I Spend $8,215 Per Month On Software. Here’s Why.

It cost me $821.15 to operate my $500,000 a month digital writing business. And for proof, here is a screenshot from our monthly P&L showing every single piece of software that we use. However, I remember when I was just starting out, I was completely overwhelmed with all the different options out there: what's necessary, what's a waste, where to begin. So I'm going to make a video breaking down every single piece of software we currently use to run the business: what it does, why we use it, how much it costs, where it's used, alternatives we've considered, and most importantly, whether or not this is essential as a beginner. So let's get right into it.

Now, before we get any further, if you want this entire document with all the links to the software and the full breakdown to follow along with me, it will be the first link in the description above the fold. You can click it; there's no paywall, there's no email or anything like that; you can just get access to the document. All right, I'm going to organize this video into five different stacks or groupings of our software: marketing and sales funnels, course hosting, payments and banking, text content, video content, and operations. So breaking that down, you can see here's a quick summary of everything we're going to talk about: across marketing and sales, payment processing, text content, operations, and media production.

Starting with marketing and sales, our very first piece of software is ConvertKit, now known as Kit, but it was ConvertKit when we started using it. This is our entire email marketing system—uh, basically our CRM as well, although we use Airtable, which I'll talk about in a little bit. But basically, anytime we have any kind of communication via email with a customer, it is coming from ConvertKit. Now, why do we use this? It was the first choice we made back when we hadn't even generated our first $25,000 in revenue. It was by far the most scalable option of all the things out there, and to be honest, I was just kind of in the Twitter ecosystem, and that's what everyone was using that was operating a bigger business than I was, so I figured that's going to work for me. Uh, and at this point, we use it because we have so much equity built up in the system that trying to switch would be an absolute nightmare. So great business with ConvertKit; I can't even imagine the amount of pain it would take to switch to anything else, and it gets the job done for us.

Who on the team uses it primarily? Our marketing team, but anytime we have a customer communication—so right now, there's probably 50 emails being sent out across communication with some of our students, some email marketing, some newsletters, some abandoned cart sequences, some fulfillment sequences—whatever they are, they're all powered by ConvertKit. Now, how much does this cost? It scales up as you get more customers, but I believe we pay around $1,100 per month, and we have around 150,000 email subscribers. So definitely expensive, uh, but to be honest, it—I can't imagine running the business without it. Our automations, our segmentation, um, everything that helps us make money in any capacity is powered by ConvertKit. So yeah, there's some alternatives out there: HubSpot, GoHighLevel, Beehiiv, all that, but for what we do, ConvertKit is by far the best tool, and if you're a beginner, I highly recommend it if you plan on operating your business as an email-based business or email-based engine because of the automations that allows you to build, because of just all of the features that go into the iteration that comes with building any kind of digital business, whether you're talking to different people at different times or having some clients, some continued marketing—unrambling—but ConvertKit is by far the most important piece of software that we have, and we highly recommend it.

Next, we have Substack, which also sends emails, but a different type of email. So it hosts our personal newsletter for me and my co-founder and our Paid With AI newsletter. So we use this because it's the best software out there, in our opinion, for any kind of simple, free, educational information-based newsletter, whether free or paid, because it's got a very strong built-in referral engine. Substack Notes is definitely taking off, and we're seeing a lot of people consume there. We've upped our posting cadence to like two or three times per day there, and we're driving a ton of subscribers. ConvertKit is good if you're running a business where you see like an engine that's going to be marketing tons of different things to tons of different people based on wherever they're at in your ecosystem, but for a very simple—I send emails, I get people to subscribe, and that's either free or paid—there's nothing that beats Substack, in our opinion, just because of the ease and, like I said, the referral engine. So who uses it on our team? Like I said, me and Cole; we host our newsletter there, and Justin, who ghostwrites our Paid With AI newsletter, spends a lot of time in there. It is free for free newsletters and then 10% for our paid newsletter. Yeah, that's a little bit steep; we generated around uh, $400,000 per year right now on our paid Substack, Paid With AI, and that's about 40,000 or 40 grand a month, but we find that the network effects outweigh the 10%, and so we continue to pay. Like I said, ConvertKit is an alternative here, but no need for the unnecessary complexity that comes with uh, ConvertKit—not that it's complex, but you just don't need automations when you run just an educational newsletter. And then Beehiiv, which we don't really have that much experience with because Substack and ConvertKit get the job done for us.

All right, next we have Carrd, which hosts all of our standalone email opt-ins, like startwritingonline.com, premiumghostwritingblueprint.com, startwritingwithchat.com—like I could show you, but basically, go to any of those URLs, and I'll hyperlink it in the document here. And it's a one-page—all it does is collect emails and then redirect to some kind of redirect page and then sync with ConvertKit to start delivering the emails there. So rather than have, you know, a subdomain or like a /email from our primary domain, we buy individual standalone domains and host them on Carrd. It loads quickly; it allows us to just have one job, and it's extremely cheap. So all those reasons here: fastest, cheapest option. I think it's like $19 for the year, and anytime we need to spin up a new standalone webpage, whether that's for a webinar, whether that's for a new opt-in, whether that's, you know, any kind of asset hosting, we use Carrd. You could use things like Notion if you wanted to, but you can't put analytics there. You could use—I don't really know too many alternatives, but this gets the job done, extremely cheap, extremely scalable, and it's what we teach people inside our Premium Ghostwriting Academy to use for their clients, because every single dollar that we've generated over the last four years has originated in some way from someone opting into a Carrd landing page. So extremely, extremely highly recommended from us.

