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Ready-to-use online tools like Slack help Singaporean startups scale faster and reach international clients, says a study by Stripe. Photo credit: Giorgio Minguzzi.

Online payments and business tools startup Stripe today unveiled the results of a study on how Singapore’s startups use online tools and resources. According to the study, 60 percent of startups in Singapore are selling internationally today.

Not only that, but more than 35 percent of Singaporean ventures that started out within the past year are doing business outside the city-state’s limits. Almost half of them expect to cross the borders within the next year.

Local startups benefit from access to tools and resources like Amazon Web Services, Google Analytics, GitHub, Trello, Hubspot, Slack, and yes, Stripe. The study collectively identifies these services as the “startup stack,” a suite of more than 150 software tools that are accessed by and operate on the cloud.

For the study, Stripe heard from 235 venture-funded startups. 70 percent of them were early-stage startups – of those, almost half employed five people or fewer. The company partnered with SeedPlus, Jungle Ventures, Golden Gate Ventures, General Assembly, and 500 Startups to do the survey.

This is how Singapore startups feel they benefit from the startup stack.

It’s cheaper and easier than ever to get started

Most startups surveyed said it’s cheaper and easier to start a business in Singapore using such tools. A vast majority also thinks such resources make it easier to go global from Singapore and nab international clients.

Image credit: Stripe.

What’s more interesting is that 64 percent say they probably would not have been able to get their business off the ground five years ago, when many of those tools were not available or were in an earlier stage.

No need to reinvent the wheel

According to the study, only a minority of startups build their own servers, payments systems, or communication tools.

As a result, most of them feel their productivity is increased and they save more money, while almost half think their product development goes faster.

Image credit: Stripe.

As to the criteria with which startups pick their tools, the top ones were cost and ease of integration to their products. They also value reliability, scalability, and interoperability between different programs.

Image credit: Stripe.

“Plugging into these cloud-based tools means that startups no longer need to build everything from scratch,” says Piruze Sabuncu, head of Stripe for Southeast Asia and Hong Kong. “By outsourcing some of the most resource-intensive parts of building businesses, Singaporean startups are able to start and scale global organizations from day one.”

Li Hongyi, deputy director of GovTech’s product and engineering team, agrees that such tools help keep development flexible and fast, citing GovTech’s Beeline app, which allows users to book seats on shuttles heading toward the destination they wish to go. “This means building and scaling quickly while keeping a small, efficient team,” he says. “Using cloud services allows us to stop wasting time on solved problems.”

For Tradegecko, one of the startups surveyed for the study, the stack helps power the company’s growth beyond Singapore and global team collaboration. “From ecommerce tools like Shopify and WooCommerce, to payments and accounting software like Stripe and Xero, user-friendly cloud software has made it easy to run a business with only a small team – or no team at all,” says co-founder and CEO Cameron Priest.

We have reached out to Stripe for more details on the study.

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