JAKE'S
FAVORITE
TOOLS.

Automation is sequence made literal — the right message, the right moment, enforced by software. ActiveCampaign's segmentation and conditional logic is the best mid-market way to build it without hiring an engineer.

If you run an e-commerce brand, nothing else comes close. The revenue attribution, the Shopify integration, the flow logic. Klaviyo is the default for a reason.

The best platform for building a newsletter with a monetization model built in from day one. The growth tools are useful, not feature bloat.

Records local video and audio from each participant at studio quality, then stitches it together. The best remote recording setup for anyone doing video podcasts.

Edit video by editing the transcript. Remove filler words in one click. The fastest way to go from raw recording to finished clip, especially for short-form content.

For marketing teams without a full-time designer, Canva Pro fills the gap. The Brand Kit feature alone is worth the price if you have more than one person creating content.

Simple, clean social scheduling that doesn't get in the way. The analytics are good enough to understand what's working without the noise of over-engineered alternatives.

The best SEO toolset for understanding where organic traffic is coming from and where your competitors are winning it. The keyword difficulty scores are more reliable than alternatives.

Watch exactly where visitors are clicking, scrolling, and rage-quitting. Heatmaps and session recordings reveal conversion problems that analytics dashboards will never show you.

Free, authoritative data straight from Google. Most businesses set it up once and ignore it. Jake's take: the "Validate Fix" button is the industry's close-elevator-door button — press it, feel better, Google does what it wants anyway. The data underneath is still gold.

Where does your audience actually spend attention — which podcasts, channels, and voices do they trust? SparkToro answers with data instead of hunches, which is exactly where a Share of Brand Voice campaign starts.

Tracks branded search volume and visibility over time — the raw inputs of Share of Brand Voice. Pair it with Search Console: if branded queries are climbing, the brand is compounding.

Anthropic's Claude is where Jake does most of his AI-assisted writing and strategy work. The reasoning is more nuanced, the outputs require less editing, and it handles long-form thinking better than alternatives.

Still the best for rapid ideation, quick drafts, and anything that benefits from a broad knowledge base. Use it for the brainstorm; edit it like you wrote it yourself.

Paste in any copy and it tells you exactly where you're being wordy, passive, or hard to read. Jake runs every important piece of content through it before it goes live.

Jake runs his entire knowledge base, content calendar, and client documentation in Notion. The flexibility to be a wiki, a project tracker, and a CRM all at once is the point.

Record and send a 90-second video instead of writing a 500-word email. Jake uses Loom for client feedback, team instructions, and anything that's easier to show than explain.

The back-and-forth of scheduling kills more deals than people realize. Calendly removes it entirely. Jake uses it for all client bookings and adds an intake form to every meeting type.

The free CRM tier is solid and most businesses don't need to upgrade. For teams that do, the Sales Hub is the most intuitive pipeline management in the mid-market.

The connective tissue between every other tool on this list. When a form fills, a contact gets added, a Slack message fires, and a task gets created. All automatically. Jake's stack would fall apart without it.