❦ STACK GUIDE · No. 003 · By founder stage
Team of two
Co-founder pair. Product working. No employees yet.
Two people, no employees. The product is shipping, MRR is real, and the cost of coordination starts to matter. The stack now includes the tools that keep two heads in sync — shared docs, shared tasks, shared sales pipeline — without the per-seat tax of bigger teams.
❦ The stack, at a glance
$300–700
8
17
$300–700/mo
Who this is for
- ●Two co-founders, no employees
- ●Product live, $5k–50k MRR
- ●Distributed or co-located — works either way
Who it isn't for
- ●Solo founders — see Solo + AI
- ●Teams of 5+ — see Growing team
❦ Project management & docs
Two people coordinating means one source of truth for what's shipped, what's broken, what's next.
❦ Hosting & infrastructure
❦ Database & backend
❦ Sales / CRM
Opswyse
Pro tier ($24). Light enough that both founders can use it without RevOps overhead.
Read review →
Pipedrive
Essential tier ($14/seat). Kanban view if visual pipeline matters more to you than AI follow-ups.
Read review →
HubSpot
Starter tier ($20/seat) if you want a big-name CRM with marketing email built in.
Read review →
❦ Customer support
❦ Marketing & email
❦ Payments
❦ Banking & legal
❦ A note from the editors
Budget target: $300–700/mo. The biggest line items at this stage are usually Linear + Notion + Supabase Pro + your customer-support tool. Skip Gusto / Deel until you have an actual employee.
❦ Your stage
See another stage.
The Founder's Stack
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