We’re delighted today to publish joint research with Stripe identifying a new ‘Startup Stack’, a suite of cloud-based tools powering the UK’s startup economy.
Tools like GitHub, Zendesk, Google Analytics, Salesforce, Stripe, AWS, Slack and Xero were among the most popular, with the majority of respondents estimating that UK startups are using between 6-15 tools to help their business grow.
Startup Stack tools make it cheaper and easier to start a business
By automating some of the most resource-intensive parts of building a business, from processing invoices and communicating with customers to accepting payments online, startup tools are emerging as the secret sauce of Britain’s entrepreneurs: 89% said these tools had made starting and scaling a business easier, and 85% said they had made it cheaper.
Outsourcing all the heavy lifting to increase productivity and build products faster
For upstarts today, there is no need to reinvent the wheel: less than 14% build their own servers; less than 12% build their own CRM systems; and less than 10% build their own payment infrastructure. The Startup Stack is transforming every part of starting a business. 45% of respondents said their biggest impact is in reducing operating costs; 45% said they increase productivity, and 41% said they reduce the length of product development cycles. Cost was considered the most important factor in that decision-making (72%), closely followed by ease of integration (59%) and stability (56%).
Startups for Startups are an emerging part of the UK economy
Startup Stack tools themselves are an emerging part of the economy — with 1 in 4 tools named less than five years old, and 15% are in fact UK-based businesses themselves, including Huddle (collaboration tool), Geckoboard (analytics tool) and FreeAgent (accounting tool).
Gerard Grech, CEO of Tech City UK, said:
“Whether you are an ad agency, a corporate business or starting a hairdressers, there are all sorts of cloud-based tools that can help you overcome operational barriers to drive success.
We are at a generational high point in the number of businesses started in the UK. This couldn’t be a better time to develop new business to business services in the UK, helping companies, employees and entrepreneurs be even more productive in their work, making the British economy even more resilient. We look forward to seeing more UK-based Startup Stack tool providers in the future, up from 15%.”
James Allgrove, Head of UK Growth at Stripe, said:
“The DIY-approach to setting up your own infrastructure no longer makes sense for today’s startups, when they can instantly integrate with Startup Stack tools that do all the heavy lifting. It also future-proofs businesses and accelerates growth by baking in the ability to scale. This is critical for British entrepreneurs who are increasingly embracing the economic promise of the internet.”
Aron Gelbard, CEO of Bloom & Wild, said:
“We’ve grown 20-fold in the last two years, and we’ve relied on a huge number of technology tools to accelerate that growth: from RJMetrics for data and analysis, to Xero for accounting, Shutl for delivery, and Stripe for payments.
“These tools have made our growth much more resource efficient, but it’s also about quality. In order to build the best possible experience for our customers, we need every element to be the highest quality — why build that yourself when there are experts with ready-made solutions to all of these challenges out there?”