I sometimes find it useful to check in on what other solopreneurs are using as the tech spine for their business. Although I don't position myself as an expert, I thought I'd share my digital team of carefully crafted (by someone else) 1s and 0s.
Office - Google workspace
As a Xoogler, I'm a long-time user and fan of Google's mail, calendar, note, photo, word processing, and spreadsheet offerings. I also find their forms and presentation tools useful, and the ability to easily integrate with all the other elements in this paragraph is an obvious plus. €11/month. I do use Microsoft Office stalwarts as well.
Website - My site and store are built on Wordpress
(€316/yr) with the Divi (€100/year) paid theme. I'm at that happy medium between drag-and-drop-only and actually knowing what I'm doing with code. I find this package gives me the balance I want between prepackaged simplicity and ability to customize down to detail. The store is a new addition, but so far I've been happy with WooCommerce.
LMS - Learndash
My Career Crossroads course is built and managed in LearnDash. It is affordable and again at the same sort of sweet spot I described above with Wordpress and Divi. I don't drown in customization options, but I am able to get it to do pretty much what I want, not too constrained by predefined limits. €152/yr.
Email Service - Mailchimp
It's early days for me on this front, and so far I'm just hitting the basics with response to store activity and newsletter distribution. Mailchimp integrates with WooCommerce and Calendly to capture new additions to my audience, and it differentiates between transactional audience members and subscribers. I look forward to building more operational support into it, sending helpful email prompts and prods to clients and course members based on their activity (or inactivity) in programs they've purchased. €19/mo.
Scheduling - Calendly
Calendly handles everything from my exploratory (aka sales) calls, to 1-to-1 coaching sessions, to group meetings and workshops. It integrates cleanly with my website, Mailchimp, and my payment solutions. €133/yr.
Online Meetings - Zoom
I like Google Meet and am happy to use WhatsApp video calls with anyone who prefers it, but my default is Zoom, where I have an plan that support up to 100 people per meeting and meetings up to 12 hours long. The integrations are smooth, the connections are stable, and the screen sharing and breakouts work. €160/yr.
Payments - Stripe Paypal
These leave very little uncovered in the consumer space. I do very little B2B work these days, but when I do, I also add my international banking details for direct payment. Stripe and Paypal each integrate well with Calendly and my shop. I briefly used WooPayments, but it seemed to layer on an additional fee element (it is built on Stripe) , so I turned that off.
Accounting - Sage
I LOVED Freeagent, but it didn't survive my move from the UK to Ireland. I'm settling into Sage now. Not as user friendly, but that might still be because it is new to me after 8 years with FreeAgent. I have a pretty simple plan, at €36/mo.
Social Media posting - Buffer
My needs aren't complex. I use Buffer to schedule a week's worth of posting to 4 channels a couple of times a day, and it does that well. I'm waiting on it to add the ability to duplicate and re-use posts over time, as opposed to having to re-enter them. This is in the development backlog. €237/yr.
Content creation
I use Canva free service for most of my creative and Unsplash for most of the photo elements of it. I do occasionally top up my iStock credits and get something there when UnSplash doesn't quite meet what I'm looking for. I use Screencast-O-Matic (€66) for video + audio + screen capture. For my long-form writing, and occasionally with my posts, I get the editorial help of Pro Writing Aid (€140). [This catches things like when to use square brackets and whether to hyphenate things like long-form of Pro Writing. I don't have it on at the moment...].
Finally
I use MS Word for my long-form word processing. Publishing For putting out Ebooks, MS Word exports well to pdf. Then I use Calibre (free) to convert to ePub. If publishing through Kindle, I use Kindle's online service for that final step. I also use Kindle's Print On Demand service for paperbacks. Voice-to-Text - Otter. Captures and synthesizes meeting notes and creates transcripts for my longer video content. (€107)
Just think what the Apollo 13 guys could have done with all that at their fingertips! All for a cool €2,250/yr.
