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Welcome to the Power Table.
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If you are leading your business with a big vision and you're ready for your visibility to match your ambition, you are in the right place.
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I'm your host, Taylor Smith, founder of the Power Table, serial entrepreneur, and international keynote speaker.
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I've generated millions in my business for speaking of personal branding and community building, and I'm here to teach you how to do the same as a founder-led brand.
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Each week, we dive into the business strategies, identity, and leadership work required to become the woman people recognize, trust, and choose again and again.
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Because your next level isn't just about what you do, it's about who you become in the process.
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This is your seat at the table.
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Everyone's always asking me what our tech stack looks like for the power table, what software I use for XYZ.
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And so I thought it would be really fun to do a podcast episode where I go through our entire tech stack of exactly what we use, what are the systems and tools we recommend.
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And I thought I would do it in a rapid-fire listicle.
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So I'm going to give myself just 10 minutes to list off the 20 systems and tools that we cannot live without inside of the Power Table ecosystem.
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Welcome back to the Power Table Podcast.
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I'm your host, Taylor Smith, and this is going to be a fun episode and a little bit different than anything we've ever done before.
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So after you listen, go ahead and send me a DM and let me know if you like it.
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And I'm going to link all of the tools that I mentioned here in this episode in the show notes.
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So if you're listening to this, you're driving, you're out running errands, and you're like, what was that thing that she used?
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Don't worry, you can go back and look at the links in the show notes.
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And we have discount codes for a few of them.
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So you'll find those exclusive power table discount codes and opportunities in the show notes below this episode.
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All right, so I'm gonna start my clock.
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I'm looking at the time here, and let's go ahead and go through six categories, 20 tools in 10 minutes.
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Are you ready?
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Okay, so the first one on my list, if you're watching this video, you can see me looking down to check my notes here because I have to talk really fast and I don't want to miss any.
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The first category is design and content.
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So the first one on our list is Canva.
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This is our daily driver in our team.
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We do social posts, PDFs, branded assets, slide deck creation, and lead magnets.
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And if it doesn't need full production or signatures or anything complex, often our team is creating these really quickly in Canva.
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But I will say our second tool on the stack is Adobe Creative Cloud because sometimes that Canva template is not enough.
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And sometimes we need things with commercially safe assets.
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We also want to send for signature when it comes to PDFs or other types of presentations and decks.
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We need to collaborate on them.
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So we use Adobe Creative Cloud for this.
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And things like Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, they're all a part of the Adobe Cloud, as well as you've heard me talk about on this episode.
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My love for Adobe Acrobat, I'll talk about that more in a minute, but it's all in one software.
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So that's a must-have in our tech stack.
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The next one is Adobe Premiere.
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So this is where we edit some videos, uh, some reels.
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While some of our video work might be done in Canva or CapCut, honestly, the reason that I love Premiere is because all of the music in it I can use as commercially safe.
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It's really easy.
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I don't have to worry about data or privacy concerns the way that I would with apps like CapCut, unfortunately.
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So uh we use Adobe because of the security and commercially safe assets for that kind of service and really protecting our IP as well with our business.
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And then the last one on the content list is Claude.
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So originally, if I had told you this a year ago, it would have been ChatGPT, but I switched to Claude.
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Again, privacy concerns there are a little bit better on that side compared to ChatGPT.
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And so we use Claude for content repurposing, for speeding things up, for taking a podcast script and turning it into an email or social post or vice versa.
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So this is really when it comes to content, the repurposing engine that we use.
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Okay, two tools under the category of website and social scheduling.
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So for our website, for the power table, we use Elementor and WordPress.
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For my personal website, I use Show It.
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Those are our preferred website text tools.
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Show it is very easy to use, and I'll include the links below.
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And then for the Power Table website, which is much bigger, that's where we use WordPress.
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And then for all social media scheduling, we use Metricool because it's one of the few tools that I can add so many different brands into.
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I know a lot of people like Rela as well, but MetroCool has just been my favorite because I can schedule and there's great analytics and it works with so many different brands and so many different accounts all in one place.
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Now let's talk about the tools under the category of money and contracts.
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So first is Thrivecard.
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This is the tool that we use for payments, subscriptions, selling, coaching programs, and event tickets.
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Then if we have contracts and workflows related to our podcast guests and speakers, those workflows go through Dub Sato, which you'll find a discount code for Dub Sato below in the show notes of this episode.
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And then for documents where I need secure signature, I want to link out to a PDF very easily, or I want to create a space with multiple PDFs and send it to someone, then I use Adobe Acrobat for that.
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So if you are someone who's like, I need to send a lot of contracts, I need secure password protected, I want to be able to link very easily with a URL to a contract that needs a signature, high recommend using Adobe Acrobat.
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And you'll find the link where you can try Acrobat for free below in the show notes.
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All right, I think I'm doing okay on time so far.
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Stay with me.
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We are on to our next category, which is operations and systems.
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So this is interesting.
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I think that these systems are not necessarily very flashy or exciting, but they are the actual backbone of everything we do at Power Table.
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So the first is Google Workspace.
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This is where we have our central home for everything: assets, photo, video, docs.
