Our Methodology

We built Efficient App to publish honest, opinionated software recommendations in a space often shaped by sponsorships, incentives, and highest pay-per-click pressures from the largest companies.

We are Alex & Andra - we're software obsessed, co-founders, and husband & wife. As a duo, we're absolutely obsessed with software. We've been evaluating and integrating software + automating business processes for teams of all sizes for over a decade.

We've seen it all when it comes to software and we're pretty opinionated on what software a team should/shouldn't use for success. In running our software implementation, integration, and automation consultancy over the past decade, we found ourselves answering the same software questions over and over.

So in typical automation fashion, we figured why not simply answer these questions publicly on our blog, since automation is all about making yourself redundant.

In our first year, we added over 110+ highly opinionated app reviews and comparisons to the site.

Efficient App now showcases our Top Picks, aka the tools we use (and pay for ourselves) or ones that we recommend and implement into our customers' businesses. We now have over 100,000 people visiting our site per month to make B2B software purchasing decisions for their team.

Software that is modern, typically has an exceptional UI/UX (no really, we score apps from A–F in this category), or is highly innovative in how they are solving a particular problem. Our aim is to be as opinionated as possible, to help you make better software decisions, faster. Think Wirecutter for software 🤔

You won't find general software reviews or articles ending like "at the end of the day, you need to choose what's best for you" because lets face it, what is best for you should be made abundantly clear, and you should be told what popular software to avoid, and why.

Let's be real: how trustworthy is ClickUp reviewing top project management software, or HubSpot telling you about the best CRM for small businesses? Their SEO is amazing since they are billion dollar companies, and they conveniently put themselves as #1 on their "top list". So yeah, we see what you're doing, and no, HubSpot is not good for small businesses!

(P.S. did you know that most people don't look at the site logo when reading a review?) 🤯

We've also found that most review sites often aren't opinionated because:

1. They don't want to "burn bridges" with any software as they may get dropped as an affiliate/partner in the future (would you believe that most TOS for affiliate programs state that you can't say anything negative whatsoever to maintain partner status?) it's absurd.‍

We're totally onboard with doing this if it means actually helping people make a decision, otherwise we're just introducing more paralysis by analysis 🫨

2. Recommending software to a broad audience is tough‍

That's why we're focused specifically on B2B software along with the actual needs of businesses—our area of specialty, having helped businesses pick and integrate their software stack for over a decade!

We felt strongly that our site should be:

• Completely free to use
• Honest (AKA: not prioritize showing you the software that pays us the most $$$)
• Actionable (after reading our reviews, you should feel confident in the software you select)

1. Formerly Services. We first bootstrapped our business by doing consulting services, specifically Automation + Integration + Software implementation to be exact over the past decade (since 2010). The majority of our revenue formerly came from our customers who we talked about earlier, those who hired us to build custom integration and automation to streamline their business. We've stopped taking on new clients in 2024, focusing all of our efforts now on content, and helping people at scale.
2. Affiliate. We include the usual affiliate links to the software on our site. Not all software has it (yeah, even some of the software we recommend doesn't benefit us whatsoever 🤯). That said, if you find our content valuable, you can support us at no extra cost to yourself by buying through the links (and we'll get a commission). In-fact, sometimes we've even negotiated discounts for you by using our links (often giving up our own affiliate revenue in favor of passing along the value). 🤷
3. VC Firm Research. As we said before, we're obsessed with software. Live on platforms like Product Hunt, and have implemented just about every tool in some of the categories listed here into businesses of all sizes over the years. Whelp, apparently this knowledge is pretty valuable to certain VC firms, as they reach out to interview us about trends and software we're seeing in various B2B SaaS industries, in exchange for compensation. What we do following those meetings is usually brain-dump the information we researched to prepare for the meeting into articles and YouTube videos for others to benefit from (for free). It's genuinely a win-win for everyone.
4. Sponsorships (sorta). You may see sponsorship CTA's on our website, but they will always be clearly labeled "sponsorship". If something is not marked as sponsored, it's not sponsored. None of our written content is sponsored either, as we do not believe you can write unbiased content if you are paid to write it. The same goes for our YouTube videos, we will never take money from a company and hide that this has happened, in-fact, we haven't had a single software review/comparison video on our YouTube channel that has been sponsored.
5. The only time you may have seen sponsored content in video format was in our YouTube Mini-Series Podcast, but we filmed the segments we wanted to use, and sent them over and said "we love your software, would you be open to us running this segment?", this was before we started seriously creating software review and comparison content. So even in that instance, we've never allowed a company to reach out to us and sponsor them (we've only gone after companies that we use, know, and love). We are incredibly mindful about who is sponsoring us and we make it clear that it will have 0 affect on the outcome of our reviews.
6. With that, we've made the judgement call that Sponsorship on our YouTube channel is just too much of a gray area in this space. If a software company is paying you in return for you creating a video about them, you're going to feel drawn to critique them less. Because of that, we have decided it's better for us to create the content we feel pulled to create, without sponsorship, so that we can be congruent with every word we say. So you won't see sponsorship on our YouTube channel (aside from our podcast in the past).
7. YouTube Ads. While this is currently a tiny slice of our revenue, most understand how this works—some of the best creators online have managed to give the best content for free, by simply running ads during their videos.
8. Angel Investing. Some of the software we've found on the site, well, we found at a super early stage. We usually first test it internally in our company, then implement it into customer's businesses, and then add the software to our site. If we happen to be blown away by our wins from using the software, we naturally get close to the team behind the product to pass along detailed product feedback. On the occasion that we're super impressed by this point, we've asked to invest. And maybe 30% of the time, they happen to be raising and have said yes. So we invest personally with our own money, and buy a tiny stake in the startup (far less than 1%). And that's angel investing! We'll know in 7–10 years if this will have made (or lost) us money, since you don't get a payout usually unless the company goes public, which happens less than 1% of the time (it's incredibly rare). If you're curious to learn more about angel investing, we cover that in episode 3 of our mini-series. With all of that said, it's important to note that we only invest in B2B software that we first love and use ourselves before even sharing it with our readers on the site. You can transparently read about the software we invested over on efficientvc.com.

And with these 6 methods, we get to stay small, independent, and keep the website access free to you (our audience), all while making sure we have a way to keep the lights on. We'd say that's a pretty fair deal, what do you think?

Hope you enjoy!

And even if you don't, we won't stop 👀 because wishy-washy reviews are OUT and unfiltered reviews are here to stay 🚀

A-Team (Alex & Andra)