I have no ops team. No EA. No chief of staff.
What I have is a set of AI tools I’ve spent the last year testing, breaking, and refining into something that actually works for a founder running at speed.
This is the full stack — what I use, why I use it, and what I stopped using.
The Principle Behind the Stack
Every tool in my stack has to pass one test: does it give me back more time than it takes to use?
Most AI tools fail this test. They require so much prompting, correction, and context-setting that you’d have been faster doing it yourself. The ones that survive are the ones where the output is good enough on first draft that I only need to spend 5 minutes editing, not 30.
The Core Stack
Claude (Anthropic) — primary thinking partner
Everything strategic goes through Claude first. Investor updates, hiring decisions, pricing strategy, contract reviews. I treat it like a smart co-founder who has read everything but knows nothing about my specific situation — so I give it context, it gives me frameworks.
The prompt I use most:
“I’m a founder of an early-stage B2B SaaS startup. Here’s my situation: [paste context]. I need to make a decision about [topic]. What are the 3 most important things I should consider, what would you recommend, and what am I probably not thinking about?”
Notion AI — documentation and SOPs
Every time I do something more than twice I document it in Notion and use Notion AI to clean it up into a proper SOP. This is how I delegate without having someone to delegate to — future hires get a proper playbook, not a verbal download from my brain.
Otter.ai — meeting intelligence
Every external call gets recorded and transcribed. I don’t take notes in meetings anymore. After the call I paste the transcript into Claude and ask it to extract decisions, action items, and anything that sounded like a commitment I made.
Zapier — the connective tissue
I use exactly 4 Zaps. New form submission → Slack notification. New customer → add to CRM. Weekly → pull metrics and email them to me. New invoice paid → update my revenue tracker. I don’t use Zapier for anything fancy — just the boring connective tissue that saves me 20 minutes of manual work every day.
What I Tried and Dropped
ChatGPT — I switched to Claude for long-context work. Claude handles a full document or transcript without losing the thread. ChatGPT started hallucinating details in long conversations.
Jasper — too templated. The output sounded like AI wrote it, which is the one thing you can’t have in founder communications.
Copy.ai — same problem. Fine for marketing copy, useless for anything requiring nuance.
Monday.com — too heavy for a small team. We use Notion for everything.
The One Prompt That Saves Me The Most Time
This is the prompt I run every Friday before I close my laptop:
“Here are my rough notes from this week: [paste everything — decisions made, conversations had, things that went wrong, things that worked]. Write me: (1) a 3-bullet summary of the week’s real progress, (2) the 3 most important things to focus on next week, (3) anything that looks like it could become a problem if I don’t address it. Format it so I can paste it into my investor update.”
Five minutes. Done. Investor update written.
The Honest Takeaway
The best AI stack isn’t the most tools — it’s the fewest tools used consistently. I’d rather have 4 tools I use every day than 20 I use occasionally.
Start with one: Claude for thinking, Otter for meetings, or Zapier for automation. Get good at one before you add the next.
Want the Full Ops Prompt Library?
12 prompts for email triage, meeting summaries, weekly updates, SOPs, board updates, and more — free download.