All right, next we have Webflow, which is a more advanced website builder. So all of our nicely produced multi-page blog-focused websites or, or CMS-focused—content management system, I think that is—starts with Webflow. So ship30430.com, premiumghostwritingacademy.com, and our personal websites; they're all built on Webflow because it is the best; it's the industry standard for like highly responsive, crisply designed web pages where you want some customization, some advanced functionality, and it allows us to host our blog content within that, so you can build a little domain authority, so we can rank for some SEO terms—not a big focus of ours, but definitely helps. Uh, we don't really do anything new here other than upload our newsletters to the website, so it's not like an active project, but if we were going to start a new business where we wanted a very clean landing page, we would find a Webflow developer because it's just fast, simple, because it gets a job done when you have a good web developer. I couldn't see myself trying to develop a website in there; it's definitely more complex than that, but we hire people to do that for us, and I think it's like $39 per month per website—pretty cheap overall relative to the amount of traffic that we drive to it—not really very many alternatives. You could use like Squarespace or something like that as a more basic option, but Webflow—we kind of strike the barbell of Carrd for really simple pages and then Webflow for more advanced pages. And like I said, this is not essential as a beginner; we did not have any kind of advanced website for the first year. I think we generated at least a million dollars just using a Carrd page—not necessary unless you are looking to really optimize what you're offering.

Next, we have Testimonial.to. This allows us to embed client testimonials right on our various landing pages. It's simple, seamless, beautiful design. I like the guy who—I can't remember his name, but he's very active on Twitter and just a super supportive guy, too, and it's beautiful. It allows us to just build an automation where we request a testimonial or some kind of positive feedback from our clients; they submit it on this page that links directly to the website, so it's always updating automatically anytime someone adds something new—just the date that they added it and just constant refreshes—social proof on our website. So we have, like I said, our success team has students fill it out and then automatically populates. I think it's uh, we spend—let me see—200-something bucks a month on this, but we also have it across like four different websites, so yeah, 240 bucks a month. I think it's, you like five websites or something like that, and then they should have a cheaper option as well, so I don't have the exact pricing there, but it's worth it because if it gets one additional person to purchase it, it pays for its entire year. And I can tell you verifiably that having social proof across your landing pages with real people's first and last name—because believe it or not, most people out there who are skeptical are going to Google the people that you put on your testimonial—so have first and last name on there, have them be real people, and it definitely goes a long way for us. The alternative—and we are looking into this right now—is Trustpilot. Uh, I don't really see that much upside other than it kind of has become a status symbol to have a Trustpilot verified with a lot of reviews on your website, but not a bottleneck for us right now; we definitely don't need it. Now, is this essential as a beginner? No, but as you get more social proof, you are going to want to display that, and I think Testimonial.to for like 20 or 30 bucks a month will be one of the highest ROI pieces of software you can have.

All right, next we have RightMessage, which allows us to deliver contextual, opted messaging and CTAs to website visitors. So basically, what this means is it syncs up with ConvertKit such that anytime someone visits our website, we're allowed to connect—or it allows us to connect the information we already have from them with the information that we deliver on a landing page or the website page. So for example, if someone has already opted in to our email list on one of our pages, we can show them a different next step in the funnel. So for example, if we sell our digital product and we have a lead magnet, and they've already downloaded the lead magnet, we might send them direct to either another lead magnet or like a behind-the-scenes sneak peek or something like that that is going to help them move closer to making a purchase decision. And we all know how frustrating it is—I guess it's not that frustrating—but if you go to a website where someone doesn't understand that you've already been there before, and you got to fill it out again or something like that, um, it just hurts conversion, and I know I'm less likely to take action on a website if I have to repeat myself. So we're trying to eliminate that with RightMessage. It also allows—say we do some surveying and segmentation on like if someone's already started to write online or not—if they have, we can change the headline of certain pages to better frame the offer we have uh, that is more congruent to their current situation. So this is all very advanced stuff; you do not, do not need this one as a beginner, but as we have over, you know, 10,000 visitors per month to our different websites and 50,000 email subscribers, we're able to gather a lot of data that allows us to make those incremental tweaks that go 10, 20, 30% bumps in conversion that end up being millions of dollars at the end of the year for us. So it's 169 bucks a month—worth every penny for us, but you do not need this as a beginner.

All right, next we have ManyChat, which I think is the newest piece of software on this entire list, and it is for Instagram DM automation. We've been running some DM funnels for our group coaching program and are getting something like 50 to 60 messages per day uh, from our retargeting DM ads, and managing that kind of flow in the Instagram app is just impossible. So we've used ManyChat; that allows us to do some automation on sending resources to people, segment people based on where they came from, uh, easily reply and kind of source who our hottest leads are that we should respond to—basically running our entire Instagram DM funnel from ManyChat, and it's super cheap; it's like $15 a month. So our setters are in there all day replying to messages as they come out, and I am thrilled with how that has been going so far. It's something we find very scalable; um, it's easy to onboard new setters with a ManyChat flow already built up, and we like it a lot. I don't know where these came from; I use ChatGPT to source some alternatives here, but no clue uh, any alternatives. This is 100% the industry standard. Is this essential for a beginner? No, even for a beginner in the DM funnel, we did not use this for the first, you know, 300 messages; we were bootstrapping it ourselves, but now we have a pretty good idea of what needs to be automated, what needs to be repeated constantly to save our setter some time, so now we use it, but highly recommend ManyChat if you are starting to build any kind of funnel on Instagram.

