Organization + Systems
A Look at How We Run Our Business: Inside Our 2023 Tech Stack
September 28, 2023
At DaSilva Life, we’re big on helping our clients make the most of their software to help them grow their businesses. After all, growth is a hard thing to do if you don’t have the backend organized, right?!
This is exactly why having an arsenal of tools and software at your disposal is so important, no matter what stage of business you’re in!
So it would only make sense that we also have our own tech stack to help us too! We couldn’t do what we do without staying organized, and all the tools we’re covering today are our go-to's.
Come find out why!
Small disclaimer: The prices in this post and video reflect the current prices as of September 2023 and are subject to change.
Already have an idea of what you like? Skip the notes and go straight to the good stuff — here’s the list of links for all the tools mentioned in this post!
Loom has been really helpful for our business because it cuts literal hours worth of meetings every single week. No need to run through project briefs on Zoom, and no need to hop on a lengthy call mid-project just to get a few questions answered.
You can record a video while also recording your screen, making it easy to loop people in on, well…everything! SOPs, project briefs, you name it.
Loom runs at $10 per month per user. There is a free version, but it only allows you to record up to five minutes at a time (whereas the paid one allows unlimited time on recordings). However, with a team of five full-time employees, we only pay for two seats, and that seems to work well for us.
Why do we use both Dropbox AND Google Suite? Because a long time ago, someone recommended that to us, and it worked. And because it’s been a great system for us, we continue to use it!
But if you want to separate them, or pick one over the other, that’s fine too. You do you!
Dropbox is a great place to store your files electronically, and it works especially well if you want to store or send large files. Our subscription costs us $11.99 per month, but there are other options depending on what you need for your business!
While Google Suite does have cloud storage capabilities in Google Drive, we use Dropbox. However, we still use so many things inside of Google Suite (Calendar, Docs, Sheets, Gmail, etc.).
And while we do tend to gravitate towards using ClickUp for a lot of the features Google Suite offers, it’s still great to have for clients who may not have ClickUp.
Google Suite costs $6 per user per month, and because we have all of our email domains there (along with our full-time employee email addresses and such AND our general email inboxes), this is a must-have for us!
Remember AOL instant messaging? Slack is kind of like that, but for business. That doesn’t mean it’s any less fun, though (if your idea of fun is streamlined communication…which to us, it totally is!)
There is a free and paid version, and we spend $47.63 per month (it’s $8.75 per user, per month), and it’s been an expense that has been well worth it! Slack has made communicating with our team (full-timers AND contractors) and clients a lot easier. We just delegate communication “channels” and it keeps conversations organized.
I will say now that we have a full-time designer on our team, Canva isn’t something we use as much. But if we need a quick slide deck, or any other type of design with a faster turnaround time OR it’s something we can easily put together, Canva is a go-to.
Canva also has a free and paid version ($14.99 per month per user, or there is a “team” option).
Recently, we made the switch from Kajabi to Circle. While Kajabi has been a great tool for us to host our online courses inside of Systems School, we felt like Circle had a much more community-centric approach. Which was perfectly on-brand for what we’re doing inside of those courses!
Circle runs us $169 per month, and it’s a little bit cheaper — we were paying $199 a month for Kajabi.
Our ActiveCampaign email marketing subscription runs us $186 per month. Yes, it’s expensive BUT it has been worth it.
We have a large number of email subscribers, which is part of the reason the cost is so high. But, there are a lot of features we love on ActiveCampaign (like automations and integrations) that other providers haven’t been able to offer.
Later is a great tool to make social media fit a little bit better into your workflows each month. If you want an easier way to manage social media across all of your platforms, this is it! You can schedule it all at once. Amazing!
Plus — you can visually lay out your posts before they go live, so you can make sure everything always looks professional and polished.
Later starts at $25 a month on the base plan (which is what we have, and it’s definitely enough for our team!).
There are several great options for web hosting, but we’ve found that Webflow works the best for us. Something to note though — it has a HEFTY learning curve, but if you can work your way through that, it’s very customizable and can work well for pretty much any online business.
Make and Zapier are both integration tools that can help connect multiple platforms at once. They string all of our tools together so that we have one, seamless workflow.
While they both have a lot of the same functions, Make is pretty much Zapier on steroids. The only downside is that while they do have a lot of tools, they don’t have all the ones DaSilva Life needs, so we sometimes have to revert to Zapier.
Make also has much more of a learning curve than Zapier, but we work with a consultant to help us figure it all out!
AI is still pretty new, and while we’re also still trying to sort out how it can fit into our workflow, we do use a few AI tools to help us out. Mainly just Fathom, a free tool for recording and transcriptions, and ChaptGPT for when we’ve got writer’s block and need help creating notes. Both are free to use.
Because we do sell digital products and online courses, we need a simple method for checkout. Enter: ThriveCart! You’ll pay a large one-time fee of $690, but that gives you access for life. (Plus, you can also keep your sales funnel there too, so you’re actually paying for a lot more than just payment processing.)
Sometimes we will use Stripe, and Wise when it comes to paying contractors. Both are free to use with a small transaction fee on every transaction (we usually don’t pay more than a dollar for this).
And of course, we never leave home without our trusty sidekicks — ClickUp and HoneyBook! We do want to note that while we get both tools for free since we are consultants, the regular prices are still pretty reasonable (and TOTALLY worth it!).
You already know that we have lots of good things to say about ClickUp, but in case you aren’t familiar with how AMAZING it is, here’s why.
ClickUp is a cloud-based project management tool that can be used across any online business in any industry. We LOVE how easy it is to communicate and collaborate with our team and task out assignments.
ClickUp usually runs at $19 per member per month on the business plan. Again, as consultants, we are able to get our memberships for free, but because we have five full-time employees, our total cost is $95 each month. But, each guest is free, so that’s a huge plus!
And HoneyBook — of course you know this is another one we love. HoneyBook is a CRM that makes it easy to set up clientflow (HoneyBook’s term for your client workflows) and keeps us from missing anything — whether that’s onboarding, during projects, or during offboarding.
As far as pricing goes, it normally runs from $8-$79 per month. And that number won’t change based on the number of users. So it’s a really great, price-conscious tool no matter how many clients you have.
If you want to learn more about how to use our two favorite tools in our tech stack in your own business, you’ll love Systems School!
Inside you’ll find all the resources you need to use ClickUp and HoneyBook like a pro. Choose from…
System School comes with lifetime access and updates, so you won’t ever have to worry about missing out on anything important. Learn at your own pace, and come back to it as many times as you need.
Spend less money and save more time getting your business organized — check out Systems School today!
LEARN MORE ABOUT SYSTEMS SCHOOL HERE →
