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(Bonus #1) my recommended toolsets for each business model

One of the first critical decisions you make is choosing the right set of tools that fit your business model.
The purpose of your first Bonus lesson is to help you succeed in this phase.

 To understand this, you need to understand the nature of cost and the investment–mindset. (You probably understand these, but I need to make sure.)

Cost always involves ALL of your resources.  Everything has a combined price. You spend your money, your time and your mind-energy. 

Efficiency by definition means that you’re spending optimally of all three without over-sparing in one at the expense of the others. (i.e. working 3x more to save on free tools)

• If you pick a too expensive toolset and overspend on money, you shrink your window to succeed. You put time pressure on yourself.
• If you add too much extra workload you build obstacles ahead of you that drain your time.
• If a tool is unnecessarily complicated you drain your cognitive energies and you’ll waste time learning just the tool. 

• Now if you get a tool which you do need – you’ll suffer in extra work, hardship, or risking of making a bad impression on your audience. (Which will increase the cost of acquisition, and the time to build earning momentum)

As you look at these points more closely, you see that time is always affected. The tools you work with primarily affect the time control of your business. Of how fast you can get forward.

What I see is that novice entrepreneurs mostly fall into the trap of focusing on collecting apps in the hope of gaining advantage, instead of focusing on earning as simple as possible. 

So as a general rule, you should

1. Aim to have the bare minimal set of tools at the get go. Tools that you absolutely need. 
2. That support your No.1 critical activity : EARNING (serving customers in exchange for money)
3. They each should do the one thing extremely well that you need them for.
4. They should be affordable for a starting business.
5. They should be a joy to use, and look great towards your customers if they see it..

And the ultimate check question to ask: 

Each must be a good investment.

Investment means you pay the cost (money, time & mind) to see a higher return in all 3. Return in earning potential, return in less effort, less thinking needed.

So your ideal tool should give back more money, more time, more mind-energy spared, instead of giving you an extra job, costing an arm & a leg and locking all your cognitive capacity to just operate. 

Now if this was a bit too abstract so far, don’t worry, you are through the theory, let’s dive into the actual list of tools that you should pick. 

Your start pack to any business adventure

You find more reference on this in the My Toolbox page. So as a brief list, you’ll need:

A Project manager, a Writer, a Thinker, an Operations manager, some lightweight design tools, business administration and security tools.

• Workflowy (for taking notes & managing projects)
• Scrivener (for writing)
• Miro (for visual thinking & brainstorming)
• Airtable (as an operational datasheet/database)
• Remove elements, Smart resizer, Remove background, or Canva & Picmonkey for more elaborate design tasks
• security tool(s) (Pass, DNS, VPN, backup etc.)
• invoicing
• domain host (Namecheap)
• Cloudflare CDN if you have a site on WordPress (makes the site faster & safer)
• Google Tag Manager with Google Analytics

Something to plan, write, visualize, account, design, secure, administer with. Plus a great host for your site. Let’s get to the specialized tools.

Your specialized toolset by business model

(I’m listing some of my favourite models, there are many more of course, with infinite way to combine and variate them)

Power Community model 

For a power community/membership model this is the set you’ll need. (You can read a step-by-step guide on how to nail this model here.)

• Circle (community platform)
• Convertkit (email automation)
• Zapier / Integromat(Make) (integration tools)
• Stripe (payment processing)
• + the ‘Start pack’ listed above

You will probably use FB ads from pretty early on, so make sure GTM and Analytics is set up correctly. There are additional Metric tools specifically for recurring payment, but these can come later.

authority blog model

In this model your aim is to build a returning audience by climbing higher and higher on domain & page ranking. (thus earning organic traffic)

You can just run a hobby blog and write about anything, but if you want to do it pro, you publish by a content strategy. You map out the keywords you attack with each post, based on the domain rank of another site, topping that keyword. As you publish the posts you cycle it through the social channels and make a reach out campaign for links to other relevant, non-competing authority sites.
This model start earning slowly, so be careful not to overspend on data & SEO tools. You can monetize the traffic by A) affiliate links, B) ad placement or C) by melting other business models into it.

So for all this you will need:

• WordPress (you’ll have it set up from your hosting)
• Mangools (for keyword research and SERP analytics. I’d do the initial competitive research in AHRefs, within the trial period)
• Google Analytics w/ G.TagManager (free)
• Cloudways hosting
• Hunter for managing the outreach rounds
• Jasper – AI writer to speed up your first draft and less important page copies (you’ll still need to re-edit, Google penalizes pure AI generated text)
  
  You should approach link building (at least in the beginning) with the mindset of building partnerships and collaborations not just bulk sending “pretty-please” templates.

Later you can add/Upgrade:

• After you can afford it, upgrade to AHRefs. It’s much more powerful than the Mangools package, but much more expensive too.
• Buffer is a useful tool to schedule and manage your publishing cycle
• Once you are established (10-15k visitors / mo), you can switch to Woodpecker for the outreach, it is a more versatile tool than Hunter.
• If you want to build a mailing list, use a simple mailer that can match your style. Flodesk is the best choice for this model, great simple interface and your emails will look simply gorgeous.

