About Tools

Tools

Not much software is needed to run the day-to-day operation of Blot.

Email

We communicate amongst ourselves and with our customers using email. Email is good because it is asynchronous and decentralized.

Analytics

We don't gather analytics data. There are no metrics and there are no A/B tests. When we make design or engineering decisions we rely on our judgement and trust in our taste.

Task tracking

We use a text-file to keep track of tasks. If somebody needs to be notified when a task is complete, we include a link to the appropriate email thread in the text file, along with a description of the task. This text-file is checked into version control which means we can easily summarize our completed tasks – the updates page is generated from this file.

Accounting

We use a spreadsheet which we update once per month with revenue and costs. Our costs are as follows:

Hosting (AWS, Bunny)
Payment processing fees (Stripe and PayPal)
Domain registration (AWS and Cloudflare)
Email hosting (Google Workspace)
Status monitoring (Updown.io)
Other software (Microsoft Office, iCloud, TurboTax)

At the end of the year we use TurboTax to generate our tax documents.

Payment processing

We use Stripe and PayPal to process payments.