All right, next we have Typeform, which is our survey capture tool of choice for everything where we want information from our clients, our subscribers, our students—whatever you want to say—and anywhere where we need data, we use it. Why? Because it's by far the most user-friendly and highest-converting survey software out there. I think I've seen Hormozi talk a little bit about this, but if you're using any kind of software, you should go for the one with the highest conversion rates and ask them what they've done to test conversion rates, because a lot of don't. So we've used, personally, Google Forms versus Typeform, and Typeform is so much more user-friendly, easy to fill out, seamless, fast, integrates everywhere—that we've seen small bumps in conversion, nothing crazy, but Typeform definitely pays for itself in that front. So, so we use it for our application page; we use it for like one-on-one consulting waitlist for my business consulting; we use it for NPS survey and data gathering; if we're launching a new product, we'll send a Typeform out asking for information like what's your biggest question. It is our all-in-one hub where we link almost everything that comes into Typeform to Slack or Airtable that allows us to sort the data or see it happen in real time. So it's a little bit pricey; I think it's like $69 per month, but we get 5,000-plus survey responses, so I'm happy to pay for that. Everything else that we've tried has been a little bit clunkier, a little bit less good-looking; you can't brand it as well. I think JotForm, Google Form, Airtable Form—those all do work, but Typeform for us has been by far the best, and when you're using any kind of software like this, it's tempting to like look for alternatives to try to save a couple bucks; it's just not worth it. The amount of logistical complexity that comes with trying to switch a survey software is far, far outweighs the cost of paying for something a little bit more expensive. So yeah, if you're a beginner, you don't necessarily need Typeform, but we highly recommend it. You just need something to capture information; like if you're a beginner, you can just use Google Forms and and move it to a sheet, something like that, but have something to gather data, and as you get more advanced, in those small tweaks go a long way in terms of CRO—conversion rate optimization—Typeform is by far the best.

All right, turning down the list, next we have Calendly, which is our call scheduler for our sales team, success team, and any one-off internal meetings. Why we use it? It just works; it's the best one by far, and our opinion; we don't have any problems with it other than at the end of the month they need to fix their UI where it doesn't change the next month; that probably leads to some um, overall less conversions when the last day of the month's on Friday or something like that. But anyway, I'm nitpicking; if you know, you know on that front. It's used on our call booking page when someone fills out an application; in all of our student success automations where the next step for them is to book a call with their success coach uh, for one-on-one feedback; that's all automated, and we have the success coaches put their own hours in that allows us to easily schedule all of the calls that happen for our Premium Ghostwriting Academy—happen via Calendly. The integrations with Slack, with Airtable, with all of our other software are top-of-the-line, and that's why we use it. Now, it's a little bit pricey; it's like $19 per seat, but it's just worth it—like the amount of time this saves us. Yeah, if you—if you look like at our overall software cost, we do have a handful of things that are pretty expensive—Calendly; we spend 340 bucks a month; we have 20-plus people who use Calendly—but the amount of time that it saves us and the ease that comes with that far outweigh the cost of it. So highly recommend Calendly. I do think there are some alternatives like Acuity Scheduling, I think is one of them, OnceHub—those do have lead routing which Calendly lacks, and we're trying to do a better job um, linking our best leads to our best closers. I think Acuity Scheduling does the same thing, but until that is a verifiable bottleneck in our business, we are not going to overhaul any kind of software that is so integral to how we make money as a business. So Calendly gets the job done for us, and we really like it. I do believe this is essential as a beginner for anything that books sales calls or any kind of feedback calls; you need a seamless call scheduler, otherwise you're going to be wasting a ton of time in uh, Google Calendar trying to bounce meetings back and forth; it just does not work as well. So highly recommend Calendly.

All right, next we have Namecheap—very simple; we use it to buy domains. You could use GoDaddy, you could use Hover, anything else that lets you buy domains, but Namecheap is like three clicks, and we have a new domain. And as someone who—as a business, we are constantly spinning up new landing pages, new offers, things like that; we want to be able to own the premium-quality domain, and Namecheap does that for like 10 to 15 bucks per year. They don't try to upsell you stuff; there's no annoying—like I don't know, GoDaddy always has more features than we end up using. So namecheap.com is where we go to buy any kind of .com domain, and we probably spend—like just last month, I think we spent like 100 bucks renewing; we probably have 10 to 15 domains at this point that all host those single uh, easy opt-in Carrd pages. So anytime we need to buy something new, we go to Namecheap.

All right, so that wraps up our email marketing and our marketing automations and our sales funnels; that's the entire software tech stack that powers that entire arm of the business, which is very important because that is how we generate money. Now, in terms of how we collect that money and where we host the course material and educational material that we send people to or we sell to people, that's this section. So first, we have Thinkific. Thinkific is our go-to platform for all of our courses and communities. I believe we have six or seven there right now. Beautiful business because we're paying them like 10 grand a year to host all our content, which is great for them. Uh, but why we use this? There's a lot of alternatives out there: Circle, Mighty Networks, Teachable. Thinkific has the best interface, and it just works. And if you go to these other ones and you click around, you'll see the speed is just worse, and overall, it's just—it's fast, and I like how fast it is; I like how simple it is. Sam, he's a great designer, and I'm extremely bullish on them over the next like 24 to 48 months, with Hormozi going all in on them; I just think those two minds together are going to create a really good uh, community-first, student-first experience while also prioritizing the people who are using it to make money. So I think they are shipping very quickly. Uh, I spend a lot of time in Thinkific on communities outside of the ones I'm actually running—as a consumer—and that was actually how we started using Thinkific was we were joining some other communities and masterminds where we just—that we kept going back because of how simple the user interface was; the content doesn't get lost; it just works. And so we started to build our own stuff there. We were using Circle before; I still think Circle does a great job, but Thinkific is just faster, and that is why we use it. So is this beginner—essential as a beginner? No, but if you're going to host a course of some kind, I think for $99 a month, getting access to the Thinkific games or Thinkific Community—whatever Hormozi does on that front—probably has a lot of educational material that is worth it as well. So I do highly, highly recommend Thinkific if you're starting to host any kind of a course or community; we recommend Thinkific as the number one.