With wordpress, you’ll want to use these plugins for a start:

• Thrive Theme builder (there is a cheaper combo of just the theme + Architect you don’t need the whole suite)
• Redirect
• Duplicate Page
• Rank math or Yoast SEO plugin
• Smush Image optimizer
• LiteSpeed Cache or WP Rocket
• Akismet anti spam
• Wicked folders
• Wordfence or Bot Protection

Where to learn about this model & SEO: I think Authority Hacker is the best source, but there are quite a few good ones. Search for SEO tool reviews, that will give you a good list.

Affiliate site + list

You are recommending (or promoting) apps, products or services that you believe in, with a affiliate partnership of the brand. The brand then will pay a small commission after a sale.
The hit-n-run version of this is that you run ads to landing pages with no established relationship to your readers. I don’t like that too much and be aware that FB can fry your account if you are not careful of what you promote.

The second option that I prefer is having a site+list offering a ton of extra value for the readers if they join with your link. Keep in mind that this second option is a slow earner, it takes time for the commissions to stack up.

Hit-n-run approach

• Instapage or Unbounce (hosted salespages)
• you’d probably also need an ads spying tool for identifying the best performing ads of your competitors
• Jasper – ai copywriter for the ton of ad versions you’d test

nasty business…

Review site approach

• same setup as with the authority blog +
• for the email list: Sender is the best choice for this model. Good UX, flexible styling, without notable compromises. I recommend to start with the prepaid credit version till you start earning.

Online (video) courses

This is a very versatile and potentially lucrative model that you can attach to any other. You can do it text only, in that case you only need a membership plugin for the gated content. Video however is perceived as a higher value.
There are many ways to puzzle this together.

A) Hosted platform: Hosted course platforms has the speed advantage for you have everything ready made. On the other hand they all suck a bit. They all have their annoying no-can-do’s, their integration limitations, their hard to edit themes, and tracking difficulties.

B) WordPress & puzzle: The other option is to use a Wp plugin. It will take more time to set everything up and you have to pay for a video host, but you will be more flexible on the long run.

You will need these tools for both options

• Convertkit (advanced email tool for highly targeted campaigns)
• Stripe (for payment processing)
• Camtasia (for video editing)
• some high end backup drive like
• lighting equipment and a stance
• if you have a newer mobile you can film with that as long as you have good lighting
• use Canva & Miro for the slides and supporting material if you are not an Adobe pro

+For the B) WP-puzzle option

• WordPress on Cloudways with Thinkific Theme Builder (for the base site & landing pages – start with this not the course and sell the waitlist)
• Accessally membership plugin (it is the best choice as for now. It has membership & course management, cart, affiliate promos covered in one hood + it’s tag based integrating with the better email tools) It’s a bit more expensive though. (a good alternative may be MemberMouse)
• Vimeo (for video hosting)

I do not recommend a hosted landing page tool like Unbounce for this model, at least not until you are earning and spending 6 figures on FB ads. Then it may make sense to test a lot on sales pages with a dedicated tool for that.

OR if you choose a hosted course platform (A)

• They are all pretty much the same saying that they are all different. I worked on Thinkific the most, but I heard good things about Podia too if you want to test alternatives.
• You will still likely need WP for the core site and landings for what these have are very inflexible to edit and doesn’t convert well. Cross-platform tracking will be a pain though.

There are a lot more, but they are either more expensive for the same, or suck more for the same cost. If you are interested in why I don’t list something, feel free to reach out and ask, I probably worked on it at some point.

The courses you can redistribute on Udemy & Skillshare with a little recut. This model is greatly supported by a Youtube video blog model.

Paid publishing model

• Convertkit alone is all you need, as it handles payments and optin pages out of the box and favors long sequences. Leaving may be tricky though as everything under one hood.
• If you want to be less dependent and need your emails to look ridiculously beautiful a great alternative choice is Flodesk. For this you’ll need Payhip (checkouts) + Zapier to connect to Flodesk. Flodesk has a flat price and using my link will half it for the first year.
• Stripe (payment processing)

In this model you build a list that you monetize from the get go. The List is the product. I like love this one! High earning per subscriber rate, naturally high opens, and a small clean list to work with. Of course you can mix it with other models and sell or promote further products or services in the list.

You can test new list concepts on Revue or Substack, but due to their cut it will make sense to migrate to CK or Flodesk once something is validated.

Here is an approximate overview of the characteristics of the different models:

Business Model	Tools & assets needed	Initial Workload	Daily Workload	Front cost	Time needed for high earning
Power Community	☁	⛏⛏	✎✎✎	$$	⌛⌛⌛
Courses	☁☁☁	⛏⛏⛏⛏	✎	$$$	⌛⌛
Authority blog	☁☁	⛏⛏⛏⛏⛏	✎✎✎	$$$	⌛⌛⌛⌛⌛
Youtube/Tiktok Vlog	☁☁☁	⛏	✎✎✎✎	$$$	⌛⌛⌛⌛
Affiliate site+list	☁	⛏⛏⛏		$	⌛⌛⌛⌛
Paid newsletter	☁	⛏⛏⛏	✎✎	$	⌛⌛
Webshop	☁☁☁	⛏⛏⛏⛏	✎✎✎✎	$$$$$	⌛⌛⌛
Freelancing	☁	⛏	✎✎✎✎✎	$	⌛