#231 - Tools I Actually Use to Save Time

In this solo episode of the Startup CPG Podcast, founder and CEO Daniel Scharff shares the tools he actually uses every day to save time and run his business more efficiently in 2026. None of these are sponsors or partners—just genuine recommendations from tools that have made a real difference in productivity.

Daniel breaks down his toolkit into four key buckets: Core Operating System (Superhuman for email management with snippets and reminders, Notion for project management, and Surfe for LinkedIn outreach automation), Back Office Solutions (Calendly for scheduling and Bill.com for invoicing), Content Creation Tools (Riverside.fm for high-quality recordings and ChatGPT for brainstorming and analytics), and Team & Talent Resources (Upwork for finding specialized contractors, LinkedIn Jobs for hiring, and offshore contractors for cost-effective team building).

Whether you're looking to master inbox zero, automate repetitive tasks, create better content faster, or build a lean team on a tight budget, this episode offers practical, tested solutions that Daniel uses at Startup CPG every single day.

Listen in as Daniel shares:

• Superhuman: email snippets, automatic reminders, and inbox zero strategy
• Notion: project management dashboards and team alignment
• Surfe: automating LinkedIn outreach with personalized message templates
• Calendly: group calendars and eliminating scheduling back-and-forth
• Bill.com: invoicing with automatic credit card fee pass-through
• Riverside.fm: high-quality content recording with AI-generated clips
• ChatGPT: brainstorming, interview guides, and tighter wording
• Upwork: finding specialized contractors for one-off tasks
• LinkedIn Jobs: promoting job posts to find quality candidates fast
• Offshore contractors: building cost-effective teams in Brazil, Philippines, Argentina
  
  

None of these are sponsors or partners of Startup CPG, these are actual tools that we use to save time.

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Don't forget to leave a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify if you enjoyed this episode. For potential sponsorship opportunities or to join the Startup CPG community, visit http://www.startupcpg.com. 

Show Links:

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• Join the Startup CPG Slack community (30K+ members and growing!)
• Follow @startupcpg
• Visit host Daniel's Linkedin 
• Questions or comments about the episode? Email Daniel at [e-mail]
• Episode music by Super Fantastics
  
  

Creators and Guests

Host

Daniel Scharff

Founder/CEO, Startup CPG

What is The Startup CPG Podcast?

The top CPG podcast in the world, highlighting stories from founders, buyer spotlights, highly practical industry insights - all to give you a better chance at success.

Daniel Scharff
Foreigners. I'm really excited to share with you today a bunch of tools that I actually use in my business and I want to share them with you to save you time this year. None of these are startup CPG sponsors or partners. I'm not being paid to say any of this. I just genuinely wish for you to be more productive this year. So here we go. Bucket one Core operating system. These are things that I use to help my business run better every single day. The first one is Superhuman. Superhuman is an email app and a lot of the functionality here, honestly is probably in tools like Gmail. But I never figured out how to do these things in Gmail and so probably you haven't either. You've probably seen Superhuman at the bottom of a lot of people's email signatures.

00:55
Daniel Scharff
Why do we all use it? A couple reasons. Number one, snippets. I love snippets. These are templates. Typically if I know I'm going to have to send a similar email more than once, we'll go right away to create a snippet and let's say I'm inviting somebody to an event or my booth, something like that. I'll just write the email once. Very beautifully put images in line. Save it as a snippet. Every time I need to send it again to somebody, I just go type in their email send. Select the snippet it's sent. It's beautiful. Every time. I think rewriting the same email is probably the way that I used to waste the most amount of time. The other thing that I love is that it automatically pings back to you email reminders. So let's say you're reaching out to a buyer.

01:37
Daniel Scharff
Hello, nice to meet you. Can I send you samples? It can automatically ping that email back to you if you don't get a response a week later. Whatever timeline that you want to suggest there, it's incredibly useful to just not lose track of things. Hopefully you use a CRM that does that for you also. But I just love the way that Superhuman does it. It saves me tons of time and dropping the ball in so many different instances. I can't tell you how much I used to just lose because I didn't have that.

02:02
Daniel Scharff
The other thing I like it for is I practice inbox zero I don't always do it perfectly, but I just believe the biggest waste of time in email is just opening and rereading emails that you've done that to a bunch of times and they just sit there and it takes up mental space and time throughout the Whole year. So what I prefer to do is every time you get an email, figure out, am I going to act on this, am I going to delegate it, or am I going to set a reminder for later? Because you don't always have all the information that you need to actually answer the email right away. What you might want to do is just say, I am not going to answer this for about a week. By that time I'll have had the meeting I need to have.

02:39
Daniel Scharff
So, great, you just hit one button, set a reminder, ping this back to me in 10 days, whatever. Great. It's out of your thought process until then and you can focus on all the other tasks you need to do. All of this is just about how to really make your inbox work really well for you and make it a. What I actually would call more of a to do list that's very tight instead of just so much clutter and stuff that's out there that you have to think about all the time. The second tool that we really use as kind of an operating system here is Notion. There are a lot of different project management tools out there. I'm not an expert on which are really the best ones, but we chose Notion. My whole company runs off it.