All right, next we have SamCart, which is our payment processor and product creation hosting service, basically. And so yeah, you can do a lot of this in Thinkific, but in terms of selling one-off digital products and checkout pages, we think SamCart is by far the best: simple, it's fast, you can embed the checkout on a bunch of different websites, and it just works. Again, a lot of the software—you're seeing a theme here—it's like there's 50 alternatives, but if you start using one and it works, avoid the shiny object of trying to change it because that does not make you more money; it just wastes your time. So SamCart, for 300 bucks a month, processes like six to seven hundred thousand dollars per month for us; it's optimized; it's got easy checkout pages; you can spin up like lightweight landing page checkout pages that are hybrids between like really nicely designed ones and ones that just have a Stripe link, so that's a good middle ground for us, and you don't need this as a beginner; you could just use—you can just use Stripe and embed Stripe on like a Carrd page or something like that. But once you're spinning up multiple products and you want to be able to easily segment the people who purchased—this is another thing I didn't include here—but SamCart uh, integrates it very well with ConvertKit, and I think you can connect SamCart and Zapier or Zap SamCart and Thinkific via Zapier, which we'll talk about in a second. And so all of our payments end up talking to each other to unlock certain material or send certain automations, and SamCart has a really good API that allows us to connect them. So highly, highly recommend SamCart.

All right, next we have Stripe. I'm going to spend about 11 seconds on Stripe; it's by far the best to handle all payments. I've seen some people say like Stripe will shut you down, or…

You should stay off Stripe if you're doing any kind of program. We've processed over $15 million across 12 different types of products on Stripe and never had a single problem with it. So maybe it's just the type of businesses that other people are running. Uh, can't speak to that one, but for 3% per transaction, it's by far the best for us. You could use PayPal or Square, but I've seen nothing but like frustration from other people who try to use these, and Stripe just gets the job done. And it's the single processor. On top of that, with Zapier, you can connect a lot of different pieces. As new payments come in, we route all of our payments to a table, which I'll talk about in a second, that allows us to easily look at different trends and overall day-to-day calculations. Because it just—that's the reason Stripe is the business that it is—is because it connects with everything. So highly, highly recommend Stripe. Can't recommend anything else on that front. And yes, this is essential as a beginner because you need a way to collect money.

All right, moving on to banking. By far the best mobile bank out there for any kind of digital business is Mercury. I can't really explain it other than once you start using it, you realize that all the little details that are frustrating trying to use something like Chase or these legacy banks are just not—they're—they're thoughtfully solved with Mercury. Like one-click copying of your credit card or easily, like, five clicks away from transferring money between accounts in Mercury or four accounts to, uh, like your personal bank account. It just works. The mobile app's great, the charts are great. I can spin up a new card if I need, like, a—to let's say a bunch of people on our team are going to go book flights for a mastermind. I can make a new digital card, send them that, and understand that that's going to host all of the payments that come in from our, uh, offsite. And then when I want to do attribution and analysis of how much we ended up spending, I have it all in one place, on one card. Little things like that go a long way, especially as operations start to get a little bit more complex, and our finance team loves it. It integrates well with all of our other tools and cannot recommend Mercury high enough. Um, I don't know any alternatives because this is the first one we use, but I guess ChatGPT said Brex is one. I'm not even going to go into those. You will not regret using Mercury. I—they've got to have like a 100 NPS score just given how much I rave about the product. So highly recommend them as well.

Next, for bookkeeping, we use Better Bookkeeping, which I believe—believe is—it's just really a piece of software, but they also do our taxes. They have a really good interface for managing our expenses. It integrates with Mercury and Stripe and all of our different tools. And having the same bookkeeper as your accountant as your tax advisor just goes such a long way in streamlining things towards the end of the year. So I think it's $1,000 a month. I believe—uh, I'm just going to add that in right now—$1,000 per month gets your job done. It's critical for our finance controller to see all of our expenses in one place, kind of sort them, categorize them, see them come in in real time. Uh, I think QuickBooks and things like that do that as well, but for us, uh, having that person who's a bookkeeper as well as our tax advisor means let's just use their software; gets the job done. And Mitchell Baldridge, who's on Twitter, runs Better Bookkeeping. Highly, highly, highly recommend. Tell him I sent you if you go his way, but just good stuff across the board. And today's the 11th of March, recording this; taxes are coming up, and I just feel far less stressed than I have in the past before we started using them. Having a good bookkeeper and accountant is worth every single penny, and so highly recommend having someone—uh, the earlier you start working with bookkeepers as you begin to scale up, you're going to save yourself a lot of headache in the future. So highly recommend getting some bookkeeper of some kind, and Better Bookkeeping works for us.

