For women building something — a life, a business, a self. Field Notes from The Audacity Project, essays on culture and self-awareness, and the kind of honest reflection your group chat has been having for years. Direct to your inbox.
Tools I'm Using As I Build This Brand
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This is not a "top tools for creators" roundup. I am not qualified to tell you what is best. I can only tell you what is currently open on my laptop and actually doing work. I run this brand alone. No team, no studio, no agency. So every tool in this list earned its spot the same way. It either makes something easier, or it makes something possible that otherwise would not be. Here is what the stack looks like right now. Content and Video CapCut (paid) Canva (paid) Thinking and Organization Claude Scheduling and Analytics Metricool (free trial) Email and Community Kit (formerly ConvertKit, free to start) Website Netlify (free) Affiliate and Commerce Amazon Storefront (free through the affiliate program) ShopMy (free) What I Am Actually Paying For CapCut and Canva Pro. That is it right now. Everything else is free or being evaluated. I am deliberate about monthly costs because every dollar has to justify itself at this stage. That is the stack as it stands. I will update it when something changes. |
Joyhdae
For women building something — a life, a business, a self. Field Notes from The Audacity Project, essays on culture and self-awareness, and the kind of honest reflection your group chat has been having for years. Direct to your inbox.
I want to tell you about the specific experience of watching someone read your pitch and say nothing. Not the general version. The actual version. The one where you wrote the email carefully, over more than one sitting, and you chose every word with the particular attention of someone who knows this is a first impression and you do not get to make another one. You positioned yourself well, you think. You were specific without being presumptuous. You made the ask clear without making it feel...
Phase 1 is over. I want to sit with that for a moment before I say anything else. Thirteen weeks of declaring things. Of putting words and intentions and a whole infrastructure into the world and then living inside the weight of having said them. Of finding out, slowly and with some discomfort, which of my declarations were real and which were aspirational in a way I hadn't fully examined. It's over. I made it through it. And today, Phase 2 begins. The Build. The name felt right when I chose...
Five days until Phase 2. I've been trying to figure out why The Build feels bigger than The Declaration did. Phase 1 had its own fear. The exposure, the public commitment, the not knowing if anyone would care. But this is different. The Declaration had a safety net I didn't fully acknowledge at the time. If nothing happened, it was still early. Still the beginning. Still the phase where not having results yet was part of the plan. Phase 2 doesn't have that. Phase 2 is the part where the work...