Every week there’s a new “10 AI Tools Every Entrepreneur Needs” post. Most of them read like affiliate-link bingo cards. A bunch of tools nobody writing the post has actually used, stacked next to each other because they all start with the same three letters.
I’m not going to do that to you, because I can’t stand it.
Instead, here’s what I’m actually running my business on right now, including one thing I just switched, and one thing I haven’t even set up yet but can’t stop thinking about.
The Squarespace-to-WordPress Thing (Or: My iOS vs. Android Moment)
I’m in the middle of moving my site from Squarespace to WordPress, hosted through Bluehost (you won’t find a single affiliate link) and the reasoning boils down to something a lot of people will recognize instantly:
Squarespace is the iPhone of website builders. It does a lot. It looks good doing it. And it is restrictive. Has a closed ecosystem, limited plugins, you play by their rules or you don’t play. WordPress is the Android of the equation: messier, more setup, way more you have to figure out yourself — but it’s yours. You can bolt on whatever you want. You’re not paying a premium for the privilege of staying inside someone else’s fence. You will be paying a premium if you’re heavy into plugins, but you can at least control that.
That’s really the whole decision. Squarespace does plenty — I’m not pretending otherwise — but it felt like I was paying a lot of money for a smaller box. I want more room to build in, and I want to stop paying Apple-tier prices for it.
If you’ve ever felt boxed in by a tool that’s objectively “good enough,” you already know this feeling. It’s not that the tool is bad. It’s that “good enough” and “actually yours” are two different things.
The Actual Stack
Here’s what’s doing the real work day to day:
Canva: for anything visual at the moment. I’m a designer, and Canva’s features which sometimes includes AI: image generation, one-click resizing across platforms, background removal, which means I don’t have to work too hard to be one. I’m currently working on learning Affinity, because honestly I got out of the Adobe world and I am trying really hard to not go back in. Except for After Effects. They still got me there.
Claude: for writing and, more importantly, for thinking through things. I used to run most of this through ChatGPT. I switched, and the honest reason isn’t some dramatic falling-out …okay it was but that was a while ago…you were all there you remember but anyway, it’s turned into more of a thinking partner than a text generator. I don’t use Claude to write for me, I use Claude to help me control my brain. ADHD is hard ya’ll.
Gemini + NotebookLM: for research. This is where I dump sources, articles, PDFs, whatever I’m circling before I write anything. NotebookLM is genuinely great at holding a pile of raw material and staying grounded to it instead of hallucinating a summary.
And that last one is where it gets interesting.
The Combo Nobody’s Officially Built Yet
Here’s something I haven’t set up yet, but I want to talk about it anyway, because the “why” is more interesting than the “how.”
Claude and NotebookLM, together, is a genuinely great pairing. I dump my research into NotebookLM, and Claude — as a thinking partner — is exactly what I’d want reading it back to me, asking questions, pulling threads. It’s such an obviously good combination that it kind of surprises me Anthropic hasn’t built an official version of this themselves.
Turns out, I’m not the only one who noticed. There’s a community-built bridge, using something called MCP (Model Context Protocol), that lets Claude actually query your NotebookLM notebooks directly. Read your sources, pull citation-backed answers, even trigger those Audio Overviews, all without you manually tab-switching and copy-pasting context back and forth.
Let’s talk about what it actually (unfortunately) is: it’s not an official Google or Anthropic feature. It’s a handful of open-source projects built by people who wanted this connection badly enough to build it themselves, held together with terminal commands rather than a polished settings toggle. That’s not to say it’s bad, if anything, it’s the more interesting story. It’s what the current AI-agent moment actually looks like: less “companies ship the obvious feature,” more “someone in the community gets there first because the need is real.”
I haven’t installed it yet. I’m writing about wanting to because I think that’s actually the useful part for you. Not a tutorial on a tool I haven’t lived with, but the reasoning for why it’s worth your attention before it becomes common knowledge. Or really for me to write about it not being a thing, Anthropic seeing it, and then going “oh yea” and building it. Pre-You’re Welcome.
The Actual Point
None of this is about replacing yourself or anybody else with software. Canva didn’t make me a designer, being an artist since I was 5 and some college courses did that. Claude doesn’t do my thinking for me. NotebookLM doesn’t do my research, it holds it so I can think more clearly about what I already gathered.
The businesses getting real value out of AI right now aren’t the ones that fired half their team and pointed a chatbot at the gap. They’re the ones treating these tools like what they are: a genuinely good assistant that still needs you. Your judgment, your workflow, your actual understanding of your own business to actually be worth anything at all.
I started looking into all of this for myself, honestly, before I ever planned to write about it. Turns out the research you do for your own business is usually worth sharing anyway.
If this scratched an itch, I’ve written more in this vein — on why you don’t need a special degree to use any of this (You Don’t Need a PhD to Use AI), what it means when giants like IBM start making big AI bets (When Giants Move), and what your own chat history might be telling you about yourself (What Happens When You Scream at the Mirror?).