Emeric Ernoult, CEO of Agorapulse, looks back at the software the company has used as it grew. CRM, prospecting, HR, finance or personal tools: his experience shows above all how selection criteria evolve with the size of the organization.
Agorapulse has existed for more than fifteen years and has never raised money. This bootstrapped trajectory has directly shaped the way it chooses its software.
“We were careful about what we spent on our tools from the start, trying to pick tools that were well calibrated for the size of company we were, and above all for the level of complexity they required in terms of maintenance and setup.”
His principle is simple: a piece of software can be very powerful and yet completely unsuited to a company's maturity. For him, 
Salesforce is the extreme example.
“I think if you take Salesforce when you're six people, you're dead.”
Behind the turn of phrase, he points to the cost of the consultants, expertise and maintenance needed to keep a complex stack running.
Agorapulse therefore started with relatively simple tools, before evolving them along with the organization. Pipedrive was its first CRM. 
HubSpot and then Salesforce supported the structuring of the sales function. ChartMogul was replaced by Fincome. HiBob remains the HRIS, while new AI assistants are starting to change some habits.
Why did Agorapulse start with Pipedrive and Intercom?
Pipedrive initially served as the CRM. At the time, Agorapulse had a sales function that was still underdeveloped and fairly simple sales processes. Emeric describes the company back then as very “marketing-driven”.
The other legacy tool is 
Intercom, adopted very early.
“Agorapulse was one of Intercom's first customers”
What struck Emeric at the time is something that seems much more ordinary today: being able to see user activity almost in real time. Who comes to the product, on which page and to do what.
“That kind of real-time view of what was happening in Intercom was absolutely magical.”
Agorapulse then adopted HubSpot, when the company had about a hundred people. The tool was used for marketing and sales.
In 2022, the CRM was moved to Salesforce, while Agorapulse kept HubSpot Marketing. At the time of the interview, the company is ultimately going the other way and moving back to HubSpot for the CRM.
How do Apollo and Gong fit into Agorapulse's Revenue stack?
Around the CRM, Agorapulse uses 
Apollo for enrichment and prospecting email sequences. Its place in the stack could change, however. The company has also looked at 
FullEnrich and 
Lemlist.
Gong is used by the sales teams, but Emeric rarely goes into it directly. He tends to open the tool when a salesperson points out an interesting customer reaction to him.
The arrival of AI assistants is in fact starting to change the way he accesses this information.
Recently, an employee had flagged in Slack a customer's very positive reaction to a new product. From WhatsApp, Emeric asked 
Instinct to find the Slack message, then the corresponding Gong call and finally the exact passage of the conversation.
“It sent me back the three verbatims within a minute, with where they came up in the conversation, via WhatsApp.”
How does Emeric Ernoult use Instinct and Wispr Flow?
Emeric describes Instinct as a kind of personal assistant he talks to directly from WhatsApp.
He asks it to find information in his messages, read his emails and Slack messages, or prepare replies. At the time of the interview, Instinct had, for example, just booked his hotel rooms and tickets for an event in Barcelona.
For messages, he keeps a human approval step: the assistant identifies the ones that need a reply and drafts one in his style, which Emeric can then approve. He also says he has given it access to various accounts through an encrypted vault containing his credentials. At the time of the interview, the service is still in beta and Emeric pays nothing.
Another tool that has become ubiquitous in his daily life: 
Wispr Flow.
“Wispr Flow, it's 50 times a day. I don't type anything anymore, everything is dictated.”
After trying various dictation solutions for years, including Siri, he now uses Wispr Flow for his emails and Slack messages, including when he works from his walking pad. He still corrects some errors, but finds they are becoming less frequent over time.
How does Agorapulse use HiBob and Gusto for HR?
Agorapulse looked at several HR solutions, including Lucca, Lattice and HiBob. 
HiBob is still its HRIS, notably for time off and salary grids.
According to Emeric, the choice dates back four or five years. At the time, Lucca did not meet all their needs, although he notes that the product may have evolved since.
