The Modern Tech Stack
Running a business today, like it or not, means being a bit of a tech savant.
Long gone are the days where mailing a personal note making a quick phone call was enough to keep new business flowing.
Today’s businesses, whether a one-person opp run from your kitchen or a billion-dollar enterprise means managing a tech stack – a collection of digital tools you rely on to run your business. Generally your tech stack includes various software platforms, including your email platform, your word processsing, your project management tool, your website builder, your graphic design tool, and now, of course, your AI assistant.
For a long time, managing software meant navigating a whole lot of moving parts. This often included remembering exactly where that project plan was stored. MS Word? Google Docs? Monday.com.
Then came integrators
Then in 2011, Zapier.com was founded, followed shortly thereafter by Integromat (now Make.com). And so the official age of “automation” was born. Both were designed as bridges – pushing data between apps, eliminating the need for human interns rewriting and repurposing entire contact lists for each use case.
Today, automation is 500+ billion dollar industry. Zapier alone connects more than 5,000 different platforms.
But AI is doing something incredibly interesting: it’s not jsut creating content, it’s becoming the connective tissue between platforms. It is rewriting what automation means.
Your tech stack isn’t just a list of interconnected tools anymore. It’s becomeing a powerful knowledge management ecosystem.
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Let’s Talk Claude AI
Claude AI has long been known as strongest AI writing assistant, outpacing even ChatGPT. If you want AI-generated content that doesn’t sound like a machine wrote it, Claude is your tool.
But what has catapaulted Claude to invaluable partner, is something else entirely: connectors. These connectors (which in some cases fully eliminate the need for third-party integrators) have changed how Ai outputs are used. .
Claude connectors link directly to the tools I’m already using — Gmail, Google Calendar, Notion, and more. So, instead of copying and pasting Claude’s output into my documents, Claude pulls from my working documents, synthesizes what I’ve written, and then outputs its response back into my original documents.No copy and paste required.
More importantly, I can ask Claude to scan those same tools. As in, “Hey Claude, search my emails for any Google doc titled “RFP 2025” and s ummarize my recent proposals.”
Here’s an incredibly powerful real-use case. I was building a directory of New Mexico book artists for my Enchanted Artists business tool. I asked Claude to search my Gmail folder where I store all my emails from my arts group. In minutes, Claude had assembled an entire database in Google Sheets. Artist name, type of art, where the artist is located. I literally sat back and sipped my coffee while Claude did the groundwork.
➤ Read More: Search the Enchanted Artists: New Mexico’s finest book artists directory to see the results of my recent Gmail search.
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Organize Everything: Notion
If Claude is the heart of my tech stack, Notion is the brain.
My entire business life is organized through Notion — content calendar, client pipeline, speaking engagements, tool tracker, brand guidelines, newsletter drafts. If it matters to my business, it lives in Notion.
For new users, Notion is something of a chameleon. For beginners, it starts as a simple to-do list. For advanced users, it can quickly turn into a sophisticated project management system. What makes it different from every other tool is its flexibility: it can take a single checklist item and turn it into a separate page or a full relational database with the click one button. No copying and pasting required.
And now — this is where it gets genuinely powerful — Claude connects directly to Notion. I can ask Claude to pull context from my workspace, summarize a project, or find a note I buried three months ago. The line between “thinking in Claude” and “organizing in Notion” is starting to blur in the best possible way.
Favorite Notion moves
- My Sizzle Statement. This is the document I use to tell AI who I am, what I do, and how I want AI to represent me. I keep my statment in a dedicated Notion page and connect Claude directly to that page. That way Claude is always working from my current positioning — not a stale version of the work it remembers from six months ago.
- My strategic plan. Claude knows my goals quarter by quarter. When it creates outputs, it keeps things aligned with my goals, not generic best practices. Once a week, I ask Claude to reorder my home page to-do list based on my strategic plan and current priorities.
- The content database. Every blog post, newsletter, video idea, and social caption lives here. I can filter by status, platform, date, or topic in seconds. When I’m looking for new content ideas, Claude can search through what I’ve already written and surface angles I’ve overlooked.
- The reading list. I use the Notion browser extension to clip anything interesting from the web and send the clip directly into my Idea Factory page. No more lost tabs. No more “where did I read that?” Once a week I review my important “ideas” delete about two thirds of them and have Claude organize the rest baed on my strategic and content plans.
- Client and speaking pipeline. I treat Notion like a lightweight CRM. Every contact, every pending agreement, every follow-up lives in its own tracked space.
➤ Try This: Start Your Sizzle Statement: Your Sizzle Statement is your defining document. The reason why people choose you. It is also an essential tool to help AI understand who you are and why you’re the premium choice.
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Customer Care: Staying on Top of Leads
Every entrepreneur I know struggles with lead management. I’m no exception — I’d give myself a B+ on responsiveness, and I couldn’t hit even that mark without the following tools.
HubSpot
HubSpot is where all my customer relationship tracking lives. I use the free plan, and it does more than most people realize.
- Email tracking. HubSpot integrates with Gmail and tells me when someone opens my emails. For sales outreach, that intelligence is invaluable. (Yes, I’m watching if you open my emails. And I’m not the only one.)
- Business card scanner. Built into the HubSpot mobile app. Scan a card at an event and the contact lands directly in your CRM. No transcribing, no lost cards. If you want to get super techie, you can even set up an automated “nice to meet you email” for every card you scan per event.
- Booking links. I use HubSpot to power my Vision Call bookings — one link, you pick the time. No back-and-forth scheduling. The tool is also connected to my email provider, so if you opt in to my newsletter during booking, you’re automatically subscribed.
- List building. Everyone who books a Vision Call is automatically added to a segmented list so I can remember how and when we connected.
