My Solopreneur Tech Stack

Welcome to The Workflow!

Welcome back to another edition of The Workflow, where we explore the latest in the world of workflow automation. In today’s edition, we’re getting a bit meta and looking at the no-code and AI tech stack that runs my solopreneur business. For background, in addition to this newsletter, I run a content creation productized service for no-code and AI startups. I’ll walk through all the tools I use to make it happen. Let’s dive in!

Today’s Topics

• My solopreneur tech stack

• How to set up an AI virtual assistant to triage your email

• Workflow automation news

• Workflow Tweet of the week

Read time: 5 minutes

My solopreneur tech stack

At Onboard, I deliver written content and how-to videos for clients. I charge a monthly retainer for these services, and as such, build long-term relationships with clients and keep my client roster low (< 5 clients per month). My tech stack reflects the solo nature and low client volume of my work — keep that in mind as you read through my tech stack.

💼 Sales: Cold Outreach, CRM

My sales process is so low-tech and non-automated that it feels ironic in the context of this newsletter. I use LinkedIn DMs, Twitter DMs, and email outreach from my personal Gmail to reach out to potential clients. Zero automation. Zero AI. Zero data platforms.

As the bulk of my job is researching, testing, and writing about no-code and AI tools, my sales research is done as a part of my core work. When I have the capacity and find a company that’s a good fit, I reach out via one of the above platforms directly to the person on the team that most likely oversees the type of work I provide.

For my CRM, I built a very simple client table (i.e. Name, Email, Stage) and a visual Kanban board in Airtable to track the status of my pipeline. This client table maps to my project management table in Airtable too (more on this below!).

✍️ Fulfillment: Content Writing, Video Creation

For writing content, I’ll use either Notion or Google Docs, depending on client preference. Both of these are great for creating and collaborating on written content. I prefer Notion as it can double as a client CMS.

For screenshots, I use CleanShot X. Previously, I used the built-in Mac screenshot tool with Skitch, but that became a bit cumbersome and hard to manage after taking hundreds of screenshots. CleanShot X combines screenshot-taking with editing, image cloud storage, and more — it makes my screenshots look much more professional.

For recording and editing how-to videos, I use Screen Studio. I started with Loom, but upgraded to Screen Studio quickly due to its specialization in screen recording, easy video editing features, and video resolution quality. If I need to add additional video graphics or animations, I’ll export the video to Capcut to add these finishers.

I’ll often work with ChatGPT and Claude on ideation, brainstorming, and outlines of all my content.

👋 Client Operations: Communication, CMS, Client Portal

Nothing too sexy here, I use Slack and Gmail for client communication. I prefer Gmail because it encourages more asynchronous communication, whereas Slack has an “always-on” vibe.

For my Client Portal and Content Management System (CMS)—a simple Kanban board of content requests and statuses—I use Notion. I invite clients to specific team spaces, they add requests, I complete them and update their status, and that’s it!

🔀 Internal Operations: Project Mgmt, Invoicing, Bookkeeping, Taxes

For project management, I use Airtable. I create a record for each project, link it to the client record from my Airtable CRM table, and add details like price, due date, estimated time to complete, project status, and more.

I use Quickbook’s Self-Employed product for bookkeeping, taxes, and invoicing. It allows me to do everything in one place. I’ll occasionally use Stripe for invoicing ad hoc, one-off client work.

And for banking, I use Mercury. No notes. It’s awesome.

📢 Marketing: Content Creation, Social Posting, & Newsletter

This category of work isn’t core to my business, but it’s focused on a more long-term interest of providing no-code and AI education content at scale. This is one of my most software-heavy categories of work.

I use Typefully for social post-scheduling on LinkedIn and X. I wouldn’t say this tool is 100% necessary—you can do everything you need to in the social platforms themselves—but this was more of an investment to keep me accountable for posting regularly.

I use a mix of Claude, ChatGPT, and Spiral to remix my long-form writing into social post drafts.

Beehiiv is my newsletter hosting and sending service (powering this very newsletter!)

I plan to expand into video creation on social channels like YouTube and TikTok and will be experimenting more with OpusClip for this use case. Looking forward to exploring this medium further!

Let me know if you want me to go deeper into any of the above use cases. Respond to this email or fill out one of the surveys below and I’ll do a deep dive into it in a future edition!

Set up an AI virtual assistant to triage your email

Lindy is an awesome tool to automate virtual assistant tasks at scale. Working with the tool has blown my mind as to what’s possible with AI workflow builders and agentic processes. In this workflow, you can set up an AI virtual assistant to triage and respond to your email (with full oversight by you!).

You can get started with the workflow via this Lindy template.

Steps to follow:

• Authorize your Email Account: Add an “Email Received” trigger with your email provider to the workflow. You can add a filter to this step so Lindy only actions on specific emails (e.g., Labels, Domains, etc.).
  

• Add a Knowledge Base: Optionally, you can provide Lindy with a knowledge base (your website, CRM, files, etc.) to have her respond to emails with this context.
  

• Customize Responses with a Prompt: Finally, you can provide Lindy with a high-level prompt on how to respond to emails, with elements like desired tone, writing style, email format, and more.

This process will allow Lindy to triage specific emails and craft tailored responses. Even better, you can add a human-in-the-loop step so that Lindy can provide you with a draft of the email for approval before sending it. Check out Lindy here.

Workflow automation news

100M Token Context Windows Magic recently introduced ultra-long context models capable of processing up to 100 million tokens during inference, enabling AI models to better handle vast amounts of code and documentation. This innovation has the potential to revolutionize software development by allowing more accurate code synthesis and feature creation.

Claude for Enterprise Anthropic introduced Claude for Enterprise, allowing organizations to securely collaborate with Claude without training on chats or files. It features a 500K context window, native GitHub integration, and enterprise-grade security, currently available in beta for early users.

The Key to Great AI Prompting? Show, Don’t Tell The key to great AI prompting is using examples to guide AI models, much like training humans. By providing a few-shot learning approach—offering a handful of examples—AI can perform tasks with higher accuracy and creativity, mimicking the power of human imitation to enhance results.

Workflow Tweet of the week

Ways To Connect

1. Ask a Workflow Question: Submit a workflow question, and I’ll answer it in a future edition or respond to you directly.

2. Get Featured: Are you automating personal or business workflows? If so, I’d love to feature you in The Workflow! Reach out with your workflow, automation tip, or related content.

3. Book a 1:1 Call: Grab time with me to discuss all things automation, whether specific automations for your business, AI and no-code tool recommendations, or whatever you’re looking for help with.

4. Work With My Agency: Do you work at an AI, no-code, or SaaS startup? Are you looking to better educate your users? Find out how Onboard can help put your user education on auto-pilot.

Thanks for reading!

Garrett from The Workflow

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