I counted the tools my team opens every day. Thirteen of them (honestly more, but these are the essential ones). One has been part of my workflow for more than ten years. Two others have been around for about five. The remaining ten either didn't exist five years ago or I'd never heard of them. I genuinely don't know how we'd run the company without them now.
What each one actually does for us:
1. Claude
Claude is the team's main working tool. Inside it we run projects for every platform and task: newsletter, Telegram posts, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more. The team doesn't just use these projects, they keep training them, adding new information so each one handles its tasks better every week. And when someone needs a cross-functional answer, they open that project and ask, because Claude already holds all the context. This newsletter went through Claude before any human on my team saw it.
2. Perplexity
I personally love Perplexity because Perplexity Computer comes with ready-made agents. A bunch of my personal projects live there, including my investment agent. As a company, we also use it to check how the podcast and my personal brand show up inside AI search results.
An example of ready-to-use workflows in Perplexity. Nothing to set up, just open and launch.
3. Codex
This is where our more complex builds happen. The latest one: a hiring workflow. Codex ranked every candidate, analyzed resumes, the team's comments, LinkedIn activity, even the interview transcripts, and handed us a shortlist.
And with the latest update there's ChatGPT Work: the same agent power as Codex, built for people who never open a terminal. It connects to your apps, runs its own browser in the cloud, and works across documents and tabs instead of just answering questions about them. I suspect we'll be spending more and more time there. The interface is slowly merging into one AI.
People ask why we pay for three AI subscriptions instead of picking one winner. They do three different jobs. And testing new features is part of my job as well (which I truly love!)
4. Figma
We wouldn't function without it. Every thumbnail and template in the company traces back to a Figma file, and our carousel agent builds from slide structures saved as Figma templates.
5. Gamma
Decks used to go out as PDFs, and most of the people we send them to read everything on their phones, zooming in to see the text. Now our decks are Gamma links. They open in one tap, look fab, and take zero design time. Our podcast prep deck and the presentation we send guests in our first outreach both live in Gamma now.
This is our beautiful Gamma deck that goes out to future podcast guests.
My day starts with the calendar. Technically it doesn't: Claude reads it for me and sends a morning summary before I've opened anything. My whole team has access too, so podcast recordings and content shoots get booked straight into free slots without a single "when are you free" message.
7. beehiiv
This email reached your inbox through beehiiv, one of the few email platforms built specifically for creators. My favorite feature is the recommendation network: other newsletters recommend Future Proof to their readers, and 176 subscribers joined us exactly that way. In email, where every subscriber is usually earned by hand, that matters a lot.
8. Granola
Every internal meeting gets transcribed automatically. Anyone who missed a call catches up in minutes, and follow-up tasks come straight out of the notes. Nobody on my team has taken meeting notes by hand in months.
9. Trint
This is the main workspace for my podcast production team. Every episode we record lives here, together with its transcript and the short videos we cut from it.
Working on the episode with Steve Jurvetson in Trint. The full video is here.
10. Peec
The newest tool we had to learn. If AI doesn't recognize you, you don't exist. Maybe that's not fully true yet, but it's heading there fast, so we're not waiting. We track 49 search queries to see where we rank against competitors inside AI answers, and we're actively working on getting the Silicon Valley Girl podcast recommended and my name recognized when people ask.
11. HubSpot
Our CRM. Every sponsor conversation lives here, and right now we're moving our entire podcast booking funnel into it too. Almost 400 contacts in that pipeline already.
12. Higgsfield
This is where our carousel agent generates the visuals for LinguaMarina, and the animated inserts in our YouTube videos are made here too. It's the tool where the team experiments most.
13. Telegram
Somehow all our communication ended up here years ago and nobody wants to leave. Every project has its own group, nothing gets lost, everything's always at hand. Telegram has no built-in AI, unlike Slack, so we solved it ourselves: a bot now sits in every work chat, remembers everything, and answers questions like "what's the mood around this launch" or "when did we agree on that deadline."
My favorite part of this list: everyone on the team keeps experimenting, someone tries a new tool, shares what worked, and it spreads to the rest of the team. So this list will look different in a year. I'd bet a few of these get replaced. That's normal. The habit that matters is checking twice a year what the team actually opens, and cutting what they don't.
Any tool you want me to focus on in the next emails? Happy to show our use cases.
Marina 💜
