketing asset. Email allows you to:
- Welcome new users with onboarding sequences.
- Send targeted messages based on behavior (e.g., “didn’t complete setup”).
- Share product updates, blog posts, or promotions.
- Re-engage users who have gone silent.
MailerLite is ideal for early-stage founders looking for a free or low-cost platform with a visual email builder. ConvertKit is particularly strong for creators or B2B founders who want strong automation and tagging features.
Email doesn’t just boost retention—it helps you build a following for future launches, features, or even a second product.
Best For: Founders who want to build relationships with users and leads through clean, effective email automation.
9. Slack or Discord – Team and Community Communication
Even if you start out solo, you’ll soon be working with contractors, advisors, users, or a growing team. Real-time communication is essential, and email isn’t going to cut it.
What They Do:
Slack and Discord are modern chat platforms designed for teams (Slack) or communities (Discord). Both allow you to organize conversations into channels, share files, and integrate with other tools.
Why They’re Critical for Year One:
Founders need both internal alignment and external engagement, and these tools offer both:
- Use Slack to coordinate with your development team, designers, or customer success agents.
- Use Discord to create a public or invite-only community around your product.
- Set up bots or integrations to alert you about feedback, deployments, or new signups.
- Quickly collaborate on blockers, ideas, or user-reported bugs in real time.
Many early-stage products also use Discord as a user support forum, making users feel closer to the team while easing support load.
Best For: Founders collaborating with small, fast-moving teams or cultivating an engaged community around their product.
10. Bonus: Fathom Analytics or Plausible – Privacy-First Web Analytics
While most founders default to Google Analytics, there’s a growing movement toward lightweight, privacy-focused alternatives. Fathom and Plausible give you all the core metrics without the bloat or compliance headaches.
What They Do:
Both tools track traffic, top pages, referrers, conversion goals, and more—without using cookies or invasive trackers.
Why They’re Critical for Year One:
In the early stages, you don’t need 100 dashboards—you need clarity.
- Understand what marketing pages are working.
- See where your traffic is coming from.
- Monitor goals like “Signed up” or “Visited pricing page”.
- Stay GDPR-compliant out of the box.
They’re also fast and lightweight, meaning they won’t slow down your site (a bonus for SEO and user experience).
Best For: Founders who care about speed, simplicity, and respecting user privacy.
Final Thoughts:
The first year of a SaaS startup is a balancing act between speed and stability. You’re constantly making trade-offs: ship fast vs. do it right, save cash vs. invest in quality, experiment vs. standardize.
The tools in this list are designed to help you maximize output while minimizing overhead. They remove the guesswork from development, communication, analytics, and support—so you can focus on what matters: building something people want.
A few parting thoughts for founders entering year one:
- Start small but choose tools that won’t bottleneck you when you grow.
- Automate early so you can stay lean without dropping the ball.
- Invest in feedback loops to build the right features, not just flashy ones.
- Communicate constantly—internally with your team, and externally with your users.
The best SaaS companies aren’t built by founders who work 100 hours a week. They’re built by founders who leverage the right systems at the right time.
Let your tools carry some of the load.