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One of the most common questions I get asked is:

“What tools do you use to run Strategy Breakdowns?”

Here’s the thing — we’re a lean, scrappy team that spends all day writing about behind-the-scenes business strategies.

We believe in sharing what works.

We also believe in building-in-public.

So, we open-sourced our entire tech stack to give you an inside-look at exactly what tools we’re using to power each corner of our operation:

But truth be told, writing about software every single day makes you a bit… picky.

There are just a few core components that form the foundation for a profitable, scalable, lifestyle business.

The universal tool-belt we recommend to everyone wanting to build a solo (or tiny team) creator-led company.

All creators should really be using all of these, no matter what format / channel / platform you publish to.

Today’s article breaks down this subset I’m calling “The Lean Creator Stack”

Let’s get into it.

The ‘Lean Creator’ Stack

1.  Athyna

I’ll preface all this by saying: Athyna is the force multiplier that’s allowed me to compound extra value out of all the other tools in The Lean Creator Stack.

Athyna is the leading hiring platform for remote talent in LATAM, and they’ve been supercharging the creator ecosystem for the last ~18 months.

Yes, this is an article about tools that multiply your output whilst keeping headcount at a minimum, but I wanted to highlight Athyna first because it took me far too long to realise:

The difference between doing every single thing yourself vs. having someone to delegate to, collaborate with, brainstorm with etc is enormous.

You don’t do 2x more with 2x people, you do 10x more.

Why? Here’s a few reasons:

• You get more value out of your other tools, because they are often designed with teamwork / collaboration in mind.

• You can achieve 24/7 productive output through thoughtful time-zone coverage.

• Designing your operations for a team, rather than a solo endeavour, is a forcing function for creating scalable systems that can run without you.

• A tiny team in conjunction with AI, agents, automation, etc amplifies the leverage you can create.

• If you spend 95% of your time working in the business, hire someone, and get that down to 50%, you’ve gone from 2hrs to 20hrs working on the business. A 10x increase.

I wont go into the pros, cons and considerations, the exponential productivity gains, or the strategic thesis for setting up global teams, as that’s thoroughly covered elsewhere.

I made my first hire through Athyna, and it’s been my mental benchmark for ‘what a b2b customer journey should look like’ ever since.

Plus, the team are legends, so if you’re wondering ‘where do I find my next 10x force multiplier?’, it can't hurt to schedule an exploratory chat.

2. Notion

There are 5 core custom systems that power my business and life. Dozens of sub-systems sit underneath. All of them are built on Notion.

Part of why I love this tool so much is its visual and architectural flexibility.

So rather than describing the ecosystem to you, I'll just show it you:

Newsletter content system for publishing weekly newsletters and managing sponsors.

Social content system for ideating, prioritising, writing, editing, and posting content every day on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Knowledge management system for capturing, summarising, categorising, and resurfacing notes and links.

Personal journal system for writing, planning, and reflecting, to align actions with intentions.

Tasks and projects system for prioritising and managing activites that power my business / life.

I’ve even documented one of my favourite elements of Notion’s strategy, and used Notion to document one of my favourite elements of my own strategy.

A magical tool that’s as powerful as your creativity.

3. Zapier / Lindy

If you’ve watched my latest build-in-public experiment, you’d know that automation is the lifeblood of Strategy Breakdowns.

The robot army working 24/7 to keep giving Strategy Breakdowns readers, customers, sponsors etc a delightful experience at scale.

Every time we do something more than a few times, we generally turn it into a Zap/Lindy/automation.

Practically speaking, this looks like an interconnected web of automated workflows, logic, and journeys that we try to add to every single day. A few examples:

• When someone signs up to become a newsletter subscriber, we send them a week-long ‘strategy crash course’ via email, walking them through our most popular articles and resources, whilst enriching the contact with additional metadata over time to understand how we can better serve our readers.

• When someone becomes a StrategyHub customer, we send their email address from Kajabi (course platform) to beehiiv (email platform), add a few custom tags, and send them a multi-day onboarding email sequence that helps them get maximum value from everything we’ve built into the product.

• When someone becomes a newsletter sponsor, we generate a custom Notion portal with key campaign information, pretty performance reports, collaboration spaces, and FAQs to instantly kick things off with trust and momentum.

Behind-the-scenes, we combine automation with AI to supercharge the operational output of our tiny team:

• Auto-drafted email replies, trained on all our previous emails for tone / language etc.

• Meeting prep research bots that send a Slack message summarising participant backgrounds, LinkedIn activity, etc. before any external call.

• Templatised customer support responses for StrategyHub queries.

Zapier (also one of the most popular Strategy Breakdowns growth case studies) and Lindy.ai power the lion’s share of these automations.

We’re constantly experimenting with other tools in the space like n8n, Gumloop, and Make, but Zapier and Lindy are top of the table on the basis of ~speed to ship new workflows from scratch~ at the time of writing.

P.S. Are you stuck spending all your time managing day-to-day operations, dreaming of an automated business that grows whilst you reduce your working hours?

Send a reply to this email - I’d love to help.

4. ChatGPT / Claude / Perplexity

How I use AI chatbots could (and probably should) be an entire article in itself.

