The tools I actually use.
Not a megalist. Not affiliate slop. The tools actually doing the work on this personal brand right now, plus what's coming next. If it isn't on this page, it isn't on this stack. I'll update as the stack changes.
My everything. Thinking. Planning. Writing. Website design and development. Copy. Social graphics. Fact-checking. Quality control. This entire personal brand runs on Claude. The site you're reading right now, every word and every line of code behind it, came from working with one AI tool. One. Not a stack of ten.
The bridge between my brain and Claude. I talk out a thought, it cleans up the transcript, I paste it straight into Claude. Talking is faster than typing. When you're using one AI tool for everything, the speed of getting your thoughts INTO it matters more than anything else. Underrated unlock.
My second brain. Every note, research file, and draft lives in one vault on my Desktop. Plain markdown files I own forever. Synced to a private GitHub repo every 30 minutes for backup. Claude reads from this vault and gets caught up in seconds. Without it, I'd re-explain context every session. With it, the whole personal brand has a memory.
The email platform powering the newsletter. I've trusted it for years on my other businesses. Strong automation builder. Not the prettiest out of the box, but it does the job. Every signup form on this site flows through it, and every issue I send goes out from here.