About Us

Hey there! Welcome to Satchel Guides.

As we mention on our homepage, we try to identify the best-of-category tool for a typical early-stage startup based on rigorous, hands-on testing and standardized assessments. Our recommendations aren't based on which product has the most features or the biggest customers. Instead, we try to find the product that gets the job done at a good value, and otherwise gets out of the way so you can focus on what matters. We make the same recommendations to our founder friends, and eat our own cooking — we follow our own recommendations.

Our driving goal is to be useful. And we think that all of our actions can be inferred from this motivation. Utility is the quality of our recommendations, multiplied by all of the people who can derive value from them. Therefore, maximizing usefulness decomposes into jointly maximizing accuracy and accessibility.

Maximizing accuracy is to maintain our standards for objective, up-to-date research and unbiased recommendations. We will hold steadfast to these standards, whether through overarching policies against bias and outside influence (e.g. we will not write nor accept any sponsored content) or day-to-day improvements (e.g. updating this guide as soon as the Fed rate changes).

Maximizing accessibility is to ensure that our research and findings remain publicly accessible. While keeping content behind a paywall is a straightforward way to monetize, we also know that that a non-open access model isn't tenable for many founders, students, developers, and others, who might otherwise benefit from our research. As such, we are committed to ensuring that there are no financial obstacles to accessing our work.