5 AI Tools That Replace A $60,000 Employee

Let me tell you something that's going to make you sit up straight, especially if you're stressed about hiring. I run a business that produces a podcast 3 times a week, a business that creates content, products, manages a community, runs marketing, handles research, writes copy, builds internal tools so that it can run effectively. And the output of that business has tripled in the last 2 years. Not because we hired more people, but because I have built a 5-tool AI stack that cost me $79 a month. Yes, $79. The same output that used to require multiple hires— a writer, a researcher, a designer, a developer, an EA— now happens with 5 tools and a fraction of the overhead. Today I'm gonna show you exactly what those 5 tools are, what each one does, and how together they make one person operate like a team of 5. Have you ever thought, I can't scale because I can't afford to hire? This episode's gonna change your thinking completely. Before I get into the tools, I wanna be absolutely clear about something. This is not about firing your team. My own team has actually grown since starting using these tools because now I have the revenue and the profit to invest in better talent, to invest in more talent. And AI did not replace the people I have. It tripled what they can produce. It supercharged my team in a lot of ways. So when I say these tools replace a $60,000 employee, what this means is that if you're a solopreneur, a small team or someone just starting out, these tools close the gap between what you can produce alone and what a fully staffed team can produce. You don't need a huge budget. You don't need a huge headcount to do big things. And that has never been true before, but it's true now. So let me give you the stack of the 5 tools, the cost and what they replace or what they actually do for your business. Now, full transparency, each of these tools have a subscription. I'm gonna tell you what they cost so you understand what your overhead will be month to month. The first one is Claude Pro. Pro. It's $20 a month. Claude is basically a competitor to ChatGPT, but it's a lot better in a lot of ways. Really quickly, before we get into the details, replaces a writer, an editor, a researcher, a strategic thinking partner. Okay, the next tool is Granola AI. It's $14 a month, and I discovered Granola because they first sponsored the podcast— full transparency— but when they became a sponsor, I used the product so I can understand what it's all about. And I haven't stopped using it since. Every single day I use Granola. What does it do? Well, it's a meeting note-taker. Now it takes notes with any kind of meeting, a Zoom meeting, an in-person meeting, a phone call. It takes notes. It summarizes notes and gives you follow-up steps. So everybody knows what they have to do after the meeting. You know, basically everybody's homework, everybody's to-do list. We used to get our EA to do this, but honestly, Granola does a better job. This is not a knock on the EA. It does a better job than I could ever do. Our EA now is doing higher value work. Tool number 3, Whisperflow. It's $15 a month. It replaces hours you'd pay anyone to handle any written communication. I'm in love with this product and I'm gonna tell you why in detail in a little bit. Tool number 4, Windsurf Pro, $15 a month. Replaces a developer for internal tools, apps that you wanna build, even just creating an MVP product. Of an idea that you have. Lastly, Canva Pro, $15 a month, replaces a graphic designer for any kind of marketing or content assets you need. We're talking thumbnails, we're talking about ads that you're creating on Facebook, you name it. The total stack is $79 a month. Now mind you, these prices may change, but we're talking about under $100 a month. The average salary of a content writer in the US is $55,000 a year. A junior graphic designer— junior— is $50,000 a year. A research analyst is $60,000 a year. A freelance developer for A basic app, and we're talking about a very basic app, is $5,000 to $20,000 a project. A personal assistant, $45,000 a year starting. You're basically getting a functional output for all of these jobs for $79 a month. Let that sink in for a moment. You have leverage now. Now let's walk through each one and how to apply them in your business so that you can get the maximum benefit. Let's start with tool number 1, which is Claude, your writer, your researcher, your strategic thinking partner. Claude, is the AI to use for pretty much anything you're doing in your business. The thing about Claude is you can train it to learn your voice. You can create projects so it understands the context of what you're trying to do in each thing. So for example, I got projects on how to fit out an office. I got projects on recruitment. I got projects on ideation for topics for this podcast. I got projects on coaching me to be a better poker player. What's great about Claude is that it can use your computer and the files on the computer and the web and everything that you can normally do on your computer. To create whatever you need to create. So for example, if you wanted to create a slide deck for a meeting and you wanted to add some images and you wanted to be able to use the agenda of the meeting so that you can be able to create these slides, you could just tell Claude to access these files on your computer and create the slides and save the slides on your computer so it's ready for your meeting. The crazy thing is you don't need to be a developer or a coder of any kind. You could just type words, English or any language that you speak, right inside of Claude. Now Claude is also known for being a great writer. I use Claude all the time to write very concise notes or messages I need. So for example, I need to reply to somebody on WhatsApp and I don't really have time to really think very long about how to construct this and