My Tech Stack
Over the years of running Responsive Conference, I've had a lot of sponsors promoting their work: HR tech software, organizational design consultants, and global companies burnishing their brand.
One of the difficulties, though, is that I am not a buyer of people promoting their work at Responsive Conference. I’m not in HR or Talent at a fast-growing company. I’m not middle management at a Fortune 500 company looking to change our organizational operating system.
To vet our sponsors, I’ve had to rely on other people who do buy those products.
With the Snafu Conference, this dynamic has changed. Snafu is for founders, operators, and transitioning professionals, all of which I’ve been.
Everyone in these roles needs a video platform, a task management software, a note-taking system, and all of the rest of the tools of daily business.
As we are heading into the final stretch before the Snafu conference, I thought I’d outline my favorite tools.
A Few Criteria:
- I want to spend as little money as possible. Most of the options below have free options, which I use wherever possible.
- I want software that is simple to use – not elaborate set-up required.
- My software should save me time and effort. None of the “This will help once you learn how to use it – which will take months” onboarding.
Google Workspace
Google Workspace is the foundation of my work: Email, Google Documents, Sheets, and Calendar. If I were to give a new entrepreneur one tool to start with, it would be to start with Google.
Apple Notes
Probably the most unexpected tool in my tech stack is Apple Notes. I used to be a die-hard fan of Evernote; I used it for more than a decade. I've also worked in Notion and a dozen other note-taking tools.
When I'm tracking work, I use Asana for task management and Google Docs for documents, but every once in a while I want to just remind myself of something or write out a new idea. Apple Notes is where I write.
It's simple, hassle-free, and syncs across my Apple devices.
Sometimes the simple things are the best.
Slack
After Google Suite, the second tool that I would set up for a new company that has more than two employees is Slack. I think there's a lot of utility in having a platform that is not email through which to communicate with team members.
Unlike some of the more sophisticated tools that we will talk about next, Slack is about as easy a software to use at a basic level as any.
Pro tip: turn off all notifications across devices.
Zoom
Zoom is the obvious winner when it comes to digital meetings.
It's gotten to the point now where, if somebody sends me a Google Meet link, I roll my eyes. And if someone sends a Teams meeting, I know they're part of an enterprise company.
I get a lot of praise for the simple trick of playing a video in my Zoom waiting room. This can easily be done with any video you have available. Here's the video that plays in the Zander Media waiting room. Setting up a photo or video in your Zoom waiting room will take you about 5 minutes. Here are directions.
I just wish Zoom would stop trying to expand their offerings with a dozen bells and whistles.
I've been making lists on paper since reading David Allen's seminal book Getting Things Done in 2008. I've since tried a lot of to-do lists and software for project management: Trello, Things, Basecamp, Monday.com, and others.
When it comes to collaborating with a team, the best tool I've found is Asana – which can be as simple as a listing To-Do list, and as sophisticated as a full suite team collaboration software.
Every few years I switch to a new independent calendar system. I want to love Google Calendar since I'm already within the Google Workplace, but it doesn't have a few of the automations and Mac-native syncing that I need.
I started using Cron in 2024, which was a beautiful, independent calendar app. Cron was acquired by Notion, so I’m currently using Notion Calendar. Fortunately, it hasn't been changed too much and remains a stand-alone application that you do not need a paid Notion account in order to use.
It turns out that building a profitable calendar application is just too damn difficult, I guess? But meanwhile, I like that my Notion Calendar works seamlessly across devices and feels good to use on mobile, which Google Calendar doesn’t.
I started using Calendly as my default way to schedule meetings when the company had fewer than a dozen employees and I could just call someone when something didn't work.
Now the company has 500 employees, but unlike so many software companies, the app remains simple to use and does everything I need without overcomplicating my workflow.
I hear good things about Cal.com, but Calendly works, so I've never seen cause to switch.
Over the years, I've worked extensively in Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zoho, and dabbled in a handful of other CRMs. I've helped several clients implement HubSpot within their own organizations to do sophisticated inbound marketing.
Every business needs a CRM: a single place where you can see everyone you’ve been in touch with.
For the last two years, I've paid $15/month to use HubSpot as a glorified Rolodex just to keep track of contacts.
This was both expensive and inefficient, so in October 2025, I went looking for a new CRM. I tried 8, including all the usual suspects, and several new “AI-enabled” CRMs that have come along more recently. None worked well.
I want to:
- Track everyone I’m in touch with by email, Zoom, LinkedIn message, or otherwise.
- Associate those contacts with a specific company, where relevant
- Ideally, add those contacts to a deal flow, so I can see Zander Media client projects in one place
Early this year, I stumbled across Clarify.ai, a new CRM that automatically keeps track of contacts, summarizes communication history in advance of meetings, and suggests potential deals.
