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Privately-held companies with valuations of over a billion dollars, often referred to in the tech world as unicorns, are attracting a lot of attention these days. Engineers want to work for them, venture capitalists want to back them (the earlier the better), and a whole host of marketing-technology companies want to sell their services to them.

But which MarTech tools are actually fueling today’s startup superstars? In advance of the big MarTech: The Marketing Tech Conference taking place this week in San Francisco, we decided to find out, running an analysis that entailed looking at the public data available from the code on these unicorns’ websites. We used BuiltWith and Datanyze to do the analysis; these profiling services aren’t perfect, and may miss certain elements of a company’s software tool base, particularly if a startup relies heavily on certain mobile technologies to deliver its product. But the two crawling services certainly provide useful insights as to what software and tools unicorns are using to run their businesses in a variety of areas.  As accessories used to equip the unicorns, I’ll refer to these technologies as “UnicornTech”.

We focused only on marketing technology and did our analysis by cross-referencing the 61 non-exited, still-private unicorns (excluding Asian companies) from the Wall Street Journal’s recent “billion-dollar startup club” roundup with data from BuiltWith and Datanyze. That gave us a sense of the saddles, stirrups, bits and harnesses (in that case “tack”, in our case “tech”) that are along for the ride with these mythical creatures. Here are a few worth noting in the MarTech sector:

A few things jump out from this tally. First of all, companies using simple/freemium business models seem to get the highest adoption. Visit the websites for these tools and you’ll see how easy they make it to get started and begin using their products without even speaking to a sales rep. I’ve noticed and spoken about this trend more broadly as an evolution in B2B and enterprise sales.

Next, the disruptive innovators (the unicorns) tend to prefer disruptive solutions. SendGrid positions itself as a simpler and more modern expression of the email service provider; Optimizely does the same relative to incumbents (funny to use that word here!) like Adobe Analytics, which offers a similar product called Target.

Finally, all these services make the prices of their products astonishingly transparent. Seeing a menu of their prices is pretty much akin to walking into a fast food restaurant, although gateways exist to evaluate larger enterprise offerings. It’s certainly not hidden as a punchline following a long sales interaction.

So if you want to lasso a unicorn, and perhaps the unicorns of the future, saddle up and study these frequently used tools. There seem to be some good lessons for MarTech companies hoping to have these much-vaunted startup logos on their client lists.

Jonathan Sills is a former high-tech marketing executive who is now an executive-in-residence at Battery Ventures.

*For a full list of Battery investments and exits, please click here.