make it concise. So I just blab to Claude and say, I need to reply to this message on WhatsApp. You know, these are, these are my thoughts. "Can you gimme a concise reply?" And it does, and I just pop it in WhatsApp. Now there's a tool called Whisperflow that I'm gonna talk about later that I mentioned earlier that I use with all the tools, which basically allow you to dictate and it transcribes what you said using AI, cleans up what you say. And it's not like a word-for-word dictation. So for example, if I tell Whisperflow, "Hey, I want to create an agenda for a meeting." Actually, it's a team meeting, not just any kind of meeting. It will just understand I made a mistake and write team meeting. Then I just paste my message using Whisper Flow into Claude to have an easy, clean prompt. But Claude goes beyond writing. It's also my research analyst and decision support system. I use Claude to negotiate the lease of our new studio office. I fed it all the details of the deal, the terms, the rates, the comparable, uh, spaces that we found, and I asked it to help me build a negotiation strategy. It came back with a complete framework, the leverage points that I had, the things I can ask for to be able to get what I want in a way that would be advantageous to the actual landlord, the exact language to use. So it sounds like I know what I'm talking about. And guess what? I got a great deal on the studio office. I got exactly what I was asking for. And the landlord is happy with the deal. It's great for pricing analysis, competitive research, comparing two business strategies that you might have. It's great for building some sort of position you want to make in the market. It's not gonna make the decisions for you, but it's gonna do a hell of a lot. It's a content writer, a copywriter, an editor, a research analyst, a strategic thinking partner, a combined value of like $100,000 a year if you had to hire out for this. And your cost? $20 a month. Now I'm a heavy user of Claude. Sometimes I reach my limits at the $20 a month because I'm using it probably 5 hours a day. I use it for personal use. I use it for business use. I use it for all kinds of stuff. And I say sometimes I hit the limits because when I do, I just top it up with a couple dollars here or there. And I'm fine and I'm good to go. And it renews the next day. Tool number 2, Granola. Granola AI, also known as your meeting memory and executive assistant. I love this tool. Here's the crazy thing about Granola. Before I was using Granola, I was using this device called Plaud. It's a little thin, almost credit card-sized device that you can slap on the back of your phone and it records any live, uh, meeting or session or conference or whatever it might be. And then it uses the cloud to transcribe it in audio and creates meeting notes and creates summaries and all kinds of stuff. This thing, I think, I believe I bought it for $250 and it's okay. But then I discovered Granola and Granola does everything Plaud does and better. And I don't need hardware, right? I don't need to carry this thing around or charge it or make sure that, you know, it doesn't break. Every entrepreneur I know has the same problem with meetings. They have a great conversation, decisions are made and action items are agreed on in the meeting. And then a few days later everything gets forgotten. You're trying to remember exactly what was said. You're trying to understand what did you commit to, uh, what is your responsibilities, uh, and when they do all that kind of stuff. Granola solves this completely. Granola integrates with your calendar. So it knows when you have meetings and then it reminds you, hey, it gives you a little notification. Do you want to use Granola for this meeting? And basically it records the whole meeting. Now you could do this for any kind of meeting, in-person meeting. You could do this for Zoom meetings. You could do this even if you have somebody on speakerphone and you just need your computer, any special hardware. And here's what I love about Granola. There's no bot joining your call. Okay. There's no awkward Otter.ai recording the meeting announcement. There's no third-party presence that's changing how people speak. Okay. Granola just runs quietly in the background on your actual device, on your computer, not in the meeting itself. Now, as a practice, we like to tell everybody on the meeting, hey, this is going to be recorded and being transcribed for AI so that we know what we're supposed to be doing after this meeting. When the meeting ends, seconds later you have a clean, structured summary of the meeting. We're talking about key decisions, action items, moments that actually mattered, things that you need to kind of take note of. It tells you exactly what was discussed in a format that you can act on immediately and easily to read. These are the best summaries I've ever seen in my life, and I've used a lot of AI, you know, tools, whether it's the native one in Zoom or other tools that we tried out that use like the browser and all that kind of stuff. My oh my God moment when I used Granola for the first time is when I can ask questions about my notes and it gave me answers like, when is XYZ's due? What is on my plate? And it would just tell me based on what happened in the meeting. You can literally chat with your meeting history. So for example, you can ask like, hey, what did we decide about the pricing structure in last Tuesday's call? And it pulls the answer instantly, not using your memory, but the actual transcript. So It's factual. So if you're an entrepreneur that runs a lot of meetings, you run remote teams, you do check-ins, you do client calls, you do vendor negotiations, you do strategy sessions. This tool is indispensable. You need this tool, not just because it's saving you time and it's really cool and magical AI, but because it builds institutional knowledge that compounds every time