My Minimal Ops Stack: 6 Tools That Actually Run the Business

Every SaaS company on the planet wants a seat at your table. They send the emails, run the retargeting ads, and sponsor the podcasts you listen to. If you said yes to every tool that promised to “streamline your workflow,” you’d spend your entire week toggling between dashboards instead of doing the work that actually moves the business.

I’ve been there. At various points running BestSelf Co, I’ve had active subscriptions to upwards of forty tools. Forty. Most of them overlapped. Several were solving problems we’d already solved. A few existed only because someone on the team had a preference and nobody questioned it. The monthly bill wasn’t even the real cost — the real cost was the context-switching, the duplicated information, and the meetings we held just to reconcile data living in three different places.

So I gutted it. I now run the company on six tools. That’s it. I do a quarterly tooling audit to make sure nothing creeps back in, and the filtering rule is simple: if a tool doesn’t eliminate a meeting, a spreadsheet, or a manual handoff, it goes.

Not “makes it easier.” Eliminates it. That distinction matters. Plenty of tools make things marginally better while adding one more login, one more notification channel, and one more thing to maintain. I’m not interested in marginal. I want tools that delete entire categories of work.

Here’s what survived.

Slack

Slack is the nervous system. Everything time-sensitive, conversational, or disposable goes here. If a message won’t matter in two weeks, it belongs in Slack.

We keep channels ruthlessly pruned — there’s no #random, no #watercooler, no graveyard channels that nobody reads but everybody feels guilty about leaving. Every channel maps to a function or a project, and when the project ends, the channel gets archived.

Slack is also where my OpenClaw agents report in. When an agent finishes a task, runs into an error, or needs my input, the notification lands in a dedicated channel. That means I can monitor everything the AI is doing without checking a separate dashboard.

Ghost

Ghost handles the newsletter and the publishing side of the business. It’s clean, it’s focused, and it does exactly two things well: email and content. I don’t need it to be a CRM or a landing page builder. I need it to send emails that look good and land in inboxes, and it does that consistently.

The newsletter is a core part of how I build an audience, and Ghost’s deliverability has been solid. I’ve tried ConvertKit and Mailchimp at different points — Ghost is simpler and I have more control over the experience.

Mercury

Banking shouldn’t be complicated, but if you’ve ever dealt with a legacy bank as a small business, you know it is. Mercury is built for startups and small companies, and it shows. The interface is clean, transfers are fast, and I can set up multiple accounts for different functions — operating, taxes, reserves — without calling a branch manager.

The real value is the treasury product. Idle cash earns yield automatically, and I can see a consolidated view of our financial position without exporting CSVs into a spreadsheet. It’s also where I manage team cards with spend limits, which replaced an entire expense-approval workflow we used to handle over email.

Conductor.build

Conductor is where orchestration lives — connecting the different parts of the business without writing custom code for every integration. It handles the automations that would otherwise require either engineering time or a human doing the same manual task fifty times a week.

Before this, I used Zapier for everything. Conductor is more powerful for the kinds of workflows I’m running now, especially anything that involves AI agents or multi-step processes. When a tool needs to talk to another tool and make decisions along the way, Conductor handles it.

Wispr Flow

This one surprised me. Wispr Flow is voice-to-text, and I’ve dictated over 1.85 million words through it. I use it for everything — drafting messages, capturing ideas, writing first drafts of articles, even composing long emails.

The speed difference is real. I type at maybe 60-70 WPM on a good day. With Wispr Flow I’m at 132 WPM and the transcription quality is high enough that I rarely need to go back and correct. It’s changed how I think about writing — I talk through ideas first, then edit. That’s a better process for me than staring at a blank cursor.

OpenClaw

OpenClaw is the AI layer that ties everything together. I run it on a dedicated Mac Mini, 24/7, with agents that handle my content pipeline, competitive research, error monitoring, and daily ops tasks. I wrote about specific AI agent use cases separately, but the short version is: OpenClaw replaced a part-time VA and several Zapier chains.

It’s not a tool in the traditional sense — it’s more like an employee that never sleeps, never forgets its instructions (once you set up the memory system), and costs a fraction of what a human would. The full setup guide covers how to get it running.

What didn’t survive

Plenty of tools had their moment and got cut. HubSpot was too heavy for what we needed — we aren’t running an enterprise sales motion, so the CRM overhead wasn’t justified. Notion was a wiki that required more maintenance than it saved. Linear was clean but overkill for a small team. Monday.com and ClickUp both tried to be everything and ended up being good at nothing for us. Airtable was useful until the AI agents could handle structured data directly. I also dropped Loom after realizing that most internal video updates could be a three-sentence Slack message.

The common thread: tools that get cut are the ones that create work to justify their existence. If you find yourself spending time organizing the tool instead of using the tool to get organized, that’s your signal.

I wrote about my earlier workspace setup a few years ago, and it’s striking how much has changed. The hardware is mostly the same. The software got dramatically simpler.

The point

Your ops stack should be a small, sharp set of tools where every single one earns its seat. Not because minimalism is trendy, but because every tool you add is a tax on your attention, your team’s attention, and your ability to move quickly. Run the audit. Cut what doesn’t kill a meeting, a spreadsheet, or a handoff. Keep what does. Revisit quarterly. That’s the whole system.