03:17
Daniel Scharff
We use it for all of our dashboards, all of our tasks, knowing who's doing what, making sure they get pinged, reminders for it. Everybody can see all the different dashboards when we're doing stuff. We really try not to create new Google sheets for everything that don't really integrate. Put all of it in Notion. Ultimately it will save everybody time and keep everybody aligned really well. Productive. Just great to have some kind of a system like that. Whatever you choose. Third tool here is something we use for a lot of outreach. Startup cbg. We do a lot of outreach. All of the CBG brands out there, you're probably doing a lot of outreach to buyers, investors, whoever you care about. And a lot of that happens on LinkedIn, which is just one of my favorite tools.

03:56
Daniel Scharff
As probably a lot of you know, when you're doing LinkedIn outreach, it can be really repetitive. You see somebody that you want to connect with and you get excited, you send them a connection request, maybe you put a note in there. A lot of times it's going to be very similar versions of the same note. What I typically am doing is adding a lot of people or people are adding me. And then once a week I go through and I use this tool called Surf S U R F E. And it lets me create basically those Snippets like you have in Superhuman, but for LinkedIn. So I have three or four messages, different versions that I will send out depending on the profile of the person.

04:31
Daniel Scharff
And it just has the best version of what I want to say to new people who I'm getting to know on LinkedIn. And so you can personalize it with their name, which is nice. And you can go ahead and like, maybe one of them is just very simple, like, hey, it's great to be connected. Looking forward to staying in touch. That's a nice thing to just ping somebody that you connect with. Keeps it warm for future if you need to reach out to them or have another message you want to send. And then I have a longer one. For me, I really love building relationships with buyers and investors and I might be sending them a specific message with a request in there. So I love having a system like that. It's not a perfect tool.

05:08
Daniel Scharff
It actually is pretty buggy a lot of the time. But despite all of that, it still saves me so much time every week that it's incredible and I know it'll get better as well. Second bucket of tools here is more back office stuff and it'll depend on exactly what you're doing, if this makes sense. But the first one is for scheduling. I love Calendly. This has been around forever. You've heard about it. But Gmail Calendar has some of these features. It actually has a free version of this where you can send a booking link. Great. If that's all you need to do, that's going to be great and free for me. I need group calendars because I have my partnerships team, I have my content team.

05:44
Daniel Scharff
I have a lot of different people who I often will want to send our shared availability to somebody. My least favorite thing in the world is going back and forth over email about when people are available. These group calendars are incredible. You set your working hours, you can set preferences. Like, I don't want to have two meetings right in a row, I want five minutes, or whatever you want to do. You can create all those rules very nicely in Calendly, and it's great. I think this is just a huge productivity hack. The second one in this back office area for me is some kind of invoicing solution. There'll be really different ones that might be good for your business depending on exactly how you work. For me, we send a lot of invoices. I like bill.com a lot.

06:24
Daniel Scharff
The reason that I like it is actually pretty simple. It's the only platform out There where you can just have people with the option to pay you via credit card, but if they do, then they automatically have the fee added. On top of that. There are very few platforms that do that. I don't know why. There are also a lot of platforms out there that charge you a fee for wires and ach transfers, stuff like that. I don't know why, but it just happens to be my favorite. But some kind of back office solution for that. The next bucket here is we do a lot of content at startup CPG and it's really important to have tools that can help us do that better and faster.

06:57
Daniel Scharff
There's so much out there that we're trying to put out there featuring brands and experts into the world. So the first one is what I'm using right now, Riverside fm. A lot of you will do content on your own as well. Sometimes your iPhone is just going to be good enough. Other times you might need to interview people over the Internet like I often do. I love Riverside. It is really high quality. The recordings look beautiful. Also they just have great features and they're AI clips that are automatically generated, saving a lot of post production time. It can create so many assets for you, so much content. So if you do interactive stuff like that, it's cool to think about. The other content tool that I'm using a lot is ChatGPT.

07:36
Daniel Scharff
I've been hearing that apparently Microsoft Gemini has gotten a lot better than that. I haven't made the switch for some reason, but some kind of tool. I use it all the time, especially just giving me ideas around branding and wording, analytics, interview guides. Even for podcast interviews. I typically am writing a script. But then I do ask ChatGPT to look at it and give me suggestions and it always is going to find one or two obvious things that I didn't think of that. Of course people need that because it's part of the building blocks of this interview that I'm trying to do and I just didn't think of it from scratch when I put the interview guide together. So I really do like it. I love also just asking it for 10 ideas for a new kind of story.

