🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

This week: a tiny stack for handling clients (and users) without drowning in admin.

I realised pretty quickly that if I’m going to work with clients, Gmail, Google Drive and Calendar are only the beginning. They’re fine when you’re chatting with one or two people. But they start to feel thin once you have leads, paying customers, proposals, signatures, follow-ups and the little admin jobs that multiply quietly in the background.

Today, I’m sharing three tools I’ve been looking at for a small agency setup (but also useful for other businesses): a lightweight CRM, a nifty booking page, and a proposal/signature tool.

Plus: Google’s new-ish video app, a small Chrome extension idea (created with Claude Code), and an AI founder story that feels almost too on-the-nose.

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Folk

Light CRM

Folk is a modern CRM for managing contacts, leads, pipelines and automating some of the admin work that comes with it. It’s a simpler CRM, and is easy to use (not to mention also beautifully designed).

What I like most is the simplicity. A lot of CRMs are powerful, yes, but they’re also expensive and stuffed with features a small business may not need for a long time. Folk feels more focused: people, companies, conversations, pipeline, and enough AI to help without making the whole product feel overwhelming.

Sadly, Folk’s current pricing page shows API access under higher plans, which can be limiting. Also, there’s a 2-week trial, but no true free plan, which is a shame for businesses still waiting for their first real clients.

🛠️ Alternative to: HubSpot, Pipedrive, Brevo
👉 Visit: folk.app
💰 From $24/month | Free trial available

Zcal

Scheduling

There are lots of scheduling tools now. Calendly, SavvyCal, TidyCal, Cal.com… the list is long enough to have 5 Tooltester Newsletter issues about this topic. But many booking pages still feel a bit stiff, and for a small service business, that first scheduling page is part of the sales experience.

Zcal stands out because it feels more personal and customizable. You can make the booking page look less generic, and I especially like the idea of adding a short intro video. If someone is about to book an automation consult, a 45-second explanation of who you are and how you work can do more than another paragraph of polite/generic marketing copy.

The free plan is generous, and the paid plan starts at $7/month, which feels fair. The catch: features like a custom domain and sending notifications from your own domain sit higher up the pricing ladder. Also, if your clients don’t work in English, check the booking flow carefully before committing.

🛠️ Alternative to: Calendly, MailerLite, TidyCal
👉 Visit: zcal.co
💰 From $7/month | Free plan available

PandaDoc

Proposals

Once you sell services, “I’ll send you an email with the details” stops being efficient pretty quickly. You need proposals, contracts, legally binding signatures, payment collection, and ideally a record of what was agreed without digging through five email threads.

PandaDoc is built for that: proposals, quotes, contracts, e-signatures and document workflows in one place. For a small business serving clients, the appeal is that it can turn the messy middle between “sounds good” and “paid invoice” into something more structured.

The pricing is also easier to swallow than some proposal tools. PandaDoc has a free plan, and paid plans start at $19/month. I also like that it can handle payments and product catalogs, which is useful if you package services into repeatable offers.

My criticism is the integration side. PandaDoc has integrations, but I’d like to see more depth here, and some integrations are Premium-only; it’s a bit of an artificial way to force you into a more expensive plan.

🛠️ Alternative to: Better Proposals, DocuSign, Proposify
👉 Visit: pandadoc.com
💰 From $19/month | Free plan available

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

Google Vids

Google Vids is Google’s video creation app inside Workspace. Think of it as a lightweight, collaborative video editor for work: scripts, scenes, templates, voiceovers, stock-style visuals and sharing that fits naturally next to Docs, Sheets and Slides.

For someone who just needs a casual explainer video, onboarding clip, internal update or simple product walkthrough, this could be very handy, especially if your files already live in Google Drive.

Of course, it’s not trying to replace heavier tools like Descript, Camtasia or Premiere-style editors. I’d treat it more like “Google Slides, but for quick work videos” than a serious editing suite. And honestly, that may be exactly what many teams need.

🛠️ Alternative to: Descript, Loom, Synthesia
👉 Visit: google.com/vids
💰 From $6.80/month | Included with Google Workspace

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

We all have those tiny recurring tasks that quietly eat our time. Answering YouTube or LinkedIn comments. Copying customer info from a webpage into a spreadsheet. Cleaning up messy text before pasting it somewhere else.

You put up with it because building software for one annoying task feels ridiculous.

Here's the thing: it's not ridiculous anymore.

A small Chrome extension can fix one specific annoyance in your day. Not a product. Not a startup. Just a button in your browser that does the boring thing for you.

Example: I built one that pulls all the email addresses off a webpage and copies them to my clipboard in one click. Took an afternoon. It saves me ten minutes every time I use it.

I never would have attempted this before. Now Claude Code makes it doable. You describe what you want in plain English ("I want a button that grabs every email on the page and copies it"), and it builds the extension for you.

How to start:

Pick one browser task you repeat every week. The more boring, the better.
Write down what happens now, and what you wish happened instead.
Ask Claude Code to build the smallest extension that does only that one thing.
Test it on your own machine before plugging it into anything sensitive.

If it works, you can publish it to the Chrome Store. Sometimes other people have the same annoyance, and you've got yourself a tiny side product.

The point isn't to become a software company. It's to get one small piece of admin out of your way. And once you've done it once, you start seeing these little opportunities everywhere.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

Here’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write: DoorDash now wants couriers to film chores so AI can learn how the physical world works.

According to TechCrunch, DoorDash has launched a new Tasks app where Dashers can earn money for assignments beyond deliveries. Some examples include taking photos of restaurant menus, checking hotel entrance details, recording voice snippets in another language, or filming physical tasks such as washing dishes.

DoorDash says these videos can help train AI models used in areas like robotics and autonomous systems. One example in the article describes a Dasher wearing a phone or body camera while filming their hands washing dishes.

There are definitely potential privacy concerns here. The article says DoorDash shares original audio and video clips with its partners to help evaluate AI models, so I really hope they have strong guardrails in place to stop any sensitive or unintended private footage from being captured or misused – like, say, a dasher using the bathroom thinking the camera is off!

Thanks for reading! Next week, we’ll look at customer feedback tools: how to collect useful signals without drowning in forms, spreadsheets and forgotten comments.

Cheers,

Josep

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