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"Have you ever wanted to know what tools and systems other companies use? Phone systems? CMS options? Billing services? etc. The logisitics of setting up a company's infrastructure can be a painful process. BestVendor, a New York City startup in its own right, is building a Yelp-like resource for business products by harnessing social recommendations&amp;amp;nbsp;to help small businesses make faster,  smarter purchasing.\nOver the last two months, BestVendor surveyed 550s startups about their most used business products and services. The results show the increasing popularity of Google's as Google Analytics and Gmail snagged the top two spots, respectively, for the most popular startup tools. In fact, BestVendor found that 70% of startup execs use Google Analytics. The survey also uncovered hidden gems like IdeaPaint, a tool that turns your walls into white boards and HipChat, a chat tool for businesses.\n&amp;quot;It's a give-to-get community,&amp;quot; explains Jeff Giesea, the CEO of BestVendor. In order to access the site, you must contribute a review. In exchange for sharing a few tools you use in your business, you can  browse other&amp;amp;nbsp;companies&amp;amp;nbsp;and people to see what they're using in theirs- for free. You can filter results by industry, company size or by your social network. Giesea plans to leverage this data set to provide rankings  of product categories like collaboration software, web hosting  providers, or payroll providers based on what others use and recommend.\nBestVendor\u2019s founders have significant  experience connecting buyers and sellers of business products. CEO Jeff  Giesea, who started the company in January, previously founded B2B media  and lead-generation business FierceMarkets, which he sold in 2008.  Co-Founders Ben Zhuk (head of product) and Magnus von Koeller (head of  engineering) are recent graduates of Columbia Business School with  extensive backgrounds in product development and engineering,  respectively.\n\u201COur vision is to become the first place people turn  whenever they need to figure out what to buy for their business, much  like Amazon is for books and Yelp is for restaurants,\u201D said Giesea. \u201CIn  turn, we\u2019ll be a highly efficient customer acquisition vehicle for  vendors.\u201D\nJust today, it released the results of its \u201C2011 Startup Toolkit Survey\u201D on the most popular products and providers used by startups with up to 100 employees.\nThe 10 most popular startup tools are:\n1. Google Analytics  (Web Analytics)\n2. Gmail  (Email)\n3. Quickbooks  (Accounting)\n4. American Express  (Company Credit Card)\n5. Salesforce.com  (CRM)\n6. Dropbox  (Storage)\n7.  Evernote  (Note-taking)\n8. Basecamp  (Project Management)\n9. MailChimp  (Email Marketing)\n10. Amazon Web Service  (Web Hosting)\n\nThe findings also show the distribution of market share within specific categories. The five categories most dominated by a single company include:\n\nWeb design (Adobe)\nWeb Analytics (Google)\nAccounting (Quickbooks\nHardware (Apple)\nCRM (Salesforce.com).\n\nOther interesting results:\n\n27% of startup execs use PayPal for payment processing.\n 57% use Google Apps.\n 71% of startup execs use QuickBooks for accounting\n59% of startup execs use Salesforce for CRM.\n39% of startup execs use Dropbox for storage.\n43% of startup execs use AmEx for their company credit card.\nBank of America is leading bank used by startups, with 19% using it.\nMailChimp is leading email marketing system for startups, with 30% using it.\n\nThe Startup Toolkit Survey is part of a larger effort by BestVendor to bring transparency and openness to the business purchasing process. The full results are available on the BestVendor blog here. The company will soon release a Quora-like platform so  you can ask a  question to someone in your social network and invite them to answer it  within BestVendor.\n\u201CIt\u2019s time to put an end to the era of too-little information when deciding what to buy for your business,\u201D said CEO Jeff Giesea. \u201CBusiness people deserve a single destination for peer recommendations and user reviews.\u201D\nBestVendor, which hopes to fulfill that role, is in Alpha launch right now. To be specific, it's currently in the second phase of its three-phase Alpha  product: &amp;quot;Bullet&amp;quot;, which is right after Moonshine and right before Blue  Label. Beta signup is available on its site and will likely open in the fall.\nBestVendor raised $600,000 in a seed round at the end of  June. The  round was led by SoftBank Capital and  Lerer Ventures and also included  Silicon Valley super-angels SVAngel and  Peter Thiel.\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://thenextweb.com/apps/2011/07/25/bestvendor-ranks-the-10-most-popular-startup-tools/>