- Email templates. Every so often I do cold “Hey cool person I really want to get to know” emails. I write a great outreach email, save it as a template in Hubspot, and send personalized versions in minutes. Bonus: Claude connects to Gmail and can research my contacts beforehand, surfacing news or context worth referencing to make each email feel genuinely personal.
Bonus: Apollo AI
Brief honorable mention. Apollo.ai is the tool I use to surface emails for people I want to reach out to. It is technically a competitor to Hubspot, but you can search any contact, either by hovering on their business URL or on their LinkedIn profile, and Apollo AI will give you the email for one credit. (You get up to 50 credits per month.)
When I want to do a bulk outreach, like a wave hello to all marketing agencies in NM, Apollo is great for list building.) I’ll download the list, score it through Claude AI, and then start shooting out emaisl using my Claude Reseaarch/Hubspot tracking power duo.
➤ Learn more about how I use Apollo.io to locate hard-to-find emails and stay in touch with community leaders.
Your tech stack isn’t just a list of tools anymore. It’s become a powerful knowledge management system.
– Monica Poling
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Build & Publish: Your Digital Home Base
WordPress + GeneratePress
My website runs on WordPress with the GeneratePress theme — lightweight, fast, and SEO-friendly. WordPress powers nearly half the internet for good reason, and GeneratePress keeps your site lean and free of bloated code.
I host my site on SiteGround — not the cheapest option, but it has excellent uptime and responsive support. For domain registration, I use Namecheap, which lives up to its name.
If your site currently loads slowly, know that Google penalizes slowness heavily. Speed is not optional when you’re looking to opitimze SEO, and the Siteground – GeneratePress combo is a good fit to keep you out of Google’s doghouse.
Bonus: Carrd
For simple one-page sites, event pages, or landing pages, Carrd is hard to beat. The Pro plan is just $19/year — one of the best deals in any stack.
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Get Found: SEO Tools
SEMrush + SpyFu
These are my go-to keyword research tools. I use both because their data often differs, and together they give a fuller picture. SEMrush is more comprehensive; SpyFu leans harder into competitive intelligence. I’ve never paid for either and get solid value from the free tiers.
I also use Answer the Public, which maps out the questions people are really asking around a topic. I find it less actionable than SEMrush or SpyFu, but some people swear by it.
Yoast SEO
Yoast takes the keyword data I pull from SEMrush and SpyFu and helps me apply it directly to my WordPress pages. Think of it as your on-page SEO coach. The free version is plenty for beginners.
Still the best platform for B2B visibility and thought leadership. The newsletter feature in particular is worth using — LinkedIn promotes it to your connections and makes it easy to grow an audience without a separate website.
I republish my newsletter as a LinkedIn newsletter and almost always the LinkedIn version pullls better with SEO than the version I host on my home page.
My follower numbers are nowhere near “celebrity creator” status, but I have made a number of amazing business contacts through LinkedIn.
Automation: Zapier & Make.com
As you can see, I play with a lot of tools. It’s no small feat to remember what I wrote and/or posted and where that expertise is housed.
Automation is the glue that binds all this data and all these platforms together. If you need to move data from one tool to another — collecting emails from Zoom and pushing them to your email list, for example — you need an integrator. Zapier is the original, and Make.com is a strong alternative. (N8N is a third option, but requires more technical skill than most small business owners have time for.)
A few automations worth building immediately:
- Someone fills out a contact form → autuomaticaly added as a contact in HubSpot or MailerLite
- Someone registers for an event → they receive a welcome email + get listed in your CRM
- You post a new blog → it gets auto-posted to LinkedIn
- Someone requests your portfolio → Get an automated email + added to your taks manager for a follow-up reminder
The free plans for both Zapier and Make.com cover more than most solo operators need. Paid plans start around $19.99/month.
The modern caveat
Claude has become so capable at connecting directly to your tools that it often eliminates the need for a separate integrator altogether. It’s worth becoming automation profiicient — but don’t be surprised if Claude changes how automations work and make some Zapier/Make integrations unnecessary.
➤ Read More: Think automation is a tool for a distant future? Check out what real people are building with automation.
Design: Canva
Canva is the great equalizer for non-designers. Social graphics, event flyers, presentations, annual reports, email headers — all of it, without hiring anyone.
The Brand Kit feature saves my logo, fonts, and brand colors so every design stays on-brand with one click. And there are plenty of great templates (even on the free plan) that are genuinely good and endlessly customizable
Through the Claude-Canva connector, you can generate a social graphic, resize a design for multiple platforms, or populate a branded template — without ever leaving the Claude chat. I can write copy in Claude and turn it into an on-brand Canva design in the same conversation.
It’s an incredibly useful integration.
The Bottom Line
The concept of an integrated tech stack has been around since the early 2000s. What AI has done is make those integrations smarter, faster, and — in many cases — automatic. The line between which tool does what is blurring in useful ways.
None of this requires you to interconnect everything at once. Start with one connection. Let Claude talk to Notion. Let HubSpot talk to your email list. Define where you have the most friction (I find for most of my clients, this hovers in the customer care/customer follow up), and build out those automations first.
Then use AI for what it does best: identify, organize, and surface data to free up your time to focus on the work that only you can do.
Key Takeaways
- A modern tech stack is a knowledge management system, not just a list of tools — and AI is making that stack more intelligent.
- Claude AI connects directly to Gmail, Notion, and Canva — eliminating the copy-paste workflow that slows most business owners down.
- Free tiers on Claude, Notion, HubSpot, and MailerLite cover most of what solo operators and entrepreneurs need to run a connected business.
- The Claude-Canva connector lets you generate on-brand designs inside a Claude conversation — no switching tabs, no reformatting.
- Automation tools like Zapier and Make.com are becoming optional as Claude’s direct connectors handle more integrations natively.
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