All right, so that wraps up the finance side. We've done marketing and sales; we've done finance and course hosting. Now we're on to the nitty-gritty operations with Zendesk. Zendesk powers our entire customer support email system. So I do not personally manage our customer support; that is Jamie from our team. So she—if we needed to do a deep dive on this, I'm sure she could show you a bunch of complex systems. Basically, every email that comes in you are able to handle and answer right there in Zendesk without any kind of Gmail-like usage, and it's just a far better user experience. I believe it's like $139 a month, and here was my entire process for finding this: I Googled "best customer support email software," and this was like a year and a half ago. Found Zendesk; we've been using it ever since. So I do not know any alternatives other than that. This works; gets the job done. It allows you to—the biggest thing with customer support, and this is a golden nugget here, it's like you just want—when someone sends an email, you want some email sent back within two minutes, even if it's not solving their problem, just saying that we've received your request and then we are actively working to solve it. So it allows you to set up like different rules to respond based on kind of some kind of a or templated response that comes in. Don't really know how it works. I know that our customer service does a great job, and we have a high overall satisfaction rating because you can survey people as well, and Zendesk is what powers that. So you don't need this as a beginner; you can just use your Gmail. But we now have hundreds and hundreds of emails coming in from our various newsletters and products and password resets and all that kind of stuff. So we highly recommend this—as a beginner, no, we highly recommend having something—and as you scale up, you will definitely want this.

All right, moving on to the single most important piece of software in our entire business: it is Airtable. It's our CRM. We track payments there; we track all of our data there. It's Google Sheets on steroids with integrations and automation. I think—I don't know how many records we have, but it's every single piece of data that any kind of customer has, any kind of email subscriber, any kind of book call, any kind of data we're tracking across a bunch of different funnels; we use it, and we track it in Airtable. It's by far the best piece of software that we have. I don't—know how to describe the things we have in there other than quite literally everything is in there, and we've built our own version of HubSpot or Close or GoHighLevel, some of these other CRMs, because since we've scaled up, we just bootstrap these things in Airtable rather than relying on some pre-made thing. So maybe it's hindering us in some way, but I just don't see how—um, it's worth it for us to change CRMs at this point. But if I showed you our bases, like we have 50,000 records from every single email subscriber, and this integrates very nicely with ConvertKit such that we can pass data between the two. As a subscriber takes this next step, we can sync with our Airtable record. When payments come in, we're able to tag them with the subscribers, so we can see, like, by traffic source where the most number of payments come in. Just does a lot of things for us. And if you haven't built something in Airtable, I just recommend going and taking some beginner courses on it on YouTube or something like that, because it will go a long way if you have the ability to make basic automations, um, integrate with Zapier, things like that. Airtable powers quite literally everything we do. We pay over $1,100 per month for it because it charges based on the number of records and the number of admins that have it. So we probably could get this down if we went and deleted some old records that we don't need or like migrated it. It's worth it for us, and I just can't describe how many things we use it for. Anytime we need to track data of something new, new Airtable base, add in the data. I love Airtable; I'm just an Airtable freak, and I—it's our—my favorite piece of software on this entire list. So highly, highly recommend it. Yeah, there's alternatives you could use, but if you are going to start tracking data of some kind, advance or evolve from Google Sheets, right? You don't need to stay in Google Sheets. You're not going to be able to do the type of integration, the type of—unless you're just an absolute wizard with Sheets, you could stay in it, but I highly recommend just building some basic Airtable bases that allow you to keep your customer and client data in one place. Our success team uses it; marketing, sales; every part of our business is built on Airtable in some way. So I should have put this as the first piece of software in this entire video. If you made it this far, you now know that this is by far the most important piece we have—um, second maybe to—no, I'm saying this is number one. So highly recommend getting up and running with Airtable; it's the best.

All right, next we have Zoom. Don't need to spend a lot of time on this one. Do not use Google Meet if you run any kind of call funnel. Google Meet is just—I don't know, it's annoying; people don't think it's a real link. Zoom gets the job done; the recordings are great; it works; integrates with everything I need to use; automates. Not going to overthink this one. Yeah, maybe I could save like a couple hundred bucks a month, but again, when something works, do not try to save a little bit of money, um, because of the additional complexity that it will end up creating, right? So if I look up at Zoom here, I think we spend $591 per month on Zoom, and maybe that's a little bit high—that is a little bit high—but it gets the job done, and I don't think that the alternative would be worth it of trying to get into, um, Google Meet, which I just don't think works that well. So highly, highly, highly recommend Zoom; it's by far the industry standard.

Next we have PandaDoc. This is definitely a niche, uh, piece of software, but we have contracts and agreements for both our employees—as our team has grown—and for our clients in our premium ghostwriting academy. It's by far the best one. Uh, this is very cheap; we do not spend a lot of money on this one because I believe they just charge you per seat, not per contract. Um, there's tons of alternatives: DocuSign, HelloSign, NoSign, all that. PandaDoc integrates with Zapier and SamCart and all of our other payment systems to make sure that right when someone joins, they're sent a contract; they don't unlock things until that contract is signed. So we have zaps that send the contract and then zaps that unlock material when someone signs it, and I don't know that you can do that with all the other ones. So obviously you don't need this unless you're handling a ton of contract volume, but PandaDoc has worked exceptionally well for us.

All right, another niche piece of software here with AdEvent. So basically, if you host any kind of community, uh, and you want them to have all of the meetings and events and group calls and one-on-one calls and stuff like that in one calendar that they can seamlessly add with one click, uh, that doesn't add the event to their real calendar, but it just adds it as something that they can toggle on and off. We found that a lot of people we work with enjoy having that rather than just like a mass invitation that they've got to go like accept and decline and things like that. I know personally I hate when I get a ton of invites to things that I know I'm not going to attend. I'd rather go in and sort for the events that I want to go to, and that's what AdEvent does. It costs, uh, quite a bit actually, $129 bucks a month, relative to what it does, but because we have 1,400 people that are subscribed to this calendar, it ends up being a little bit more expensive. So we like this one. I know that it's not necessary for anyone as a beginner; you can just send Google invites until you have a couple hundred people where that becomes unscalable. Um, that's when I would go with AdEvent, but I think Skool might have some kind of integration here, uh, or if not, they're working on it that might replace AdEvent for us because we have all of our activities hosted in Skool. But for now, because we want everyone to have easy access for all the events that we are hosting on any day, week, or month, we use AdEvent. We send them the link to it right when they book, uh, or join one of our programs or join one of our communities, that way they have all those events already added. Highly recommend this as you begin to scale up any kind of community.

