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What if you could save 12+ hours per week in your business? Being a solopreneur sometimes focuses too much on the “solo” part: doing all the jobs, figuring things out yourself, and spending too much time in your business. But we didn’t start out own solo business to spend all of our time at our desk.
We did it because we want freedom: to travel; to spend time with our family; to watch a movie in the middle of a week day. That’s why Streamlined Solopreneur exists.
Each week, host Joe Casabona talks about how you can build a better business through smarter systems and automated processes. He does this by bringing on expert guests, and sharing his own experience from years as a busy solopreneur parent — so that being a solopreneur feels…less solo.
With every episode, you'll get insights, great stories, and 1-3 actions you can take today to improve your business processes and spend your time the way you want.
Joe Casabona: Some podcasters call the summer the summer of fun. Shout out to Upgrade one of my favorite podcasts. And I have been traveling a ton. I didn't mean for that to rhyme, but here we are. So I decided that this solo episode, instead of going deep into some automation will be about some tools that I'm trying either to help me automate better or just to save me time and do my job better.
I think that these are really interesting, which is why I want to share them with you, because I think they'll be interesting for you, too. There I go rhyming again. I promise I don't mean to do that. I'm really not a poet and I know it. Okay, that was on purpose.
I'm also going to talk about some partnerships I'm really excited about, the new memberships tier, and a little bit about my travel. Now in the pro show, I will be telling you about a new position I have. It's a part-time contractor position that I announced on LinkedIn. So if you follow me on LinkedIn, you might already know. But I want to get into the why of that.
I'll also be sharing a little bit more about the stuff that I'm working on as we move from summer to fall, something I want to share with you all. So that it. That's gonna be the whole episode. I hope you enjoy it. You'll be able to find all of the show notes over at howibuilt.it/327.
Do me a favor. I'm running a little experiment. If you like this episode, or you like this show, give it a rating and review in Apple podcasts. It won't help people discover the show, but it offers social proof for people who come across the show. And I think I'm really close to 100 reviews. I don't usually ask for them. If you are enjoying the show, I really, really, really appreciate a rating and review.
Now let's get to the brand new intro, and then the episode.
[00:02:04]
Intro: Hey everybody, and welcome to How I Built it, the podcast that helps busy solopreneurs and creators grow their business without spending too much time on it. I'm your host Joe Casabona, and each week, I bring you interviews and case studies on how to build a better business through smarter processes, time management, and effective content creation. It's like getting free coaching calls from successful solopreneurs.
By the end of each episode, you'll have one to three takeaways you can implement today to stop spending time in your business and more time on your business or with your friends, your family, reading, or however you choose to spend your free time.
[00:02:55]
Joe Casabona: All right, let's get into it. Let's just jump... Actually, you know, I don't want to make the partnerships I'm excited about too close to the actual sponsorships read though they might be anyway. So I will tell you about the partnerships I'm excited about right now.
The first is rss.com. I am a content creator and evangelist for them now. I alluded to that in the intro. Again, if you follow me on LinkedIn, you'll know that is the case. I just love what they're doing. What really convinced me to accept this evangelist position was I feel I'm pretty well-informed in the podcast space. And I didn't know about a bunch of features that they have to offer. And I fully believe that if I did they would be hosting my podcast right now.
So I want to tell the world about all of the super cool stuff they're doing. They are dedicated to helping podcasters their mission and their company credo, let's say, their kind of approach to everything really jives with mine. So I'm really excited to be helping them and helping podcasters understand them a little bit more. So I'll dive into that a little bit more in the Pro show, which you can sign up for over at casabona.org/join.
The other partnerships I'm excited about our sponsors either of my YouTube channel or this podcast. So since they have been doing it for a long time, I just love what they're doing in the LMS space. You know, again, I think that this is an ever-changing landscape and I've been really impressed with the stuff they've been doing.
The other podcast sponsor for the next few months here is Lulu. Lulu.com. I met the folks at Lulu over a couple of conferences dating back to last year at last year's Craft & Commerce. I saw them at CEX and then I saw them at Craft & Commerce again.
I am working on my next book about podcasts workflows and how to save time with your podcast. And having self-published, not my last book, the book before, I guess, I had two books come out during the pandemic and one was self-published. And doing it by myself was just such a nightmare. And Lulus... I mean, you'll hear this in the sponsor spot, I guess. But they help people sell books, and they are more of a partner then than, say, Amazon is. So I love that about them. They'll help you, you know, get set up, they'll do the printing and distribution, you keep all the profits. Again, now we're starting to sound like a sponsor spot again.
