Vetd’s community-focused platform tells you what’s in everyone’s stack

We here at Technical.ly are diving into the topic of tech stacks this month — anything software, programing and even where to brush up on or learn some new skills. During July, we want to know what kinds of libraries, frameworks and programming languages you’re working with.

While many people in this industry think of a tech stack as the smaller pieces of your individual software products, one Center City company is looking at it on a larger, business-wide scale.

“We really consider it all the pieces of tech or software you use to run your business,” said Andrew Hoagland, cofounder and CEO of Vetd, makers of a software-buying platform that vets vendors.

That can be anything from what coding language or data visualization tools you’re using to your preferred payroll processing program, he said, estimating that the average number of vendors a company uses is somewhere around 40, depending on its size and purpose.

The mission of Vetd is to make the buying process for companies as easy as possible without spending time judging vendors for themselves. Its platform helps recently funded startups pick the right B2B software and build their own tech stacks. (We gave the startup the #8 spot on our 2019 realLIST.)

Hoagland and cofounder and COO Zach Shapiro left their jobs in software buying and selling in April 2018 and have since added cofounder and CTO Bill Piel and front-end engineer Chris Elwell. The team works out of MakeOffices at 17th and Market streets and hopes to grow to about 12 by the end of the year.

Now, the company’s community feature has grown to make space for companies to share with each other what programs and software they use.

Hoagland said the team kept hearing from folks in the industry — mostly VCs and accelerators — that they didn’t trust sales people or review sites, and wanted a place to talk amongst others in the Philly startup community in order to better support their portfolio companies.

“We heard that folks trusted the community,” Hoagland said. “They kept saying, ‘We trust the people we know.’ So now we’re pushing to make sure the Philly network is seen and there’s some transparency in the conversations around how much people are paying for services and which services they’re trusting.”

The goal for the resulting free Business Communities version of Vetd is to give portfolio companies discounts sourced through its database of Vetd Vendors; for members to better understand their portfolio companies’ stacks, buying history, recommendations and the price they paid for each vendor; and to promote their own portfolio companies to use each other’s products.

So far, 12 “communities” with more than 2,000 portfolio companies — again, mostly VCs and accelerators — have signed onto the Business Communities platform, Hoagland said.

“The future is all going to be about transparency,” he said. “The bigger the internet gets, the more access everyone will have, and we want to promote that transparency.”