All right, next we have Notion, which powers our internal team wiki. So all SOPs and meeting notes and our video content pipeline and our content management systems for text and video, it all happens in Notion. We take notes in there; I love it. I do think it can easily become overly complex if you spend all day in there trying to assemble the perfect dashboard; it is a mess when you go in hours. But again, it's not a bottleneck, so we're not going to waste time trying to fix it. Everyone on the team is part of our Notion teams, so it's $10 per user per month. So we do spend quite a bit of money there, but the amount of time that it saves us by having all things streamlined in one place—again, our Notion system is not optimized; we do not waste time there; it could be 100 times better—but for what it does in terms of organizing our team projects, organizing our newsletters, it's where things are written; it's where we brainstorm all of our course material, allowing us to leave comments inline without having to, like, make a new Google Doc and share the permissions and things like that; that becomes a little bit clunky over time. Notion is where most of that magic happens; it's got the best interface. I haven't really used any of their AI features, but I do think that as we start to just do more in Notion, we will use that more and more. So again, my—my word of caution with Notion: don't turn it into a project in itself to go build this massive dashboard; use it as necessary. You don't really need it as a beginner; you can use Google Docs, especially if you don't have a team. But as you want more kind of cross-team collaboration and easy, uh, permission sharing and things like that, Notion is definitely the way to go. Aside from Notion, we use G Suite for all of our team emails, and we also use Google Sheets for some things where we want to be able to track, uh, like a little bit more custom of an interface, uh, for data tracking and analysis that we can't put right in Airtable. But for the most part, Google's G Suite is just used for—I'm using Google Docs to make this video only because it looks better, uh, with the white background than Notion does, and for filming Loom, I like to have it like this. But I—I just quite literally make a new document and paste it in here after writing it in Notes or Apple Notes or Notion. So I know I didn't say that I use Google Suite for Google Docs, but occasionally I'll use that, but everyone uses it for email. It's $24 per user per month. We don't think there are any alternatives that get the job done quite as well in terms of security, flexibility, all of that. We use Google Sheets for a few things; I use Google Docs for a few things, but—and I guess I should say we use Google Drive; I didn't put that in here—but now as I write this or film this, I realized Google Drive is a big part of our video cadence. So as we talk media, you'll see where that integrates. But G Suite, not too expensive; I think it's like $10 a month as a beginner, too. We use a little bit more storage and have some other advanced security features; I think they give us $24 per month. But the end of the day, Google, Zoom, Stripe, all these softwares that I'm sharing, it's just like—just use them; they're the industry standard; they're the best for a reason. Don't try to save a couple bucks trying to do anything else; use Gmail.

All right, moving on to Zapier. This is the digital glue. I really think they should be branding themselves as digital glue because that's exactly what they do. They basically patch together the 20 pieces of software that I've already talked about here. Uh, they do a great job creating APIs and interfaces and connection points between things you didn't think you needed until you see that there's the option to, and it just streamlines it. So we probably have five-plus full-time administrative assistants' worth of zaps and work being done by Zapier. And so for $800 a month, or whatever we end up paying for like 100,000 tasks, it is by far the best. There's some options like Make, and I don't know the other name; Zapier—we are—they have their—their trenches and hooks in us as a business, so we will never ever cancel from them. If Zapier ever went down, we do have significant software risk given how much we use them. But highly recommend it, and it's not that you need to have—when I put this out there, people are like, "How—what do you do with 100,000 tasks?" Like, we have so many different small things that we built one at a time. We did not—believe it or not—jump from zero tasks to 100,000 tasks in a month. Uh, that's taking four or five years to get there. So don't look at this and think I'm not automating enough until you do something manually yourself, until you do something so well that you can easily program a robot to do it. You don't need to think about Zapier, but as you start to take on more operational complexity, more clients, more students, more content, more platforms, things like that, Zapier does a great job connecting all those tools. So we highly recommend it.

All right, Slack is up there with Stripe and Mercury and Zoom and G Suite; is you just need it. Uh, we do all of our work in Slack. It does become a little bit distracting, and I need to do a better job filtering out my, uh, like obsession with Slack inbox zero, uh, but we don't really send any emails internally; it all happens in Slack. We use tons of zaps to pipe in information in real time. So anytime sales come through, anytime a student survey comes through, anytime a sales call comes through, anytime an application comes through, it all goes to a specific channel in Slack that allows us to consolidate communication. We don't like to send external links in Slack; we like to just say, "Keep the communication there; copy-paste the data; copy-paste screenshots," because there's friction when you have to leave Slack. So we really like just keeping all communication right in there. So the number of channels we have zapping in information allows us to operate the entire business from Slack without having to go to all these external tools. So like Slack + Zapier allows us to just funnel all the information to make decisions and to react to things in real time. And it's also where culture happens when you have a remote team. And so we do a good job reinforcing things like our core values with emojis; we have channels for like wins and inside jokes, informal chats, things like that. Uh, so we highly recommend having Slack as you start any kind of journey. I remember when Ship30 was just starting, I had a solo Slack channel where I was just like reminding myself a little information that I wanted to keep, and I had like this running chat log of ideas. And then as the team started to grow, um, we obviously have grown that now to over 30 people. So we pay $15 per user per month; Slack is rather expensive on that front. But again, some of these things—like we have $88,000 in software expenses—the—if we wanted to spend three months trying to pair that down to maybe $4,000 versus just going to try and make—going to try and make—make $4,000 more per month, one of those is going to be a lot easier than the other, and one has infinite upside while cutting expenses has a fixed amount of upside and the additional headache probably hurts our revenue in the long run. So we pay for things that allow us to move fast with efficiency, with speed, and make crisp decisions in one place, and that's what Slack does for us.