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If it's this is we use Google Meet, we use Google Calendar.
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Like our entire ecosystem is built around Google Workspace.
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Then we use Slack for team communication.
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And then project management is done in Get Tasks.
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And this is kind of similar to tools you've probably heard of, like Asana or ClickUp or Monday, but Get Task is woman-owned by one of our mastermind members, April Wilhelm.
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She's the founder of Get Task, and it is a productivity and project management app that is run on voice notes.
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Now, of course, you can do all the regular text-based traditional project management task assignment to in text, but I love that I can just tap the microphone and voice note and brain dump without having to type because I'm just like not a fan of typing these days.
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And so get task has my favorite feature, which is running all of my projects and tasks entirely on Voice Note.
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So go check it out, it's linked below.
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And then the last one in there is Zapier.
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So because we have 20 different tools in our tech stack, there is quite a bit of automation.
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So for example, when someone buys something in Thrivecar, we want them to be put into Circle for a community.
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So there's a Zap that does that.
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And so Zapier is a tool that makes all your other tools go together and automations.
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And if you're not using it, it's going to change your life.
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And it has a really great AI and tools these days.
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It's so much easier.
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And because it also has a Claude MCP, now I just go into Claude and I say, Hey, I've opened Zapier in Chrome.
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Go ahead and build me this automation.
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And I don't even have to do it anymore.
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Claude does it all for me.
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Okay, I talked really fast.
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Here we go.
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We have six, no, seven tools left in this list.
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So next we're talking about going live and what text tools we use for community.
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So for most of our video calls, we use Google Meet.
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Occasionally I will use Zoom if we're expecting a larger number of people on the call, but mostly we use Google Meet because of the integration with Google Calendar.
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And then for sending videos with client feedback or sending videos to my team.
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Historically, we have used Loom, but recently I've kind of switched to Google Vids for most things because Google Vids is in Google Workspace.
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I already pay for it.
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So it's just like taken a thing I have to pay for off my list because Google Vids is already in Workspace.
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Next, we use Circle.
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This is where our mastermind community lives.
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This is where we have courses, resources, templates, trainings where our community meets.
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And it's just been a really great switch to Circle from other tools because it's got an app and our community really loves using it.
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Then we also use YouTube sometimes for unlisted videos.
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So if I need to share a longer form video with someone or we need to put something together temporarily at an easy-to-use link when it comes to long form videos, we'll just send them an unlisted YouTube link so that it's not publicly found, but we can send it to a client.
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Okay, I have three minutes left and just three tools left.
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So congratulations, Taylor.
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You did it.
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All right, our last tools are under the category of podcasts and emailing.
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So how do we build effective written and video audio long form content?
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So for podcasting, we use Riverside to record and edit podcasts.
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I'm doing it right now here in Riverside.
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One of the things that I love is once you record your video, it'll do a series of videos for you called Made For You.
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And these it chops up, it does some short form and YouTube style highlights of what their AI determines is the best part of your video, and they're edited pretty nicely.
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Our team has to do like maybe minor changes to the videos, but overall, it's really been a great software.
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And I've used Riverside for a long time for podcast recording, and I've always been very happy with it.
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Next for podcast hosting is Buzz Sprout.
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So we switched to BuzzSprout at the beginning of the year because I wanted a host that had a really nice built-in podcast website and that would distribute to more channels.
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So I did that.
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We had a very big jump in podcast listeners almost immediately with BuzzSprout because of the greater distribution.
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So you can save, I think it's$20 off your BuzzSprout account, and you can get a free trial using our link.
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So if you want to try it for your own podcast, it's very easy to switch podcast hosts and you can grab that link in the show notes.
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And then finally, last but not least, is what do we use for email marketing, which continues to drive the majority of our sales and has really been a great way to grow our audience with Power Table, and that is Kit.
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I have been a Kit user for over six years across three of my different businesses, and I just love it.
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It's the single best, easiest to use, most effective email marketing platform out there, and they have just so many cool features.
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I love that I can schedule things out, the automations are great.
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I rarely have any problems in kit whatsoever.
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So I've just been a very happy, loyal user for a very long time with kit.
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And if you are someone who's wanting to work on your email marketing this year or you're considering switching, kit has a free email plan where you can have up to 10,000 subscribers for free.
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It does have limited automations, but you get a few for free.
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And if you're just growing your list, this is the single best thing you could do uh to get started for free with email marketing.
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And I will include the link for that in the show notes if you want to check it out.
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So that was it.
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That's our entire tech stack for the power table.
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I just wanted to share that because everybody asked.
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You can grab all the links below.
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You don't need to sign up for all 20.
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Also, after hearing this, just grab the ones that you need.
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Or if you have a question, feel free to send me a DM.
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Pick the tools that you feel like you're really needing to move forward and start with them one at a time.
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No need to go through the whole list.
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And I hope that this is helpful because I think people are always curious what does it look like?
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What are the tools we recommend?
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And I thought it would be cool if I could do this in 10 ish minutes.
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So it's there.
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I will talk to you soon and DM me if you have any questions about any of these tools in our tech stack.
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Bye, everyone.