But I mean, if you've been a longtime listener, you know this about me. I don't get sponsors I'm not excited about or sponsors that I really believe in. And I'm even more excited. I've talked about my other sponsors previously, and how excited I am about them. But Lulu is very new and I'm really excited to be partnering with them on a couple of fronts. So super stoked. You'll hear more about them during the ad spot, the dedicated ad spot.
And then the last one I'm really excited about is Uscreen. They are sponsoring a few videos on my YouTube channel. They are, I think, the membership platform I would have gone with, again, had I known more about them when I launched the podcast Liftoff Playbook. They are not a sponsor of this podcast. I'll link to their video on my YouTube channel because I do want to make sure that I'm giving the appropriate time to the appropriate folks. But Uscreen is a very exciting platform. That's actually one of the ones I'm testing. So this is a good transition here for stuff I'm testing.
Uscreen is something I'm testing out, obviously, I'm using them for the videos I'm creating, but I think they'd be a very good candidate to move my new membership tier and community over to. Community is something I've wanted for a long time. I never felt that paying for Circle was super worth it to me. In part because I've tried to back in the community aspect, and I've switched platforms a bunch.
And the fact that the community aspect comes with the video library aspect in Uscreen is very appealing to me. And I've added a new tier to the membership that is extra for the community. So my thought is that people who are paying for the community will be more active there. And I'm not going to rely on that necessarily, but I am excited to actually have a viable plan and option for the community. So Uscreen is one of the tools that I am testing.
And while I'm here... I guess I'm jumping around a lot. Sorry. I guess this isn't gonna have chapter markers. The new membership tier that I just alluded to are actually specifically spelled out, I guess, I should say, is... Again, you can see it over at casabona.org/join. But now there are three discrete tiers. And I think the offering is really clear.
So How I Built It Pro, if you just want the ad-free extended version of this podcast, it is $5 a month or $50 a year. The $10 a month or $100 a year membership includes How I Built It Pro as well as my weekly members-only newsletter, access to my automations database, which is getting a big update soon. I've been traveling a ton, but I do have this mastermind retreat next week in Scranton that I'm super excited about and I'm probably going to work on a lot of the stuff for the membership there.
You also get live stream archives. Again, something I really like about Uscreen is my current workflow right now is streamed to YouTube, Twitch, Twitter/X, and one more I want to say that I can't... Oh, Facebook. And then when it's done, I need to unlist it or delete it from all those places and then upload it to Vimeo so I can send a link to my members.
But with Uscreen, since they support live streaming, I can simultaneously stream it to YouTube and my membership platform, and then just make it private in YouTube. And done. That's it. That's the whole workflow. So I'm really excited about that part of Uscreen.
And then again, the last year, 250 bucks a year or 25 bucks a month, that's an introductory price. That will almost definitely go up to like $40 or $50 a month because it includes everything I just mentioned, plus monthly live workshops that I would normally charge, you know, 200 bucks or something for in the community. They have community and live workshops for the community only.
So different from the live streams. They'll be more structured. They'll be actual takeaways from it. So that's the kind of stuff I'm really excited about. That's the stuff the Uscreen will be able to help me with, which is super cool. So there you go. I just covered the new membership tier for you.
I guess before the ad break, so what we'll do is, I'll talk a little bit about my travel, and then we'll have the ad break, and then I'll talk about the tools I'm trying as... not that I want to do that thing that YouTubers do where it's like, stick around till the end. Maybe I will put a chapter marker for the tools on testing just so people can skip to that part if they want.
But I'm actually gonna have to break up this recording into two because I have a meeting in a few minutes. If you're really interested in how the sausage gets made, I'll talk about that meeting in the pro show as well. So if we're keeping track here, the pro show is going to cover why I partnered with rss.com a little bit more, this meeting that I have in a few minutes.
The thing I actually have in my outline here, what I'm using Notion for. If you came across my blog, or you are a member, then you'll know I have a blog post a members-only newsletter called Why I Continue to Choose Airtable over Notion. But in the intervening weeks, I've decided, you know, Notion is really a lot better for certain things. So I've decided to give it the old college try. So I will be sharing in the pro show what I'm using Notion for.
So 10 minutes into this or more and we have a programming note, which is cool. I've done lots of travel. I tweeted or X this or whatever it's called—I posted it on Threads too—all of the travel that I've been doing this summer mostly with family, less just me. Though that's going to change coming up.