Rather than doing a deep dive on all the ways I use these wonderful tools, I’ll start by rattling off 3 use cases that create incredible leverage in my daily creative work.

Use Case 1 - Supercharged thesaurus: [Paste draft paragraph] + “The 3rd sentence is too [cheesy]. Write it 5 different ways, focussing on [story rather than technical details]”

The main benefit here is seeing a handful of variations of the idea you are trying to word, in an instant - basically completely short-circuits the “I have the point in mind, I just can’t word it” problem.

Typically using Claude Sonnet 3.5 inside of various Claude Projects trained on all my articles / social media posts / ads / StrategyHub content etc. depending on the context.

Use Case 2 - Concept articulator: [Paste 15x links I’m reading for article research purposes, located using Perplexity] + “What was so novel about what [Notion] did from a [community] perspective? Write 5x tight one-liners that capture this essence.”

Debating whether ‘AI is better/worse than humans at XYZ’ is entertaining, but often unproductive. I prefer to learn/build/optimise my workflows based on what ‘AI is already far far better than humans at’. One of these things is reading and drawing insights from large volumes of information, instantly.

This use case requires an environment/model with real-time internet access - currently using GPT-4o inside of ChatGPT Plus. The result is straight up wizardry - an on-demand list of interesting word combinations, clauses, and ideas to pick at and stitch together using your own unique taste.

Moves you from “Not sure what to say” → “Some seed ideas to work with” → “Better than I could’ve come up with myself” in just a few minutes.

Use Case 3 - Omniscient editor: [Paste entire draft article/post] + [Very long prompt, tldr: imagine you are a Chief Strategy Officer / Ben Thompson of Stratechery / a product management intern at a Series B startup / Ernest Hemmingway, explain what you don’t like, and suggest edits]

This lets me rapidly identify logical gaps, awkward flows, unconvincing sentences, and other aspects of my writing that I should consider changing, plus potential rewrites, from the perspective of relevant audiences/editors.

Again, it’s not that AI is telling me what to write, or writing for me. It’s accelerating my path towards the best possible version of the article.

From reviewing sales emails to structuring deals to finding restaurants to brainstorming strategy to speaking directly with years of journal entries, let’s just leave this at: AI gets a healthy daily workout at Strategy Breakdowns HQ.

5. Canva / Figma

It’s cheesy, but I genuinely wake up each day and try to make internet art.

The content is the art. The business model is the art. The customer experience is the art.

And of course, the brand is the art too.

The visual design for Strategy Breakdowns is one of the things I’m most proud of. We still get love on our build-in-public piece covering the behind-the-scenes design process all the time.

Canva and Figma sit at the helm of our visual creative work.

They’re also 2 of our earliest breakdowns!

6. beehiiv

This is the core platform that powers the email side of things at Strategy Breakdowns.

“I thought you said ‘The Lean Creator Stack’ was for all creators, agnostic of channel!”

Here’s the thing - all creators should be building an email list. It’s the only channel that lets you:

• Reliably reach your entire audience without an algorithmic feed deciding what content they actually see.

• Personalise your content based on who is receiving it and what you know about them.

• Own and export your audience data, rather than having it locked within a social platform. You can’t export your followers from Instagram and import them into LinkedIn, but you can take your email list anywhere.

• Integrate with other tools for use cases involving CRM, data enrichment, surveys, landing pages etc.

• Create automated funnels, so subscribers can e.g. receive 10 daily emails about a certain topic they indicated they are interested in by clicking a link in an email.

• Segment your audience, so you can e.g. send a targeted email to everyone who joined in the last 90 days, via a specific lead magnet, hasn’t yet bought your product, and has an open-rate of 60%+.

Honestly, the list goes on and on, but I’m not here to convince you that you need email. Simply sharing that email is what lets you build a product, not just a following, making it the cornerstone of what we do here.

And beehiiv’s unmatched shipping velocity + unwavering commitment to enabling growth and monetisation for publishers, makes them only sane choice for novice and veteran newsletter operators alike.

I also semi-recently got to sit down with beehiiv’s founder Tyler Denk to jam out on a fascinating pillar of their long-term strategy. Hint: building an email mega-SaaS is only one part of the equation.

Phew. Ok.

That was meant to be a quick little rundown, but it appears I got slightly carried away. Honestly, I’m getting asked for a deeper behind-the-scenes look at how we operate quite often. So I’m glad we got there!

Now, you've seen the foundations of our tech stack, but it’s important to remember that tools are just an enabler; they're only as powerful as the strategy behind them.

That's exactly why I created StrategyHub, our flagship video course.

While The Lean Creator Stack showcases my business toolkit, StrategyHub is my comprehensive strategy toolkit.

StrategyHub gives you my exact research tools, tactics, and templates gathered from 5 years in strategy consulting and big tech, plus a suite of bonus materials to translate your high-impact skillset into promotions, business opportunities, influence, job offers, and career acceleration.

Rated ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ by 150+ strategists from companies like Google, McKinsey, and Canva who now use our modern-day strategic insight system daily.

Thanks for reading - hope to see you inside,

— Tom