The Tools I Use to Run My Company (2026 Edition)

Telegram for internal team communication (fast, simple, no bloat). Email for external communication. No Slack — I find it creates more noise than signal for small teams.

The anti-pattern is installing every communication tool. Each tool creates another inbox to check, another notification source, another place to miss a message. Fewer tools, more focus.

GitHub for code. Railway for deployment. Claude Code for AI-assisted development. Cursor for focused editing. Vercel for static sites. PostgreSQL for data. Redis for caching and queues.

The stack is deliberately boring. Boring technology that works is better than exciting technology that breaks. Innovation should be in the product, not the infrastructure.

Custom-built analytics dashboards for our specific metrics. Google Analytics for basic web traffic. PostHog for product analytics when we need user behavior tracking.

I've learned to distrust analytics tools that show you everything. The best analytics setup shows you the one metric that matters and makes it impossible to ignore.

Mercury for banking. QuickBooks for accounting. Stripe for payments. Simple, reliable, boring. The less time I spend thinking about financial tools, the more time I spend building product.

One lesson learned the hard way: automate financial reporting from day one. Manual reconciliation scales horribly and creates end-of-quarter panic. Set it up right once and forget about it.

Claude is the meta-tool that improves the use of every other tool. It writes the code, analyzes the data, drafts the communications, and debugs the infrastructure. Every other tool on this list is more effective because AI amplifies my use of it.

If I had to cut my tool stack to three things: Claude, GitHub, and Railway. Everything else is nice to have. Those three are need to have.