So starting in... when was CEX That may. So May I went to Cleveland for CX, in June I went to Boise for Craft & Commerce. And then for three or four solid weeks, I was traveling to various places via car. I went to visit my parents in New York. That's a three-hour drive from where I live. The next weekend, we took our annual family vacation to Bethany Beach, Delaware, which fun fact, that it's close to where the current president of the United States also vacations. Luckily, our vacation has never collided with his because I assume that makes navigating the townie traffic and logistical nightmare. No commentary on the president. Just when the President comes to town, there's a lot of secret service and things that might disrupt an otherwise peaceful vacation is my perception. I have no idea.
So we stayed there for a week. Then we got home the next weekend. I just got back from this. Actually, yesterday, as I record this, we went to Lake George to visit my brother. That's about a six-hour drive from us. And then in the coming weeks, I'm doing the mastermind in Scranton. I'm visiting my parents again. All three of my brothers will be in the same house for the first time since the pandemic. There will be four children there, three are mine, one is my nephew. So it's just gonna be wild but it will be fun.
And then I'm going back to Scranton for an alumni event. And then in October, the first week in October, I'm going to Cabopress. So it's just been very busy. Lots of travel, lots of good things. But as a result, you know, I've been kind of rethinking how I'm going to do my own workflows and keep on top of things. It's been a little difficult. I guess the summer is just always like that. Everything's in disarray.
But also, my son starts... you know, he's moving from daycare to pre-K. So our schedule is going to be a little bit up in the air for the first couple weeks of September. So a lot going on. But hopefully, the tools I'm about to tell you about will help.
But first, let's take a break to hear from our sponsors.
[00:15:51]
Joe Casabona: Okay, so let's get to a few tools I'm testing, playing with. The first one is the Arc browser. This has been in development for a while. It's been in beta for a while. I've heard people talk about it. But when I was on a call with my friend, Brian, he shared his screen, I saw the browser, and I immediately downloaded it.
So, first of all, it's based on Chromium, which is like the open-source browser framework that Google Chrome is based on. That means that switching from Chrome to Arc is seamless. Almost all of your settings, cookies, profiles, login things, passwords come over, because it's the same underlying architecture. It's like Arc built features on top of Chrome.
The things that don't come over, but are still there are custom searches. I wrote a blog post about custom searches. So, for example, I will type in G space to search Google. I'll type in TW space to search for my own tweets, like text in my own tweets. And I'll type in C space to search my blog. So things like that all super seamless coming over from Arc.
Some of the things I really love about Arc are spaces. I think spaces are better than tab groups. They are so subtle. So first of all, the entire everything that you would normally see at the top of browsers like the tabs, the bookmarks bar, the URL bar, that is all in a sidebar. So I don't know if you can change that. I haven't looked because honestly, I have a gigantic screen. So I am happy to keep everything on the left-hand side. I don't know if it changes or if you can make that change. But I love it over there. Probably not because it's got some actions based on the swiping left and right. But anyway.
So everything is over on the left. You can hide the sidebar with command.. or I assume on Windows... Well, it's not on Windows yet. So command... or I'm sorry, the... Yeah, command. The S little icon button, the little swirly icon. So you can hide the search bar there, you can pin pages to the top, then you have all of your tabs. Really nice tabs get archived, and you can auto archive tabs after a certain amount of time, 12 hours, seven days, 30 days so you don't just kind of collect tabs.
But the tab groups, I think these are so much better. The spaces rather. I think they're so much better than tab groups. So you create spaces by swiping to the left You navigate by swiping left and right. So you're creating these different contexts for your tabs. So I have a primary tab group, I have my own LinkedIn Learning scriptwriting tab group. I have my social profiles, I have a recording, like How I Built It recording tab group where I keep my show notes and stuff like that.
And then I have an rss.com workspace. And the thing I love about that is that each space can be associated with a different profile. So you can have completely different login cookies, or whatever, for the different profiles all within the same space. So for example, with rss.com, I have a different Reddit account, I have a different Adobe account. I have a different Quora account. And I don't need to open up an incognito browser to be logged in on those accounts in the rss.com space.
So workflow stuff, absolutely incredible. I love it. I think spaces are absolutely much better. It's very out of sight, out of mind too, right? They're very easy to get to, but very out of sight out of mind. So really love that.
Each space can also be customized by sidebar color, icon, which can be an emoji or a built-in icon, and then the name. So you can easily identify them. All of the icons slash emoji are also across the bottom. If you swipe all the way left, then you also get access to a few other features. I should probably do a whole video on this. I'm not going to go deep into everything.