It does a lot of things automatically that with HubSpot I had to do manually: importing contacts from Gmail, associating contacts with companies, deal flow. And it has tiers based on usage that allow me to use it free (just tracking contacts) or paid (summarizing meetings, task management, and more).
I like Clarify enough that – not only have I recommended it to dozens of entrepreneurs I know – but I reached out to the team and have confirmed their CEO, Patrick to speak at Snafu!
I love the process of writing and editing a single sentence a dozen times to get the meaning and texture of the words just right. And when I'm going through a few hundred emails or dashing off a quick note to a colleague on Slack, it's sometimes nice not to have to put my fingers to the keyboard.
I've been trying out dictation software since the 1990s. Does anyone else remember Dragon Dictate? It didn’t work.
Wispr Flow solves a problem I've had for years: using my voice to accurately write.
I do business via email.
The tool I’ve been using for the last year that saves me more time and headache than any other is the email app Superhuman.
Superhuman trains you to be more effective at email through very thoughtful behavioral nudges toward using shortcuts, snippets, and other built-in tools to process email faster and more thoughtfully.
Even if I eventually move away from paying $15/month for email – on top of the Google Suite subscription I pay to have my custom domain emails – I’ll always be grateful to Superhuman for nudging me to use keycodes for simple actions like "schedule send” or “next” that I never knew you could do within normal email.
By nature, I spend a lot of time on the phone. I routinely phone friends and colleagues, instead of messaging them. But as a result, a lot of Zander Media’s culture and training is passed down through daily actions and voice, instead of written documentation.
Loom is a tool that I’ve found extremely helpful in training colleagues on standard operating procedures. You record your screen, a small video of yourself, and give verbal and visual feedback that can be reviewed at the recipient’s leisure.
Increasingly, I've also come to use Loom to give friends and clients feedback on a website, video, written document, or other content.
Being able to show my face, a screen, and simultaneously talk through feedback has dramatically sped up the process of providing notes.
ChatGPT and Gemini
It almost feels redundant to talk about using LLMs as a part of my suite of tools. Everyone should be using LLMs as a part of their everyday work.
My two, currently, are ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
ChatGPT was the first LLM I began to use regularly, and I built a handful of custom GPTs for things like querying previous Snafu articles or writing proposals. I haven't been able to completely move away from ChatGPT because at this point, it has more context on my writing and my work than any other single LLM, but I almost always find it useful to compare the results across ChatGPT and Gemini in giving me feedback on my writing or when doing research, to see what each has to say.
I was very fortunate to be able to write a small angel check into Maven, a cohort-based education platform co-founded and led by the co-founder of Udemy.
I've been fascinated by education technology since working with Vivienne Ming back in 2013 – and even before that as an educator, myself.
And one of the challenges with online education is getting people who buy a program to actually go through a course. Something like 90% of online courses aren’t completed – even when people pay to attend. That’s why I developed my How to Sell Yourself course to be in real time, as well.
Maven seeks to solve that by providing instructor-led courses that occur in real time. Their most popular courses are, unsurprisingly, about AI, but you can also find courses in design, marketing, sales, and leadership.
3 (Other) Things I’ve Loved This Week
Quote I Love
“Success is not the key to happiness, happiness is the key to success.” - Albert Schweitzer
I was reminded of this quote watching Oakland Figure Skater Alysa Liu’s gold medal performance in the Olympics.
Article I’m Thinking About
I always enjoy the non-fiction writing of Hugh Howey, author of the Silo series, and this recent article outlines Howey’s opinions about why AI won’t be the ultimate solution to all human problems (or even most of them).
Here’s an excerpt:
Computers are already better than me at chess, and yet I continue to play. They built a robot that can play billiards almost perfectly, and yet I love chalking up a cue and the crack of a ball knocking another into a leather pocket. There’s a human out there who is better than me at anything I can do, and yet it feels good to do many of those things.
The limits holding us back are the very things that make us human.
Book I’m Loving
A friend gave me this book perhaps a decade ago, but I’ve only just now gotten around to reading it. The book is galactic world-building at its best, and I feel foolish for not having read the first chapter years ago.
What I’ve found surprising, though, is that in addition to a great story the book is simply beautifully written.
Want more?
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The Snafu Conference is an immersive 1-day experience about authentic selling in a chaotic world. The summit is next week, so this is your last chance to join us!
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Responsive Conference is coming back in September! With AI and a changing economy, our jobs and careers are changing faster than most of us can adapt. Attend Responsive Conference and learn how to keep up with change.
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Until next week,
Robin
