Toolkit

I meet founders who spend three months arranging their technology stack and six weeks building the business. The stack has become the project.

Tools should behave like plumbing. You notice when they break, appreciate them when they work and otherwise get on with running the business.

This is the stack that works for me in 2026. Use the list against a specific bottleneck. If a tool does not save time, remove friction or improve a decision, leave it out.

Accounting & Finance

Dext (formerly Receipts) for expense capture, snap photos of receipts, its AI extracts the data directly into your ledger. If you're doing any volume of expenses, this saves your life.

Xero for bookkeeping. Browser-based, integrates with everything, and its new AI assistant handles bank reconciliation remarkably well. When you need an accountant (and you will), they all use Xero.

Ramp for spend management. It uses AI to flag wasteful subscriptions and automate employee expenses before they even hit your inbox.

Email, CRM & Sales

Kit (formerly ConvertKit) if you're building an audience (newsletter, membership, products). It's built for creators, not for enterprise. Simple, fast, and their new AI writing assistant helps with subject line optimisation.

ActiveCampaign if you need deeper automation, drip sequences, membership logic, and predictive sending. It has largely replaced the complexity of Infusionsoft/Ontraport with a much cleaner, AI-powered automation builder.

Apollo.io for prospecting. Their AI search finds your ideal customers and writes personalised cold outreach designed to sound human.

Content & Marketing

Taplio or Lately.ai for social media. They use AI to turn long-form content into dozens of high-performing social posts based on what is trending in your niche.

Canva Magic Studio for graphics, their text-to-image and AI layout tools save you hundreds in designer time for the 80% of work that doesn't need a pro.

Midjourney for high-end custom assets. No more stock photos that look like everyone else's.

Research, Writing & AI Assistants

Perplexity for research. It has replaced Google Search for me because it gives you cited answers rather than a list of links to click.

Claude for drafting and coding. Its 200k context window means it can read your entire business plan or codebase and give you meaningful feedback.

Fireflies.ai or Otter.ai for meeting notes. They join your calls, record everything, and send you a structured summary and action items five minutes after you hang up.

Infrastructure: the stuff that has to work

Dropbox for files. It is not cool anymore, but it syncs reliably and works everywhere. Google Drive if you're all-in on Google Workspace (which is now completely infused with Gemini AI).

WordPress for the "boring" choice that always works. Framer if you want to build a stunning, high-converting landing page using AI design prompts in minutes.

Slack for team communication. Use the built-in Slack AI to summarize threads you missed while you were working.

Automation & Workflow

Zapier Central for automating between tools using natural language. You do not need to know "triggers" and "actions" as well as you once did. Tell the AI agent what you want to happen.

Make.com for visual, complex workflows that require more logic than Zapier can handle.

The Hardware Question

If you're serious, you want a decent laptop. Apple's M-series chips are still the gold standard for performance-per-watt, especially when running local LLMs. Don't cheap out on RAM (32GB+) or storage, AI models and video assets are hungry.

Decent mic and webcam (like an Elgato Facecam) are non-negotiable. People judge you on audio quality more than video quality. Invest there.

The rule that matters

You want everything in the cloud. Browser-based. AI-integrated. Accessible from anywhere.

Resilience is the point. Your business can run independently of one computer, one office or the internet connection at home. If you lose your laptop, you lose hardware, not access.

The useful stack buys back time, connects cleanly and then gets out of the way.

Choose the smallest set that covers your real work. Give it a month. Remove what you did not use and get back to building.