All right, moving on to Loom, which I'm using right now, and hopefully this is still recording as I say this out loud, otherwise I'd be giving Loom a lot of credit before it ends up screwing me. But—and that has happened before, and that's why I say that out loud. So anyway, Loom is where we create any kind of SOPs and documentation, any kind of, like, status updates we do via Loom, any kind of, "Hey, I want to document the steps I'm taking," I'm going to start with a Loom recording. Uh, any kind of course material that we walk through, uh, some kind of document, we'll use Loom. And like I'm doing with this YouTube video, we will just use Loom. We have this "always be Looming" mindset, which is anytime you're recording something or you're doing something that is repetitive that you could even automate, use AI, use a VA, something like that, you need to be Looming your process, and then we can go and document it from there, and it just saves time. Anytime I want to just share a bunch of information, I'll pop open Loom and just talk and send it out, um, and show charts and words and things like that. So I find that the YouTube videos that I consume the most are these Loom-style, just clean talking head talking through a Google Doc, giving actionable information and not flashy edits. So we also use Loom for all of our YouTube. It's like $19 a month. So if I scroll up—damn, this document's long—Loom, $193. So we have like 10 people, maybe 15, 12, I don't know; don't do public math—quite a few people use Loom, and it goes a long way for us. So highly, highly, highly recommend Loom. I think one alternative is Teachable, but again, it's not broken, so we're not going to try to fix it. If you are a beginner, use Loom for your course material, for updating your community, for documenting things that you're eventually going to hire. The earlier you can start documenting anything that you repeat, the more time you're going to save in the long run, and Loom is a perfect place to start with that.

Getting into the home stretch here, this is our text stack for all of our written content, starting with Apple Notes. This is where I do all my writing; it's just me that uses it. I'm pretty sure—I think a lot of our team uses Notion, but I love writing in Apple Notes. It syncs across all my devices instantly; there's no distraction; there's no shiny object or trying to build this complicated dashboard or database or whatever. I pop open an Apple Note; I do my writing; I get out; I post it to different platforms; I send it to where it needs to go. This entire document I wrote as an Apple Note before transferring it to Google Docs. It's the best; don't fall for the shiny object syndrome of all the other AI note-takers and things like that. Blank page, double espresso, 6:00 a.m. in the morning, I crack open Apple Notes and I get my writing done, and that is my favorite place to write. If you find that you're wasting time or productively procrastinating trying to build the perfect setup on some other app, try just using Apple Notes, getting your thoughts out, and you'll probably end up putting out more content. Uh, we do use Notion for the actual aggregation of things, but everything starts for me in Apple Notes. Next we have Brain.fm; Brain.fm—

Is my deep work music of choice. I had it this morning as I put together this entire document for about two hours. Uh, just if you find yourself getting easily distracted, going on Spotify, and then you end up scrolling, I have a very simple setup on my phone. I click one button; it starts a new Brain.FM 90-minute deep work session. I throw my phone away, put headphones on, and I get to work. And it's something about the science I couldn't really tell you, but it works for me in terms of I immediately feel a little bit more focused. Maybe it's a placebo effect, but having that ritual of Brain.FM goes on, I start writing; that goes a long way for me. And it's pretty cheap; it's like six bucks or seven bucks a month or something like that.

All right, next we have TypeShare. Full disclosure: I am an owner of TypeShare, so I'm obviously going to talk about it because we do use it for all of our long-form posting, carousels, and atomic essays. It's got templates, it's got cross-posting to multiple platforms, it's got data, it's got analytics. We think it's beautiful; we personally love it. It's only 20 bucks a month, and it allows me to post long-form stuff on LinkedIn, on X, and Medium, and other platforms. I think Threads is currently in the works right now, trying to get Substack notes up and running there. But anything that you need to put out written content on the internet, we use TypeShare for it because it's got templates that let you get started faster. Uh, it sources—I store most of my writing ideas in there, or my team does, before posting on other platforms. So not essential as a beginner; you can post manually to all the different platforms. But as you start to write more, as you start to want to mix up the format of things, if you have a long-form post you want to turn into a carousel or an AI essay, being able to do that all in one spot is my shameless plug for TypeShare that I do own, but it is an integral part of me and my team's personal writing process, so I wanted to share it here.

Now, the only part of TypeShare that is not up to standard with HypeFury is posting individual tweets and LinkedIn posts that do not have any media. So we use HypeFury for anything and on Instagram—not really on Instagram as much—but any type of time-based tweet scheduling, HypeFury has it. It was the tool that I started before I built TypeShare, before I really was writing consistently. I was using HypeFury to schedule out my tweets. It's ingrained in my brain; I know how the system works, I know like the little ins and outs of it, and our team now uses it to schedule out our tweets. So eventually we do see ourselves replacing HypeFury with some of the features in TypeShare, but like I said, if it's not broken, don't fix it. And even though we have our own software, we do want to use the one that works the best, because HypeFury allows us to do that. Um, it's got some advanced features like auto-plugs and countdown timers and like, uh, time-based thread posting—kind of more advanced—but we love HypeFury for that, and we recommend any beginner that's writing specifically short-form content; they want to be able to schedule it out. HypeFury is by far the best for that one.