you do a meeting. It's basically the knowledge base of your business. This is great documentation. And it has value in itself. It integrates directly with Notion, Slack, HubSpot, Zapier, you name it. So to wrap up this tool, it's a meeting note-taker that is a follow-up coordinator, uh, in a lot of ways does what an executive assistant would do in a post-meeting, uh, situation. And the average cost of a junior EA is $45,000 a year. You get this for $14 a month. And by the way, that $14 a month plan comes with unlimited history. So you don't have to worry about hitting some sort of cap if you do a lot of meetings. And like I mentioned, I discovered Granola AI because they became a sponsor of the show. I had to use the product. I fell in love with it. So as a sponsor, they gave us a special deal. If you want 3 free months, just go to granola.ai/mba and use code MBA at checkout to get 3 free months. Tool number 3, Whisperflow. This is the one that really started it all. This one's different from the others because Whisperflow doesn't replace any specific job function. It just makes Using every tool, including the ones on this list and outside this list, dramatically easier to use. I probably use Whisperflow more than any other tool I'm talking about. I use it more than WhatsApp. I use it more than my messages app, more than any social media. Why? Because it turns your voice into clean, polished text. Any app, any device instantly. Basically, I don't type anymore. I just speak. Whisperflow understands what I'm saying. It removes all the ums and the ahs and all the mistakes I made. It then and then just pastes it in wherever I wanna paste it. And it does this automatically, by the way. So we're talking every prompt I send to Claude is dictated. Every note that I drop into Granola, every question I ask Granola, every message to write on WhatsApp. Literally, even when I create like a calendar event, I don't type anymore. I just say what it is and Whisperflow pops at it. I started using Whisperflow about 18 months ago, and when I started using it, I started to realize I never have to type again. Because I can always speak faster than I type. In fact, most people speak 4 times faster than they type. Now what this does is psychologically, the things that you kind of ignore or don't want to do or get lazy about because it's just going to take so long to type out that message to that person or to reply to that email, you just do it because it takes 2 seconds. Okay, it doesn't take literally 2 seconds, but it takes a fraction of the time it normally would, and you realize, oh, that was easy, I should do that more often. So just think about it for a moment. If every time you type, you can speed it up 4 times as fast. Think about the compounding effect of a full day. All the things you do in a day, every email, every message, every prompt, every document that you create, all of it dictated in real time in one app. It works on your phone, it works on your desktop. Whisperflow is like a productivity turbo button, right? Like you're playing a video game. It just, It makes every tool you use easier, faster, and it's $15 a month, right? I mean, if an hour of your time is worth more than $15 a month, you're going to save hours every day. If this episode is showing you a completely different way to think about building a lean, productive business, I want you to subscribe to the show. Why? Because if you subscribe to the show, you will get our upcoming episode that we're working on right now as soon as it drops. What is this episode? It's called Don't Make These Mistakes When Starting a Business from Home. So if you're building a business from home, which a lot of us do, I did that. There are some mistakes that can really cripple your business and make it very hard for you to get traction and allow you to quit your job. So hit subscribe so you don't miss it. We're putting the finishing touches on it right now. So go ahead, hit that subscribe button on whatever app you're using. Tool number 4, Canva Pro. It's really a graphic design on demand. Okay. It used to be like a Photoshop for beginners, and now it's becoming with the power of AI, basically a way for you to allow a digital version of a graphic designer to do the work for you. So if you've ever paid a designer to create thumbnails, social graphics, ad creatives, event materials, presentation tools, invites to a party or to an event, you'll start to understand that freelance designers are not cheap. They're about $50 to $150 an hour. You know, a junior in-house designer will cost you $50,000 a year. And most of the work that they produce is just repeatable. They have templates, they're creating the same thumbnail format over and over. They're changing the colors, changing images. Maybe they're moving a few things around, but it's pretty much the same thing. Now for those repeatable tasks, I recommend Canva Pro, and that's what it's built for. It uses an AI layer on top of Canva's already really powerful tool, and they call it Magic Studio. There's a mind-blowing moment that's gonna happen when you start using Canva AI, because there's a tipping point very soon after a few designs that it genuinely understands your style, especially if you give it a style guide. If you tell it, hey, this is my style guide, these are my branding colors, these are my logos, these are the fonts I like to use. Once it understands what you're trying to do, it really produces some pretty incredible work. And again, you could load it with all this stuff. With your color palette, your fonts, your designs, your photos, previous designs from maybe somebody else that you hired. I recommend you start with something very specific, like thumbnails for a YouTube video. I find that it creates a lot of great looking assets with very little editing required. And if you do need editing, you just tell it, you prompt it, edit this, change the wording to