As a startup, we have the opportunity to seed the company culture and process. This affects what tools we use to manage these processes. We are still experimenting with various tools, and I foresee there will still be a lot of changes in the near future. Nevertheless, I have listed down all the tools we are using to keep this ship sailing.

Tools we evaluated, but didn’t make the cut:

• Retrospectiva for keeping track of our projects’ tasks and change sets. We stop using Retrospectiva because it does not have enough features to support our version of agile software development.
• Acunote for tracking projects’ tasks. Acunote is an excellent tool. But we decided to switch to Rally due to more complete feature sets (bug tracking, estimate vs actual time comparison, etc). Free for teams of 5 and below.

Tools we are using now:

• TextMate for Rails development.
• SVN for versioning our source code.
• Mac OS X for a rock solid platform. The ability to run Windows using Parallels or Fusion for cross-browser testing is a nice bonus.
• Basecamp for tracking our administrative and non-coding tasks.
• Apple iCal with WebDAV for sharing calendars internally.
• StikiPad for our internal wiki.
• Google Apps for email hosting.
• Google Alerts for keeping tabs on what the web says about us and our products.
• WordPress for all our blogging needs.
• Amazon S3 for offsite backup and asset hosting.

Tools we have our eyes on:

• Rally for managing our projects. Community Edition is free for teams of 10 and below.
• Campaign Monitor for email lists management and marketing.

Most tools listed above are hosted and come with affordable pay-as-you-go or free plans. This frees the company from a lot of fixed costs and full-time maintenance effort so we can focus on building the next big thing.

What tools you use to run your startup?