A few weeks ago, I visited some family friends and they asked me what tools I use for my personal life, home and business. Figured it’d be fun to share. Here goes:
Online Services
Outreach.io – Way to mass send personalized emails
FollowUp.cc – Best way to never forget to follow up with someone.
SendGrid – To send the 10M emails we send a month
SendFox – For my personal OkDork emails
Zenefits – Company health benefits
Promoter.io – Helps facilitate NPS score of customers. Good to learn what we can do to improve the business. And what people already like about it.
Workable.com – An ATS (applicant tracking system). What we use to organize our hiring process.
Litmus.com (or mail-tester) – Check how your emails look in all mailboxes and if they’ll go to spam or not.
Libsyn.com – Stats tracking and manage all your podcasts for distribution.
Profitwell – Free financial reporting for SaaS companies
Wordable – Our Dork team uses this to upload Google Docs into blog posts in a fraction of the time.
Computer Software
Pro-Tip: I save a copy of ALL of my installation files (.dmg) in a dropbox folder. Super helpful whenever I get a new computer.
Sequel Pro – A technical marketers dream. This is a great tool to use SQL without all the pain in the ass.
Transmission – Best way to download torrent files
Transmit – My favorite FTP client.
MacJournal – What I write every article in. Nice to have categories and distraction free mode.
Alfred – Most critical app on the computer, like spotlight on steroids. Saves me literally WEEKS of my life every year with all the built in shortcuts.
Audacity – Very simple and easy way to record and edit audio.
Calibre – Clean way to convert your pdfs into books for your Kindle
Call Recorder – So you can easily record your Skype calls
Jing – Make super quick video screencasts to share
TeamViewer – Awesome way to screen share or remotely log into one of you computers. Thanks EricF for recommending!
VLC – Best way to watch movies on your computer.
Zoom – Easy tool to do screensharing, conference calls and record conversations.
Hazel – A bit of a PIA to setup but super helpful I use this to auto transfer music I download into iTunes. Auto-delete files in my Downloads folder after 7 days and move photos into monthly categories and more.
LiceCap – Best way to create an animated gif.
Camtasia – Way to edit videos.
BetterSnapTool – Super easy way to maximize screens or create side-by-side screen view. One of those tools you didn’t know you need until you have it.
Chrome Extensions
Sumo – Best way to grow a website. Install it (free).
Buffer – Easy way to add new things to share to all my social media
BuiltWith – See what tools, hosts and more every site is using
ColorZilla – Makes it able to copy any specific color from a screen
SimilarWeb – See the popularity of a website, where it gets its traffic from and more
DF YouTube – Removes the recommended videos from YouTube. Prevents you from going into the recommended video coma.
FollowUp.cc for Gmail – The best tool you can use to never forget to follow up with someone. Also nice to see when someone
Gmail Offline – Use Gmail on the go or when you want to be productive.
News Feed Eradicator – A GOD send. Removes your FB newsfeed. Install it. Thank me later.
PixelBlock – Blocks people from knowing if you opened their emails
Reddit Enhancement Suite – Saves time so you don’t have to open things in new windows among other awesomeness.
SiteBlock – Blocks you from drunkenly visiting your ex-gf Facebook profile or Hacker News
UglyEmail – Lets you know if an email is being tracked before opening it.
The Great Suspender – Saves computer power by turning off tabs you haven’t used in awhile
Momentum – Nice clean Chrome background dashboard
Quibb – Exclusive network to find great articles about all things business and technology related
Laptops
I have 2 of them. I like working from home and all my docs are in Dropbox so I don’t have to worry about sync-ing.
At home – Macbook Pro 13 inch 2017
At office – Macbook Pro 13 inch 2016
I’ve said this numerous times but in life you need to optimize from the top down. That starts with your health, then your computer, your phone, your typing skills and so forth. You use those 99% of your day if you’re a desk jockey, so double your output with a computer that’s twice as fast.
Bonus: Buy the fastest router possible. Again, you are only as fast as your weakest router. I personally use the NETGEAR Nighthawk x6 AC3200.
iPhone Apps
TapeACall – Instead of repeating yourself, way easier to record your calls so you can share with your team, clients or potential customers. Also can turn the audio into blog posts in the future.
MyFitnessPal.com – If you eat too much, no energy to run your business. This is the best way to track your eating.
RememberTheMilk – People are always looking for a better way to get things done. Too bad people just are lazy bastards 🙂 Anyways, I find this app the easiest way to keep all my items organized.
Pocket – So many times at work someone emails or messages me an article / video. I always use the bookmark or forward them to Pocket so I can read them at my convenience and without distractions (it removes ads).
Glympse – Share with colleagues where you are. Everyone is always amazed they haven’t heard of this one.
One thing I do with my apps is I switch them around every 3 months. It keeps my brain fresh and sharp. Also, I make sure to move distracting apps to the 3rd screen so I have to go out of my way to use them.
If you’re curious about the devices I use at home… Check out my home automation setup.
What other tools make your life better? Click here to view reader favorites.
32 responses to “The 40+ Business Tools I Use to Run My 8+ Figure Business”
So good!!!!!!
Great blog… Useful information.
How about an intuitive contact management tool? like Circleback (which just burned me) 🙂
DM
Noah,
it would be great to hear about your alfred setup.
