If you are starting out as a soloprenuer, entrepreneur or freelancer you'll need some help. For me starting the creative dept. could only work with a certain stack of tech tools to save me time and standardize my processes so that I can spend my time servicing my clients. This new power of a one or two person business being able to compete with a huge corporation would not have been possible just a few years ago. Luckily today the only thing stopping any one of us from building a company or community online is ourselves. Here are the top tools that me and my company couldn't live with out.

Eagle.cool

Eagle.cool is a digital asset management (DAM) platform for organizing, managing, and distributing media assets like images, videos, PDFs, and more. It provides cloud storage and organization tools to centralize an organization's digital media library. Features include metadata tagging, search and filtering.

After years and years of messy folders sitting all over my desktop of screengrabs of websites, cool type and funny memes I’ll never look at again, I finally found the holy grail of swipe organizing. Eagle.cool is a $30 one time fee (not a monthly sub! yay!) that can store anything you can find on the internet from URLs to screengrabs to images to PDFs to whatever. Using it’s chrome extension you can grab a page, or a URL and then you can organize it all in visual folders. But it's the way you can visually see the "swipe" that sets it apart from just another folder organizing system. It’s heavenly. They just need an iOS app and it will be perfect.

Need Score: ★★★★☆

Cost: $30 (no subscription!)

Alicent.ai

Overview: Alicent.ai is a conversational AI service that can be used to create chatbots, virtual assistants, and interactive dialogues. It provides natural language processing to understand text and speech input.

Since day one of the "AI chatbot revolution" back in November 2022, I've had a chatGPT window pinned to my browser window. It isn't an ideal workflow for using an AI chatbot and frankly the interface is not conducive to actually getting work done. After trialing a bunch of other AI LLM's I found one that feels like it actually performs useful tasks and doesn't just prompt me to ask it dumb stuff and fall down a rabbit hole. Enter Alicent.ai. A chrome extension ChatGPT inteface that has native internet connectivity (which chatGPT doesn’t). So if you’re on a site you can ask Alicent to summarize it or use the info on it to answer questions etc. It also features “Discover Prompts” which can help you get a first draft of a LinkedIn post, marketing email twitter post or a longtail keyword list. To me this has been the best interface and use case for an AI chatbot yet. Also it’s cheaper than chatGPT Plus at only $8/mo.

Need Score: ★★★★ ☆

Cost: $8/mo

Lemlist

Overview: Lemlist is a cold email platform designed for sales prospecting and outreach. It helps you create targeted email campaigns and automate follow-ups based on response activity.

If you are looking for ways to organize leads and send out email campaigns for your business look no further than Lemlist. In a catagory that seems to have billions of options for cold email outreach, Lemlist rises above. They provide informative video tutorials on how to create complex outbound campaigns.

And to me what sets it apart from other cold email / CRM products is that it has a true community at community.lemlistfamily.com that is actually helpful and engaged. There you can find other people doing the same thing you are and share examples of what is and isn't working. It's a great place to find encouragement and tips when grinding away to sell your business services.

There are other cheaper options like mailflow.io if you are looking for a barebones approach for this but the full set of features are hard to beat.

Need Score: ★★★☆☆

Cost: $39/mo

Outseta

Overview: Outseta is the all-in-one membership software Payments, authentication, CRM, email—it's all here. Outseta gives founders the tools to monetize their website, SaaS product, or online community in minutes.

If you are looking to set up a community or have any sort of “login” area for clients outseta is a must. It can integrate with your site in about 5 minutes and you'll have a custom content section on any website. It also doubles as my CRM. It's simpler than others I’ve tried but honestly if you don’t have 10,000 clients it’s great. You can also use it for email campaigns but I have only utilized the automated emails it sends after sign up of my service. Use it to wall off any area of a site to house your course or create protected content etc. It integrates with stripe for payment processing with one line of code and also with circle if you have a community forum there. You can even customize it with your own CSS if you so desire. They take a 1% fee on transactions and it cost $40/mo but I can’t think of an easier way to set up a login area for your community.

