Two of My Five Marketing Tools Aren’t AI

Count the tools you pay for every month. Not the ones you meant to cancel, the ones that actually take money. Most solo operators I speak to land somewhere between six and eleven. Then I ask which ones they opened last week, and the answer is usually three. A team of one does not have a tool problem. It has a task problem.

Here is the version that works. Name the jobs that genuinely have to happen every week. Buy one thing per job. Cancel everything that is not doing one of those jobs, no matter how clever it is. I run on five. Two of them are not AI at all, which is the part I did not expect when I started cutting.

Decide what to say

I keep one AI chat assistant and a single running note of things customers actually said. The note is the important half. An assistant looking at nine real sentences from real buyers writes something only you could have written. The check: can you point at the customer sentence that caused each of your last three posts? If not, you are short of input, not ideas.

Make the thing, once

Copy, image and a short video. I keep one tool that covers design and video in the same place, and the same assistant for the words. Every handover between applications is where the week goes. The check: time yourself making one post and count the tools you touched. Three or more means you are paying for the seams, not the work.

Put it in front of people on a schedule

I keep one scheduler. Which one matters far less than the rule: load the week in one sitting, then stop thinking about it. The check: look at your last ten posts in a row. If four make the same point, that is not an audience problem.

Answer the people who reply

The tool I refuse to add is the one most often recommended. I keep my inbox. If you sell your time, a reply is a person who nearly wants to buy. If you sell a thing, it is a person with a problem that becomes a refund or a repeat customer, depending on how fast and plainly you answer. An assistant can draft it. An assistant should not send it. Being one person is the advantage here.

Write down what happened

The fifth job is not a marketing job, so almost nobody has a tool for it. I keep one spreadsheet: what I did, what it cost, what came back, one row a week. Dashboards tell you the number, not what you did that week, so you end up running the same month twelve times with slightly different graphics. The check: without opening anything, say what you changed six weeks ago and what happened next.

Your one job this week

Find one subscription you did not open last week. Open your bank statement, not your tool list. Before you cancel it, name the job it was supposed to be doing. If that job is already covered by something else, cancel it. If the job is real and nothing else covers it, keep it and stop feeling guilty about it.

The week in brief

• ChatGPT ads can now start a conversation: OpenAI began testing sponsored agents on 16 September, where clicking the ad opens a chat with an agent the business set up.
• HubSpot argued the opposite of this issue at Unbound 26 with a bigger AI bundle. Name the task it removes, or do not buy it.
• Google is piloting paying publishers when its AI quotes them, reported on 14 September.
• Google is testing ads inside AI Mode results, first seen on 4 September.
• LinkedIn now ranks comments rather than listing them in the order written. A long, specific comment outranks a fast, empty one.
• X shut down its old creator payout program on 8 September. Own the list.