My Tech Stack & Philosophy: The January 2026 Edition

I am sharing this update as a way to chronicle my path at this moment in time. My focus remains on the services and infrastructure that help me create content with the least amount of monthly or yearly subscriptions while balancing which tools are actually worth the investment.

The Business Philosophy: Solvency & Sustainability

My goal is to build a profitable media business that allows me to stay solvent and invest in the humans around me.

• Prioritizing Humans: I deeply value building a sustainable business model that includes employing people with extraordinary gifts.
• Low Overhead: I want to have very little overhead when it comes to the tools I’m using. I’ve reached a point where I only want to pay for services I actually use.
• Living Wages: The key is to pay myself a living wage and eventually expand to pay a living wage to others who work with me.
• Ethical Alignment: I love to invest in tools and humans aligned with open-source values and the global majority. Beyond the tools, I want to partner with independent builders, indie developers, and owner-operators who value autonomy and direct accountability. If you’re a one-person band or a solo creative building your own path, you are the person I want to co-create a sustainable structure with.

Core Infrastructure: The Website Evolution

I am moving toward a more independent foundation for my digital home.

Squarespace (The Transition)

• Current Status: Still paying for it, but I’ve moved down to the most basic monthly payment.
• The Lesson: Last year I paid nearly $1,000 for advanced functionality and integrations I wasn't fully utilizing. I'm now taking the cost down as I simplify.
• Why: This is still a better infrastructure to run my consulting, coaching, mentorship and digital product side of my business. Squarespace is build for sales.

Ghost (The Future Home)

• Ethos: Built for independent media creators, journalists, and voices.
• Values: It is open-source, non-profit, and has a fantastic community built around it.
• Action: I am currently building out the Ghost site to serve as my primary home for Multimodalee™.
• Why: I find the Ghost infrastructure to be much easier for content creation than Squarespace. Ghost is built for media.

Email & Audience Foundations

I am currently taking my costs down to match my current volume while I set my foundations.

• The Move: I’ve moved off of Kit (formerly ConvertKit).
• Current Tool: EmailOctopus. They offer a free account that allows me to build my email foundations without high monthly overhead.

The Podcasting Ecosystem

I am currently running three distinct private podcasts, all of which are managed through Captivate.fm. They believe in this work and are underwriting my first year.

1. Behind the Scenes: A podcast covering the work I’m doing and how I’m building things. (Only accessible to paid subscribers)
2. Slight Spiral Dispatch (SSD): A podcast about podcasting for the creator economy—a signal in the noise. It’s coming! (Available for all subscribers)
3. The E-League Essentials: A private podcast for my mentorship community that has been running since 2017.

The Long-Term Goal: RSS Sovereignty My hope is to eventually run my own RSS feed—a "master feed" that holds audio, video, and anything else that I would like to add. I want this to be the one source of truth for my work, independent of any specific hosting platform.

The Production Toolkit

This is the current "lab" setup I use to record, edit, and create.

• Video & Streaming: Ecamm Live for streaming, local recording, and presenting.
• Audio DAW: Amadeus Pro for plain audio recording (a long-time favorite).
• Video Production: DaVinci Resolve for more robust video needs.
• Efficiency: Timebolt for speeding up long form editing workflow.
• Short form: OpusClip
• Graphics: Canva for all visual assets.

AI & Operations

I am staying comfortable with the tools I know while being very intentional about new subscriptions.

• Intelligence: I am currently investing in ChatGPT and Gemini. I’m curious about Claude, but I am sticking with two subscriptions for now to keep things manageable.
• Workflow: I use the Google Workspace infrastructure. I appreciate the features they release through Google Labs and find the environment very comfortable for my daily workflows.

Moving Forward

This is how I’m starting. My hope is to continue using tools that offer a free tier to get me started, allowing me to easily invest more as I grow or move away if the tool no longer fits. It’s all about keeping the overhead low so the business can remain human-centered and sustainable.