this, move the photo from the right to the left, things like that. Now, beyond thumbnails, you can create ad creatives or running ads. Event marketing materials, social media posts, presentations, all within Canva. And what's great is because you're using one tool, it can use the branding identity that you've built and it's learned from you throughout all the different materials, through your ads, through your marketing materials, through your slides, everything you're doing. So it's cohesive. Again, a, a junior graphic designer is around $50,000 a year in salary, and Canva's paid plan is $15 a month. This is just ridiculous. Tool number 5, Windsurf, your developer for any kind of tool or app you want to create. This is a tool that will seem the most intimidating if you are not a technical person, and it's one of those that will blow your mind wide open. And I think it's the most value for your buck for what you're paying and what it produces. That delta is huge. So what is Windsurf? Well, it's an AI coding environment, but here's the thing. You don't need to know how to code to use it. You describe what you want to build in plain English right inside of Windsurf or any language, by the way, that you speak. Windsurf builds it for you. Windsurf is just absolutely mind-blowing. I've used Windsurf extensively for the last year. I've created multiple apps and it creates like production-ready tools that you can use in your business or sell if you'd like to for $15 a month. That's bonkers. So if you always had a tool that you wanted to build, even internally for your business, like a CRM that's built for your type of business, Windsurf removes the developer dependency entirely. Like you, like, I need a developer, I need a designer, I need to create this thing. No, Windsurf can do it for you. If you just play around with it on a weekend, watch a couple tutorials on YouTube, in a few weekends you could build this tool. It definitely replaces like a junior developer. And in fact, the code it writes is a lot cleaner. Than a lot of sophisticated developers that I have worked with. And the speed it develops is incredible. Like, it wrote 30,000 lines of code in 5 hours in one weekend session I was working with it. That would have at least taken 2 to 3 months if you hired a freelance developer. Your cost: $15 a month. Windsor is also great if you have an idea for an app and you just want to create an MVP version to see if it's viable. You want to just give it to people to use and get feedback. And you want to create something quickly so you don't invest too much time or money in a bad idea that doesn't sell, that the market doesn't want. You can literally create that in 20, 30 hours max. And it's incredibly fun to create things out of thin air without needing to know how to write a line of code. So let me put this all together. 5 tools, $79 a month. Claude Pro for $20, which is your writer, your researcher, a strategic thinking partner. Granola AI, $14 a month, your meeting memory and executive assistant in any kind of meeting and any kind of discussion. Whisperflow, $15 a month, the ultimate tool where you never have to type again. Canva Pro, $15 a month, your graphic designer on demand. And Windsor, $15 a month, your developer for internal tools and apps. A combined value that replaces human labor between $200,000 and $300,000 a year. We're living in unprecedented times. You get this all for $79. It's like I'm selling this to you, but it's a no-brainer. It's less than $1,000 a year. Now that is not a small productivity gain. And yes, these prices may change, but come on, what are you gonna— they could charge you another $5 or $10 more. It's still a crazy value. I wanna be real with one thing before I wrap up. These tools do not replace human judgment, creativity, relationships. They replace the execution layer in a lot of ways. The writing, the research, the meeting notes, the design, the coding, the grunt work, the communication in a lot of ways. But what it can't replace is your specific expertise or the specific expertise in your business. People on your team, your relationships, decision-making, that's all yours and the people that work for you. These tools simply remove everything that's getting in the way of you developing that expertise at scale. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. It's never been a better time to build a business as a small team, or a solo operator. The tools that used to require a full department now cost less than a nice dinner out a month. You don't need to use all 5. You could start with one that solves your biggest bottleneck in your business. Maybe that's Granola. Maybe that's something else. You don't have to use all 5 at once, right? Or right now, you don't have to start with 5. You can start with one. You can start with Granola. That's where your biggest bottleneck is right now. Meeting notes. Maybe it's Claude. But the point here is that get started. Start with one tool today. Don't be intimidated. These tools are built to be easy to use, and a lot of them come with free plans or trials that you can try out before you even start paying. By the time you have all 5 working together, your business is going to look different. I can almost guarantee you that. If this episode has given you a completely new perspective on what's possible with you and your team, then I really recommend you check out this episode that we recently published called The 5 Lazy Ways to Start a Business on the Side This Weekend. So if you want to start going and you want to start using these tools in your new business, well, we got to first understand what kind of business and how to start it, and then we use the tool. So check out that episode called 5 Lazy Ways to Start a Business on the Side This Weekend. It's a good supplement to today's episode. Go check it out. Thanks for checking out today's episode, and I'll see you on the next one.