Need Score: ★★★★☆

Cost: $39/mo

Framer

Overview: Design websites on a freeform canvas. Add animations and a CMS.

I've always liked grinding away at building my own website. Making small changes, publishing, seeing why it's not working, looking through the CSS then going to W3Schools to see what is wrong then doing the process like 6 more times just to get a rectangle absolute positioned. But if you are like me and a really bad coder who barely understands CSS/HTML 5 etc doing all that is draining and time sucking and it's really hard to realize on screen what you see in your head.

So when I found out about Framer about 7 months ago I was thrilled. This is the web dev software designers have been waiting for. If you've ever used Figma it's almost the same app so the learning curve is almost zero. Blogs, e-com, portfolio sites you can build it. And build it fast. Oh and you can now build sites using AI prompts which is a great way to start a new project.

Never has a program captured my excitement like Framer. The support and community are great and they seem to be adding features suggested by users regularly. Its the way design software should be. iIterating along side those that use it.

Need Score: ★★★★★

Cost: Free to use $19/mo to host and publish site

Photoshop

Photoshop is the industry standard image editing and graphic design software from Adobe. It provides powerful tools for compositing, retouching, typography, vector graphics, and more.

The OG of design tools, Photoshop is still a daily driver for me. By now there are many other free options like photopea and I do feel like as time goes on I use it less and less. But with recent updates like "Generative Fill" it's good to see Adobe keep making this software relevant. Their embrace of AI prompting is encouraging and I'm hoping for the day coming soon where I can just press one button and it will make me exactly what I want.. Which is what non-photoshop users have thought it does all along.

Need Score: ★★★★☆

Cost: $9/mo for the photoshop only plan.

Loom

Sometimes you need to make a quick video to explain something or to present a deck. Your iPhone is too shakey. Zoom is a pain. So where do you go? Loom is a simple video communication tool that makes it easy to record quick videos of your screen accompanied by webcam footage and audio narration. It's great for the asynchronous communication that the creative dept. is built on. And in the few times I've had to use it for to explain something complex to a client it's been great. I can see it being used by content creators who use slides decks or present screen captures but for my little experience with it's basic functionality it's been great.

Need Score: ★★☆☆☆

Cost: free

MidJourney

If you've not used MidJourney yet then you might want to reconsider you life decisions. The AI image generator that runs through discord, is an amazing resource to create images you can’t find anywhere else. Now there's a whole science to writing the correct prompts to get what you want but even a moron can make beautiful artwork. Midjourney art has become it's own art style and a lot of it seems over-played but this is the future and the now of image references and art work generation so to me it's a must in the creative tool shed.

Need Score: ★★★★★

Cost: free or $10 or $30 or $60/mo

Brain.fm

When the majority of your day is spent coming up with idea and quickly building prototypes for clients you need all the help you can get when it comes to focusing. Brain.fm is a site that plays music to focus better. Using different wave patterns their instrumental music can help you focus, think or relax. You're able to mix the music to your liking and tailor it to the tasks you're trying to perform. It really helps me to power through some of those times I'm tempted to check twitter or fall into a rabbit hole on the interwebs.

Need Score: ★★★★☆

Cost: $49/yr

Google Workspace

If I'm being honest Google workspace (email, domain, slides, sheets, meet) is probably what half of my business runs on. It's almost so ingrained in this company and my working life I don't even think about it. Google offers so many different things in one username it's kind of a must. Their business workspace email is super fast and easy to set up an email from your domain (which is also the easiest domain provider I've used.) Google Slides is where we make all of our presentations for our clients and sheets is where track our daily to-dos and accounts receivable. It's not super sexy but that's the point. Google is worth $2T for a reason and there offerings are usually top notch (sorry Google Glass).

Need Score: ★★★★★

Cost: $14/mo for email, prices vary for domains but thecreativedept.xyz is $12/yr

So that's what I'm working with on a daily basis to keep this ship moving. Do you need them all to start out as a soloprenuer or small business? Probably not. Can you waste tons of time trying out different SAAS software and other tools to make your business run better? Yes I have! But finding the right apps for your business is one of the best ways to increase your leverage.