I use it myself and am always searching for new, useful workflows.
Great tool base. I will use the ones I’m not already using and compare the results.
Wow! This is such an impressive list of tools. I am familair with a few, the rest I need to check out.
Nice use of apps and it looks like we share the same in most instances, but glimpse is an interesting one.
I dont use team viewer anymore because they just uncovered a major security hole.
Thanks for the great tool list buddy. I’m blogging from last 2 years and recently I have launched my new digital marketing blog. There are many tools in your list which I heard the first time and found much helpful for me. I will defiantly use these tools on my blog too.
And I’m very sure there are thousands of newbies, who is looking for tools support. Your article will help them to find out their desired tool.
Thanks for sharing.
Task management: hands down I’m an ASANA devotee
For Focus: I Meditate (best app around and you don’t need wifi!)
Deadly accurate answer. You’ve hit the buslyele!
Well, that was specific! Personally I’m a big fan of Jing. This (free) app has help me so much!
I hadn’t heard of or even HEARD a SONOS until I joined a coworking space and man, those are some of the best sounding speakers. Can’t wait to get some into my own house. 🙂
-Nick
Where do you get the content for Plex from, do you run your own server?
Great resource, I’ve opened a dozen tabs to research different tools you’ve mentioned here.
I’ll a add a couple of great tools of my own:
A super robust screen capture tool (an alternative to Skitch. for non-Mac users, as Evernote is no longer supporting Skitch):
PicPick – scrolling window capture, regional capture, annotations, markup, custom hotkeys, etc. It also has some bonus tools built in: a color picker, magnifier, pixel ruler, & more.
A project manager that’s cheap and very effective. It’s incredible for teams working remotely.
TeamWork.com – time tracking, sub-tasks, tags, comments, integrates with apps(Google, MS, Apple, CRMs, billing, clouds, etc), and more.
I also use Sonos all over my house. Wish it would integrate with Echo- but probably not going to happen.
I use a ton of tools, but here are the ones I use pretty much every day (in addition to Sonos):
– Tasks: Remember The Milk
– Managing Contractors: Trello & Slack
– Third party-sourced contractors: Upwork, Skype, Google Sheets
– Podcasts: iOS native podcast (also use LG Tone bluetooth headphones)
– Running gadgets: TomTom Spark+ Cardio & Jaybird X2 wireless headphones; also integrates with Runkeeper
– Social Media: Buffer
– Work phone: RingCentral Pro for one business line & Phone.com for the other
– Doc scanning- ScanSnap
– Document sharing- Dropbox
– Dedicated online backup for all computers (+ server): iDrive
– Personal Finance: Mint
– Organizing individual projects: Evernote
Left a huge one off the list; Password management: LastPass
Some of my favorites include Grammarly (grammar-checker), Freshbooks (invoicing), Pressly (content curation)
Thanks for sharing! What program do you use to manage ALL these programs? Amateurs like me, would be lost.
You should to add an iPhone App for personal finance management.
I installed DF YouTube and News Feed Eradicator right away. My life will never be the same again.
Awesome list. I also use onetab in chrome extension to manage my tabs the next day when I turn-on my computer.
Amazing list…. Thank you.
OneTab is a Chrome plugin that autopopulates links of all of your open tabs into a neat list in one tab. Do this as many times as you like – the destination tab is additive.
Second the OneTab suggestion. So awesome. I got it to save memory, but I’ve found it helps with just removing distracting sites. I’ll open any article I feel is interesting, and then I can OneTab it – I get the feeling I can come back to it anytime I want, but I don’t end up with 1,000 tabs, and I can never come back to it too.
Would be cool to sell a .DMG with all these tools.and only one bill. Cool tools but may take hours to get them all on your own.
Good list. Just looking at some of my Chrome extensions..
1Password – my preferred password management. Not for everyone if you don’t have good process in storing/keeping this safe – but useful when you deal with 1,000 logins.
Lazarus Form Recovery: if you write a lot into web forms/blog posts this autosaves anything you type so you can recover from crashes/timeouts/network errors.
Redirect Path: Shows HTTP header & redirect. Good tool for SEO/affiliates to see whats going on when you click on a specific link.
This is awesome, thanks Noah and Shalom from Israel:)
Hey Noah –
How much do you like SQL? We recently released a mac version of our open source business intelligence product. Dirt simple dashboards, nightly emails and a graphical querying interface for when you get tired of dealing SQL.
Good stuff you re sharing with is Noah. Thanks for feedEradicator it will be definitely helpful!
Cheers from Tel Aviv!
Btw you should come to visit.Sire you will like live over here 🙂
Expensify for expenses and mileage.
Waze for travel times
Trello for GTD tasks and personal OKRs
Teamwork for project management/collab
TYVM you’ve solved all my prlmbeos
I grinned when I saw your upgraded toolkit.
Your resources page has previously helped me find the right tools for my work.
This article has lot of appealing tools for email lists and personal technology. I wasn’t aware that tools like litmus and salesintelligent existed.
I also loved the fact that you’ve included a ranking system in the google doc. I’ll make sure to visit again in a week to check the rankings.
I have a question for you Noah – How did you overcome your apprehensions (if any) with August?
p.s. Would love to hear of the ‘August experience’ from fellow readers too.
Again, this was an awesome post!