Not as much a rant as interest, but did any of you guys recently start a business or witnessed the start of one? I really wanted to know how those find the services and tools that get them off the ground or enhance the business, is there lists with "must have" services for specific business categories etc?

My experience with startups is that they generally fail.
Every single one I have been a part of and put my dedicated time and effort in just failed due incapable management.
If you are bored it'd suggest contributing to something open source or just your own project.

Then again my experience is personal so take it with a grain of salt.

@rootshell I wasn't initially aiming for startups, although the question could stay the same (since they could be even more willing to get into new technologies and services) - how do they find services and tools to use to get off the ground? or was your experience that bad that they didn't even have anything remotely prepared?

i'm starting my business.trying to, at least.
what kind of tools are you asking? for development? those you probably already have. to make the company legally valid, probably look for some lawyer. even if they don't know how to help, they will probably know wherr you can look for help. if the tools you use are paid, check if the company offers deals for start ups. microsoft does, the guys from gitkraken,etc..

@fcrozetta I am looking for a way on how businesses (or startups as we discovered above) find new services and tools to use with their workflow (or start their business with), this can range from email analytics (to get insights on what drives the traffic most from emails), server monitoring, bug report software etc., I am just generally curious on what kind of methods/software/analytics/.. businesses use (for getting traffic, analyzing various variables, ..) that I might not know yet of. What I discovered to be kind of handy is stackshare, that comes as close to "discovering", but not really the way businesses would go. The paid software that I do use, sadly doesn't really have anything in that range though.

@JoshBent Oh my bad I didn't answer the question correctly.

Honestly as much free software as possible as generally you want to get into the profit that you can use to expand your business.

For software development you probably have to look at some VCS of which git is probably the most popular. something to share documents around which isn't code something like owncloud.

hosting of prod/dev server either selfhosted or AWS or heroku if we are talking web. Or a vps could do it.

Something to look at your applications performance there are tools but I generally like to make something of my own.

Docker is rather popular for dependancy control.

You can either do the fast approach of just using libs and services up the wazoo but be stuck in depandancy hell or do the slow approach and build as much as possible yourself.
Some form of web interface is nice or SNMP traps or the like.
Frameworks.
Loadbalancing either as a service or hardware.
Honestly anything beyond that DIY it.

@rootshell Many of the mentioned I know already, but you mentioned doing a lot of DIY - I would be able to, I just don't know what I could really track or analyze (or improve? or use?), like I just recently stumbled upon tracking the portfolio emails my site is sending out and it gave me a some insight on whats actually going on, how many get opened etc. I am just clueless where would I find things like this to stumble upon and it seems to me that businesses and startups just have that well they visit for things to find. I tried looking up some talks businesses give, but mainly they just advertise working concepts, brainstorming etc.

@JoshBent Well if you could give an example. Generally the best strategy is anything that is repatative or takes more then 5 minutes should be (fully) automated as much as possible.
You generally want stats that are important to you or your business. Which depends on business strategy and what your services and/or products are.

@rootshell Well the thing is - just like in my previous answer; I did not know that I should/could analyze the emails I am sending out until I actually read about it, so it's hard for me to tell - what is important or rather what I can do to get better insight on things, same goes probably with hidden services/tools that make life easier.

@JoshBent can u tell us more about your business... this information can be usefull to filter what kind of tools you should/could use.

@fcrozetta I don't have any business (yet) just interested looking into things that could benefit my sites, apps or general knowledge.

@JoshBent oh, i see..
but why would like to keep monitoring emails.. what woud you like to achieve?

@fcrozetta I achieved (so far) knowing what emails actually get opened, which one drive traffic to my site (through what links) and some smaller variables. It's really handy analytics, that I wouldn't have thought of, if I didnt stumble upon them, that's why I am trying to figure out a way to find more of those.

@JoshBent Tracking how long and what content your users browse could be rather interesting to know.
To find out your user demographic is very vital information.
If you use ads to see which kind is most effective.
If you use a subscription model for ypur site/app to see what demographic choose what.

@rootshell noted some down thanks, still searching for that well that startups and businesses grab into though.