The Tools I Trust to Run My Business

I run a real estate agency, a property investment operation, and an interior design firm out of Marbella, Spain. Mostly solo. There is no operations team, no EA, no office manager. What there is: a set of tools I've built my entire working day around — and an AI system that acts as my operating layer across all of it.

This is not a roundup. It's an honest account of what I actually use, what each thing replaced, and why I haven't moved on.

Claude Is My Operating System

I came to this gradually and then all at once. Claude started as a writing tool. It's now the thing I open before anything else.

Every morning I run a briefing — deal status, open tasks, what needs to move today. When a broker sends a property email, Claude processes it into a content pack: Instagram carousel copy, a YouTube Shorts script, a newsletter blurb, a portal listing. When I'm about to send a high-stakes email to an investor, I run it through a communication protocol I've built into Claude's context — it reads the person's profile, the deal history, and drafts something calibrated to the relationship.

The reason I stayed with Claude instead of cycling through everything that launches every week: it holds context reliably, it reasons well under uncertainty, and it doesn't hallucinate confidently. That last point matters more than any feature comparison.

Claude Code specifically handles my website builds. I describe what I want, it writes and deploys HTML. I don't need a developer for most things anymore.

Tana for the CEO View

Tana is where I keep my head. Every active deal, every project, every person I'm working with lives there as a structured node. My "Needle Movers" dashboard — the handful of things that actually move my business forward — is a live filter I check at the start of every session.

I tried to make Notion do this for years. It's a great database. It's a terrible operating system. Tana handles the way I actually think: fast capture, structured context, relationships between nodes. If Claude is the work layer, Tana is the thinking layer.

Fibery for the Operational Database

Deals, projects, web pages, accounts receivable — all of it sits in Fibery. It's where the operational record lives. When a deal moves from prospect to active, that status changes in Fibery. When I deploy a landing page, it gets logged in Fibery with the live URL and host.

I'm not going to oversell Fibery. It has a steep learning curve and the UI takes some getting used to. What it does that nothing else does: lets me model my business exactly as I need, not as the software vendor decided a business should look. For a solo operator running multiple revenue streams, that flexibility earns its price.

Shortwave for Email That Doesn't Run My Day

I have six inboxes. My default state for most of the last decade was living in Gmail tabs, moving between them manually, losing things.

Shortwave consolidates all six with genuine AI triage. It surfaces what actually needs attention and lets the rest flow through without demanding I process it in real time. The AI summaries on long threads alone have saved more cognitive bandwidth than I expected.

I specifically did not want Spark or Superhuman — both ruled out for different reasons, mostly around Todoist integration requirements and privacy. Shortwave fits.

Todoist for What Gets Delegated

My own tasks live in Tana. Todoist is for the team — recurring processes, delegated work, anything that needs to survive a context reset and land in front of the right person with enough information to execute.

When I give my content manager something to do, it goes into Todoist with the source link, the brief, and the deadline. He tags me when it's ready for review. I get a push notification. That loop runs without WhatsApp threads or status meetings.

I'm phasing out ClickUp completely. It served a purpose when I was trying to manage everything in one place. The overhead outgrew the value.

Zoho for the Brokerage Side

Zoho Bigin handles the DZT sales pipeline — contacts, deals, outreach stages. Zoho Campaigns handles email marketing for the Productivity Nerd list. Not the most elegant tools in their respective categories, but they're integrated, they're affordable, and they do exactly what they're supposed to do without requiring a consultant to set them up.

I don't believe in paying for CRM complexity at this stage. Bigin is a contact and deal tracker. When the volume justifies something bigger, I'll upgrade. Right now the bottleneck isn't the software.

Vercel for Everything That Goes Live

Every custom page I build — deal pages, landing pages, investor portals, buyer briefings — lives on Vercel. Fast, simple, free for the volume I'm running. Claude Code handles the build; Vercel handles the deploy.

I migrated off Netlify in May. There's nothing wrong with Netlify. Vercel's CLI integration with Claude Code just made the whole pipeline cleaner.

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The stack isn't perfect. There are gaps I know about and haven't fixed yet. But it works, it's mostly automated, and I can run the whole operation from my phone on a bad week.

If you want to follow how I'm building this — the AI workflows, the tool decisions, what's working and what isn't — join the list below.