Now, in terms of AI writing tools, we use ChatGPT for far more than just writing, but any kind of synthesizing and organizing of ideas, brainstorming content ideas, streamlining internal workflows, uh, doing things like taking a sales call transcript and analyzing what could have gone better, building prompts that allow us to do things like that and replace a bunch of manual work; that's what we use ChatGPT for. I could make an entire video on the 50 different places we use ChatGPT in our workflow, but maybe I'll do that. Leave a comment if you'd like to see that. It does replace Google for me in that anytime I need to find an answer to something, I don't go to Google anymore; I just ChatGPT it, and it's overall the best AI tool for us. So every single person on the team uses it; I think almost everyone has ChatGPT Pro either personally or within the business. Uh, it saves us a lot of time. I like it for like a sparring partner when I'm brainstorming a new idea and I want to be able to get feedback on my thinking; that's probably the number one place I use it. In terms of alternatives, Claude is the best for writing copy, uh, like actual words that you intend on publishing somewhere; it's just got like more taste and better voice and things like that. You can train it on voices better using the project feature, but I don't do too much actual writing, um, in terms of output with chat with AI. Instead, I use it more for organizing things, and we talk about how to do that in our Write with AI newsletter. So that's what ChatGPT does. It's definitely essential as a beginner because you're going to immediately start to save time and build up workflows that potentially replace employees over the long term, um, so you can stay lean, tight operations, all that good stuff. So if you're not using AI, highly recommend getting that up and running.

All right, last but not least, we have our media production. This is all video, and full transparency: I'm not that involved in the more advanced side of our video and Instagram reel and YouTube posting, so I'm not going to talk in depth about a lot of these, but I wanted to make sure that you saw all of these options out there if you were starting in the media production game. As I take YouTube more seriously, I will see myself probably deeper in this, but for now, this is the main, um, overall pieces of software when I just went and looked at our system of like which one of these are spent on video. These are there. So starting with Canva, we use Canva for all one-off images, ebook mockups. We have a design agency who builds a lot of things in Canva templates and sends them to us. It's easy to use; anyone can use it. It's cheap; it's like 12 bucks a month. There are some alternatives out there like Figma and Photoshop and things like that, but as far as I know, all of our small one-off assets and designs and adding caption—or not captions, but like, uh, banners to advertisements or to some of our content—we use Canva. And I know personally anytime I need to spin up a design, I just jump right into Canva, and it's really easy.

Podcast hosting: If you don't listen to Espresso Hour, which is the podcast I host with my co-founder, talking about all the things going on in the business business world, we use Riverside. It's seamless; we both hop in there, uh, hit record, the it—it I think it records locally and then uploads all of it, and then we send the file to our video editing team. They're able to slice and dice it with multiple angles of having us both on the screen at the same time, and then only one of us. I think it's got transcript and some advanced things and allows us to record in 4K online, which goes a long way for us in terms of quality. So 15 bucks a month, very cheap, easy to bring on guests on here too, uh, if we ever want to do like a a third person joining us. And so Riverside, it's the first one I ever used, and we use it.

Building on that, for podcast distribution, we use Transistor. Again, I don't really know any alternatives or things like that, but it's cheap, allows us to upload one audio file; you sync your podcast to all the Apple Podcast and Zencastr and Google Podcast and all these other places that I didn't even know existed and had to be uploaded individually. It sends them all out there with one upload on your end and saves us like at least an hour per week for 19 bucks a month. So unless you have a podcast, this is not necessary, but if you're looking for a podcast hosting solution, uh, highly recommend Transistor.

Moving on to video, we use Frame.io for quick, rapid feedback on videos that are being made in real time. So, for example, as I upload this Loom, uh, our video editing team will download it, add in the edits, and when they make the first V1, for some reason I think it's faster to upload via Frame, or you can like lower the quality, just just for like cut-based feedback or like structure feedback or graphic feedback, um, rather than having to upload and download the entire giant video. Frame allows you to do it quickly. I don't know other than that what it's used for, but I know that I'll, after uploading this one, spend a good bit of time in Frame just kind of reviewing the flow of the video, and that saves us quite a bit of time. So I don't know any alternatives here, uh, but if you are a beginner in the video world, I think this will save you a lot of time.

And then last but not least, we have Captions. Captions allows us to auto-generate—automatically generate captions on my Instagram reels. So our Instagram, uh, kind of lead takes our videos from different podcasts, clips them out, and then quickly adds captions to them. Seems like a great thing for AI to do, so I'm glad we use it, and it's only like 10 bucks a month. So I I can imagine that saves a ton a ton of time, but I didn't know this existed until I like I thought we were doing this manually until I checked our software bill. I was like, what's that one? And they're like, oh yeah, that's how we add captions. So 10 bucks a month saves our editing team a ton of time and highly highly highly recommend it, cuz it it also looks great too.

All right, that wraps it up—the entire $821.15 software expense list to operate this $500,000 per month business. I think we talked about like 90% of the ones on here. Anything else that we didn't talk about, we probably stopped using, and I just haven't canceled yet because it wasn't like an integral part of our workflow, but that's all we got. If you have any questions, the doc that I just talked through here with links to everything that I talked about will be the first link in the description. Toss a like, toss a comment, and I got a bunch of other videos talking about my digital writing businesses, so be sure to watch those, and I'll see you in the next one. Peace.