08:16
Daniel Scharff
We're thinking of stuff like that. It can often give me stuff that's much tighter or better worded than what I'm thinking of. It's not going to replace your decision making, but it can save you a lot of time in thinking of new ideas, especially when you're just trying to work very efficiently like all of us are. The next one that I really like Right now this is all around making sure your team has the right talent. I would say in place because it can be very hard to find and you're going to need a lot of different things as you grow and you're being scrappy as a company. The first one is Upwork. If you're not familiar, Upwork is this marketplace for people who can do lots of different jobs.

08:52
Daniel Scharff
You can find an expert on literally anything on upwork and a lot of them are ready to work for you that day. I use it for, let's say I'm doing a spreadsheet and I'm just not good enough to do the final formatting to make it look great. Or I just need somebody to go out and look up a bunch of websites for me and add them into a database or I need somebody who has a very specific kind of expertise in notion to help us get started. Something like that. You can find people who can do anything on upwork and many of them are outside of the US and really affordable to work with. You can really find anyone someone for anything.

09:26
Daniel Scharff
I see in the slack a lot of times people will post a question like hey, I'm looking for somebody who can help me edit an Adobe PDF label today. What I would suggest is that go on upwork and find yourself an expert for all of these different things that come up and give them those one off tasks. It's the best way to find somebody who can reliably work with you on just those small things that require a specific expertise all the time. It's great to have that speed dial list ready to go. It's on Upwork, the next one. I love LinkedIn jobs.

09:56
Daniel Scharff
When we're hiring people we do have an advantage of I have an email list, we definitely use it to hire people, broadcast new roles that we have and often that works great because we would always prefer to hire somebody from the community who knows us. But when we're looking for a really specific expertise, LinkedIn jobs is amazing. Actually I usually will post on there. I link the whole thing to a Google form that helps me organize all of the applicants that we get and then I promote the post. That's the key thing is you just have to be willing to do it. I think I'm often budgeting 500 bucks or a thousand bucks to promote a job post and then I'm getting fifty, a hundred candidates for something and a lot of them aren't going to match what you're looking for.

10:36
Daniel Scharff
But I think if you get really good at structuring your form, you're going to quickly know who is and isn't a good fit. And we've been so lucky at startup cpg. I love the team that we have and a lot of them have come through this specific method through LinkedIn jobs. I'm so lucky, I think that I figured this out. Some things maybe you'll need to go and hire a recruiter for. You don't want to do this yourself. You don't want to look through the resumes. Great. I think there's some great partners out there. But LinkedIn jobs has been a great hack for me, especially because when we finally realize we need to hire someone, often we are like, well, we need them Yesterday. And so LinkedIn jobs, you can turn on the same day and immediately start getting applicants.

11:14
Daniel Scharff
And again, I know this sounds like these are sponsors of ours and I'm trying to sell this stuff, but I'm not. None of these people pay these. This is just stuff that I really use every day that has saved me a lot of time. Last one here. Offshore contractors. Funding is tough out there. Nobody has all the money they wish they had. The valuations are lower. Everybody's being scrappy and doing a lot of the things that I'm talking about today to figure out how they can run their businesses more efficiently. Offshore contractors who are really part of your team can be a great unlock. I personally love hiring people in Brazil. It's just a personal preference of mine. I like that it has a similar and overlapping time zone with the US I just happen to have lived in Brazil and speak Portuguese.

11:53
Daniel Scharff
I'm really comfortable hiring people in Brazil and in this career that I've had, which has been very international in all these jobs, I just have always had such a great experience with the offices in Brazil. I always find them to be extremely hard workers and well educated with good levels of English and just hustlers. And I get a lot of enjoyment out of it. So the way that I often will hire for contractors like that is I will go and create the job on LinkedIn jobs and then set the location as Brazil remote. I do the whole application in English, of course, because we do need people who speak English, but we've gotten great people this way. So I recommend something like that. Whatever region might work for you. A lot of people work with standout people in the Philippines and Bangladesh and Argentina.

12:40
Daniel Scharff
So many different places that you can check this out. But this is a way to do it where you aren't going through one of those agencies that then is going to add on a management fee. Maybe they can provide a higher level of service also, but typically I just prefer to go direct to somebody. So that's it for today. These are all the tips that I wanted to share with you. I hope all of you are able to start out 2026 in a really efficient way and not waste your time in areas that aren't necessarily the biggest value. Add to the business and hopefully some of these ideas will help you run your business better, faster, smarter, and achieve more success in 2026. Hopefully it's been helpful.

13:16
Daniel Scharff
And if you have any other questions, ask them on our slack all right everybody, Happy New Year. All right everybody, thank you so much for listening to our podcast. If you loved it, I would so appreciate it if you could leave us a review. You could do it right now. If you're an Apple podcast, you can scroll to the bottom of our Startup CPG Podcast page and click on Write a Review. Leave your company name in there. I will try to read it out. If you're in Spotify, you can click on about and then the Star Rating icon. If you are a service provider that would like to appear on the Startup CPG Podcast, you can email [e-mail] lastly, if you found yourself grooving along to the music it is My Band. You can visit our website and listen to more.

14:01
Daniel Scharff
It is super fantastics.com thank you everybody. See you next time.