But they have built-in notes, which can be treated as a tab and then you can export them easily which I love. Because I'll be like looking at a website, maybe for a sponsor or talking points for a sponsor, and I'll be on a right at the same time. I can keep all of that in Arc now.
I kind of alluded to this, but they also have a split view. So you can have two tabs open in the same window at the same time, which is super awesome. Love that. That's kind of tab navigation stuff.
The way they handle YouTube videos is like a chef's kiss. It's perfect. So you open up a YouTube video and then you navigate away. Video keeps playing but you can't see it. Nope. It opens up... This is any live video. So like if you have Google Meet open as well... Well, I shouldn't say any. But a lot of... it's happened multiple times for me with playing video. So as long as you're using the right API, I guess, a little square, a little box will show up in the right-hand corner with that active video so you can browse while having the video in the corner, which is super great.
With Google Meet, I've been able to browse sites while also keeping an eye on the meeting, which is awesome. But maybe I'm looking something up for the meeting or maybe I'm bored. But it's most likely the former. I try to only have meetings where I have to pay attention, right. So anyway, love the way love, love, love the way that's handled.
You can resize as well. So if you don't need as much screen real estate, then you can have the video open. It's fantastic. They also have a Google Calendar integration. So if you pin Google Calendar or you have an open Google Calendar tab and you hover over it, it'll show you your upcoming meetings, which is super cool.
The last thing I'll mention here, there's so much, but the last thing I'll mention is they make keyboard shortcuts a lot more obvious. So like if I want to copy my active URL, I press Ctrl Shift C and that gets copied to my keyboard without all of the tracking, like UTM code stuff, which is cool. But usually, if I'm hovering over something, and it has a keyboard shortcut, it will tell me which I think is really great, too. So that's Arc. I've spent far too much time on Arc but I like it a lot.
I will not spend as much time on the other stuff, because it's just too much to cover in this episode. But also like talking through these tools is a little... it's a little clumsy, right? Videos would be better for this. Okay.
So the next tool I'm trying is Voxalyze. This is analytics and SEO for podcasts. So it's pretty affordable. It's like eight bucks a podcast. There's probably some coupon code floating around that will get you a discount. But I like it because I've been experimenting more with my podcast's visibility. And this helps you. It'll give you a keyword planner. It will tell you how your show ranks among active podcasts for that week.
Right now I'm in the top 2%. Couple weeks ago, I was in the top 1%. But I've been on vacation. So I haven't been promoting the show as much. That makes sense. It'll tell me, you know, the keywords I'm counting for, listener distribution, and stuff like that.
And then they also have analytics. So transistors analytics are good. But I like having a third party as well just to kind of compare and contrast. Podcasting, all of this is kind of a black box. So I like getting that second opinion. But this also has a downloads heat map, right?
So I know that Mondays at 2 a.m. or 3 a.m. are when most of my downloads come or when... I shouldn't say most. But 648 downloads happen at Monday at 2 a.m. Guess what happens at Monday at 2 a.m.? The episode publishes. So I can reasonably guess that I have around 650 subscribers. And then that changes throughout the day. But Monday is definitely my best day.
Now on Friday, you know, Friday at noon is also pretty heavy for some reason. I do my clips on those days. And the last time I was late publishing it, so maybe that's the case. But I'm excited to see what that looks like. Like I said, they support multiple podcasts. So I can see how my new podcast is doing as well, what the visibility looks like, and again, keywords and planning and things like that.
They just changed their pricing model. And I'm really excited about this because now they do it per podcast. This is definitely something where I'd happily spend eight bucks for a month to look at the analytics behind the people I do podcast audits for. So you know, I'm thinking I just get a snapshot for an initial audit. But maybe for a more advanced audit where I look at their stats over a month, I can provide information for them as well. And that would be a nominal fee for me, right? I would look and analyze them. Otherwise, they could just have their own account. So that's really cool. So that was Voxalyze.
AudioPen. I don't think I need to spend too much time on this because everybody's been talking about AudioPen lately. I haven't really given it a fair shake, but I like the idea of it. So you can hit record, start talking. AudioPen is supposed to organize your thoughts for you. Lots of people seem to like it. I am very... what's the opposite of dovish? Is it bull... No. It's Warhawk and bull. I don't know what the opposite of bullish is. I think it's bull and bear markets. I'm bearish. That doesn't sound right.
I am lukewarm on AI tools in general, especially ones that people come out the gate thinking it's gonna be amazing, because usually that's just like shiny object syndrome, right? Now [Arvid Carl?], I think I'm saying his name, right, you know, he talks about how he uses it to manually summarize his transcribed brainstorming sessions. So maybe that's cool, right? I am suspicious, but I do want to try it more.
