I think it's important to start with identifying your bottlenecks, and work from there to determine the solutions you need. In the case of our business, I feel that my time is best spent talking to customers and prospects. These discussions directly impact revenue, retention, product strategy, etc.

So then I start thinking ... what sort of things am I doing that take me away from talking to customers? I spend a lot of time on implementation. I spend a lot of time on administrative sales tasks (chasing people for meetings, writing proposals, negotiating contracts). I spend a lot of time on meeting prep and follow-up. And many more. So I'm always on the hunt for tools with a problem already in mind.

In terms of specific tools...

Claude is a great backbone for a lot. Both the chatbot but also the API. I use the chatbot to help me write proposals and review contracts. I used it to write scripting to automate our implementation process which was once quite manual and is now a button click.

Cursor has been a game changer. In particular, it means that we spend very little time on bugfixes and small features. This keeps my CTO almost 100% focused on big picture needle-moving projects. We are now doing some research into things like Codex/Claude Code to see how we could improve this further.

Another app that I really love is called Granola. It automatically joins all of my meetings, writes notes, reminds me what promises I made, helps me write follow-up emails, and helps me prep for meetings.

Finally, we use an email client called Sedna (disclaimer: I used to work at Sedna) which is fully programmable. We've been building our own internal tooling (leveraging the Claude API) on top of Sedna to help automate different workflows. For example, my inbox is now perfectly prioritised. In many cases, when I receive emails from customers, an AI has already written a draft that I can review and send. I know there are a lot of out-of-the-box tools out there like Fyxer to help with things like this, but I've really appreciated the ability to get exactly what we want by building certain things ourselves.