WP Engine's CEO: 'I Couldn't Do My Job Without...'

Ever wonder what apps and gear busy entrepreneurs use to boost their productivity, stay organized, and maintain their sanity? In our ongoing series, we ask company CEOs, founders, and other influential business folks to reveal their tech essentials.
The entrepreneur: Jason Cohen, co-founder and CEO of WP Engine

The business: WP Engine is a WordPress hosting company that makes Web sites "fast, scalable, and secure," with a strong focus on customer support.

The tech tool that makes his life easier: "SwagLove makes it easy for us to do online t-shirt marketing.

"Like many startups, we've found that giving out t-shirts is worth every penny -- customers love gifts even if it means becoming walking billboards. As long as the message is funny or the design is stylish, everyone's ready to strut your stuff.

"The problem is distributing the t-shirts. For example, we wanted to give every customer a shirt when they signed up for service, but that would mean coordinating on their size, pattern, and color, and getting a valid, possibly international shipping address. Then there's the logistics of keeping an inventory of shirts and physically packing and shipping the orders. That's a lot of time and expense for a give-away marketing effort.

"SwagLove fixes all that for us -- they're like CafePress, except the customer orders and we pay. It's easy to use their Web interface to generate unique URLs, which allow someone to get exactly one shirt. You can easily spiff one out to anyone on Twitter. You can use SwagLove's CSV-export feature to merge with a mailing list or use their API to integrate it into your own systems, which is what we did."

The specs: Setting up a SwagLove store is free; then it's just $20 per shirt including shipping, or less in bulk.

If you're a CEO or business owner, we'd like to hear how you'd fill in this blank: "I couldn't do my job without _____." Ping me at bizhacks@gmail.com.