Maybe I should be saying all of this into audio pattern, and then getting an actual script for me to read. But just write the damn script, I guess. I said damn. Do I need to give this an explicit rating now? I guess I can edit it out later. But I do want to try this more because I do talk a lot and I end up talking into my phone. So maybe AudioPen would be good for that.
I'm paying for a ChatGPT for it... I'm paying for Raycast's new tier with ChatGPT-4. So maybe I just word vomit where I want and have ChatGPT summarize it. I have to think that that's how AudioPen works.
So I haven't tried it yet. I'm not as excited as everybody else seems to be about it. But you know, it seems like a cool tool and a lot of people I trust seem to like it. So okay, so that was Arc, Voxalyze, AudioPen.
And then I think that the last one I just want to mention here is QuillB because I was testing it. I'm not testing it anymore. And my friend James Laws launched it. So maybe I'll talk to James. I didn't get to try it when it was completely free. And I'm hesitant... Again, that's it. Maybe that's the word I'm looking for—AI hesitant.
I am hesitant of any tool that is supposed to replace something you do. So like, you know, I was listening to a podcast the other day that was very obviously AI-generated voice. And I guess, you know, it was like supplemental. It was an experiment. So that's fine. But I think people think, Oh, well, I can...
I saw somebody say that they don't need to make videos anymore because the AI-generated video of you based on the profile picture, plus the script, plus the voice supplement. No, that's not how this works. I mean, yes, you could do that. It's going to be garbage though.
So you know, QuillB... I trust my friend James. It's all AI-assisted, they're very careful to use the words assisted. So I am curious to try this. But for me, I don't really need help writing. I'm comfortable saying I'm a good writer. But I do want to try this out. Because the approach is very different.
They ask you a number of questions before getting to the actual generated content. AI is all about prompt engineering. And I'm not a good prompt engineer, quote-unquote. That's another thing. I'm kind of lukewarm on that state. Like, oh, you got to engineer your prompts the right way. Like, okay, okay. Yes. It's like saying, Oh, I build cities with Lego. So I'm a civil engineer. You got to unlock the right prompts. Like unlocking the right prompts, I wouldn't call that engineering though. Whatever. That's neither here nor there. I've just upset people. Right?
But it is a bit like Capsho, right? So I like Capsho as a tool for kind of summarizing and taking your audio content, like this podcast, and creating social posts out of it. And one of the things I like about it is halfway through the processing, it'll be like, Hey, we think that this podcast is about one of these four things. Is it or is it about something else? And then it gives you a box. So I like that. Like, Oh, these are the... because like the other tools I've tried, like Castmagic, kind of gets stuck on a thought. You know, it'd be like, Oh, you said the word Hazel a lot. So this must be about Hazel when it's not. I just happened to say Hazel a lot. And at the point I was talking about Hazel.
Anyway, the point is, I do want to try QuillB. So what I'll probably do is during a live stream, start the free trial and mess around with it. Free trials are over on YouTube. You can subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'll put a link in the show notes. I'm mentioning a lot of links. So the show notes are going to be rich this time. And they'll be at howibuilt.it/327. But that's everything I'm trying.
So Arc, Voxalyze, AudioPen, and QuillB are the tools I'm trying right now. You know, I know I'm getting long on time here. So I'll probably talk about this more in the pro show, and maybe in a future episode, but definitely in the pro show is I'm also trying Lu.ma, L-U-.-M-A as a way to handle my webinars.
Members will know because I wrote this up, I have a big complicated thing for doing webinars that integrate with ConvertKit. And I set up a Make automation to send people who sign up on a specific ConvertKit or Gravity form over to invite them to a Zoom meeting. Lu.ma does all of this for free and is much, much easier. My toxic trait is over-automating. So in the Pro show, I'll talk a little bit more about Lu.ma.
Again, you can head over to Casabona.org/join to hear that conversation. Let me know what tools you're trying. Head on over to howibuilt.it/feedback, and let me know what tools you're trying. Maybe I'll mention some of them on the show, give me you little shout out. Again, for all the show notes, you can head over to howibuilt.it/327.
If you want to hear me talk about that meeting that I had to pause this recording for. I guess it's about BetterHelp and therapy. So if you want to hear me talk about that, I do that in the pro show. I'll also talk about what I'm using Notion for and a little bit more about my contract position with rss.com.
But that's it for this episode. Thanks so much to our sponsors. Thank you for listening. And until next time, get out there and build something.