What are the 5 tools you simply couldn't do your work without?
This could be related to your industry, or even a side project you're working on.
Here are my 5 (I couldn't function without them):
Grammarly – proofreading my texts, not just posts, but also client communication
ChatGPT / Claude – mostly brainstorming, help with copy, and summarising
Figma – I can put the basic graphics together quickly.
Translator – sounds incredibly old-school, but English is not my mother tongue
Gmail – and not only for communication, but also for storing ideas and sending myself email reminders for posts
[and soon one more that I am working on – SafeLimit – prevents me from being banned on LinkedIn, so I will not lose my account.]
What are your five?
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Mine, running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at once:
Claude - drafting, structuring my thinking, and now most of FounderFlow's own copy
Google Sheets - still where the real financial planning happens across all three businesses
Slack - the care home team lives in it, can't imagine coordinating shift handoffs without it
Loom - recording quick walkthroughs instead of scheduling another meeting
FounderFlow - my own build, but genuinely the one I check first each morning since it tells me which of the three businesses actually needs my attention today instead of me guessing
Agree with Adrian's "becoming the glue" point above, that's exactly the problem I built FounderFlow to avoid, I don't want to be the one manually reconciling signals across ventures.
AISA AI Skills Test
Claude for thinking through complex problems, Cursor for code, Perplexity for research, Figma for design, and Notion for everything else. honestly the biggest unlock wasn't any single tool though, it was learning when to use which one. most people default to ChatGPT for everything when different tools have very different strengths.
Mobile dev here who also handles his own SEO, so my five are a bit of a mix:
Flutter. My whole agency runs on it, one codebase for both stores.
Claude Code. Went from toy to teammate for me in about a month, it now runs my SEO audits end to end.
Figma. Clients say yes to a picture much faster than to a paragraph.
Google Search Console. Humbling but honest, it tells you what Google actually thinks of your site instead of what you hope it thinks.
A plain notes app. Every idea, invoice and half-written post lives there.
Number 4 surprised me the most. Pages I was sure were ranking turned out to be sitting on page two.
My five right now:
ChatGPT / Claude — brainstorming, research and working through product decisions.
Gmail — most communication starts here, along with a surprising number of follow-ups and unfinished threads.
Figma — turning product and website ideas into something visual quickly.
DaVinci Resolve — every product demo and walkthrough we create.
Vortyx — keeping follow-ups, commitments and waiting items visible until they are resolved. Full disclosure: this is the product we’re building, so I use it every day 😊
Codex – I usually access it through the API in OpenCode rather than using the native app. The main reason is that my company requires registration for software that's not on the whitelist, and the native app is blocked by an application lock, so using the API is much more convenient.
OpenCode – At least for now, it's my primary development environment. I also use Cursor, VS Code with extensions, and various CLIs depending on the task, but OpenCode is what I spend most of my time in.
Notion – I use it to manage my to-do list, track development progress, and jot down random ideas that come to mind during vibe coding.
Google Translate (or similar translation tools) – I use it when reading technical documentation, articles, or news in other languages. It's also handy when I'm taking a short break and browsing interesting content.
Our work chat platform – We're still following a fairly traditional front-end/back-end collaboration model, so I spend a lot of time discussing requirements with product managers, QA engineers, and backend developers. Even though everyone is using AI now, our day-to-day collaboration workflow hasn't fundamentally changed yet.
My 5 right now: Claude for thinking through gnarly ops problems, Slack for the two teams that actually use it, Google Sheets for the weekly gut check I still do by hand, Gmail for basically everything else, and FounderFlow, which is mine, I built it because I run a software company, a care home and a cafe and kept missing the one thing that actually needed me that day. Disclosure since it's on this list: I'm the founder. It only speaks up when something's actually off, which turned out to matter more to me than a dashboard ever did.
my 5:
zextra.io - instagram content planning / dm automation
Claude/ chatgpt - for brainstorming
canva - thumbnail/ carousels
CapCut -for video editing
Discord - conversation
My 5:
Claude - 100% my favorite of all things. It automates an unbelievable amount of operations for me as an owner! EXCELLENT for vibecoding!!
ChatGPT - copywriting, some prompting
Canva - for general agency work
Capcut - Super easy to use for video editing etc.
Open Art - Great for videos, creating very specific images etc.
As a founder of a few companies, Claude has saved my sanity by summarizing my daily tasks in each company in terms of outstanding tasks and what to prioritize!
Claude
Canva
Gmail
Granola
Not linking to resist self-promote but has to be our in-house tool.
I don't think I'd manage well losing any of them. Could maybe find a replacement for Granola (Fathom for example) but other than that I'd say this are pretty integral to our work.
My 5:
1.chatGPT
2.Codex
3.google chrome
4.Gemini
5.MaoMao