Today, his view of HiBob is more mixed. According to him, Agorapulse does “hardly anything anymore” with it, and he finds the cost relatively high compared with the remaining uses. He also cites the handling of French time off as a point that does not seem ideal to him.
In the United States, where Agorapulse has fewer than ten people according to Emeric, the company uses 
Gusto. His feedback sums up fairly well what he expects from a back-office tool:
“Gusto is great. Honestly, I've never heard anyone talk about it internally and it works. That's when you know a tool is well made.”
Why did Agorapulse replace ChartMogul with Fincome?
To track its SaaS metrics, Agorapulse used 
ChartMogul for a long time before switching to 
Fincome.
Emeric describes a bad experience with ChartMogul, notably on price and support. His feedback on Fincome, by contrast, is very positive.
“Fincome is cheaper than ChartMogul. It does the same thing, or even better, for a much more reasonable price.”
Fincome lets him in particular analyze SaaS metrics by segment, country or product in order to identify the areas that are underperforming. At Agorapulse, Fincome is mainly connected to 
Chargebee. The setup and migration are described as easy, with a responsive team.
Why does the finance stack remain fragmented?
Agorapulse has a French holding company as well as US and Canadian subsidiaries, and has to deal with several accounting frameworks. 
Xero is used as the accounting software, with a French accountant stepping in to adapt the books to French requirements.
“An accounting software that does everything, we haven't found it. We make do.”
The company also evaluated 
Pigment for financial planning, but the discussions went nowhere, as Agorapulse did not match Pigment's target company size.
Chargebee, for its part, handles billing and notably feeds Fincome. Emeric says he is generally satisfied with the tool, with a major reservation about support. An experience that fuels a broader criticism on his part of some large SaaS vendors:
“We have tools where we pay tens of thousands of euros a year and where it's hard to talk to anyone. Whereas for smaller software, often French, we pay less but the support is much better”
Finally, Agorapulse uses 
Spendesk and 
Navan, but Emeric prefers to remain cautious about these two tools, which he rarely uses personally. He reports good feedback from his CFO and from Spendesk users. On Navan, used for business travel, the feedback so far is “neither great nor negative”.
Summary of the software this article mentions in Agorapulse's stack
| Status | Workflow | Tool | Usage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Replaced | CRM | PipedriveReplaced | First sales CRM mentioned |
| In use | Customer communication | Intercom | Adopted very early to track user activity |
| In use | Marketing / CRM | HubSpot | Gradual consolidation of the Revenue stack |
| Replaced | CRM |  SalesforceReplaced | CRM adopted in 2022 |
| In use | Prospecting | Apollo | Enrichment and email sequences |
| Dropped | Enrichment | FullEnrichDropped | Solution Agorapulse looked at |
| Dropped | Prospecting | lemlistDropped | Solution Agorapulse looked at |
| In use | Conversation intelligence | Gong | Sales calls and customer verbatims |
| In use | Communication |  Slack | Communication and access to several workflows |
| In use | AI assistant | Instinct | Personal assistant |
| In use | Communication |  WhatsApp | Interface with Instinct and professional groups |
| In use | Dictation | Wispr Flow | About 50 uses a day, by his count |
| Replaced | Dictation | SiriReplaced | Former dictation solution |
| In use | Knowledge management |  Slite | Company knowledge base |
| Replaced | Knowledge management |  NotionReplaced | Alternative considered against Slite |
| In use | Management | Radical | Internal application for data from meetings |
| In use | AI-assisted development |  Lovable | Building Radical |
| In use | Payroll | Gusto | Payroll for the US team |
| In use | SaaS metrics | Fincome | Tracking SaaS metrics |
| Replaced by Fincome | SaaS metrics | ChartMogulReplaced by Fincome | Replaced by Fincome |
| In use | Billing | Chargebee | Billing and data source for Fincome |
| In use | Accounting | Xero | Accounting |
| In use | Spend management | Spendesk | Cards and expenses |
| In use | Travel management | Navan | Business travel |
