VICTORIA PREW
Victoria Prew is an award-winning entrepreneur and CEO who has raised over $10M in venture capital funding (when 2% of VC goes to female founders), scaling tech-first marketplace HURR to become a UK revenue leader.
Aug 24 • 4 min read
🔊 The 10 Apps Running My Life
The 10 Apps Running My LifeRead this on victoriaprew.com​ Read time: 1.5 minutes Hey! I get asked about my stack more than almost anything else. So this week I've written the whole thing down. Ten tools, the set-up rule that matters most for each, the prompts worth copying, and what the lot costs me every month. But the tools aren't the point. The difference in 2026 isn't which apps you have. It's whether they talk to each other. TODAY AT A GLANCE
[the stack] My Top Ten
So the starting version of this stack is twenty dollars a month. Everything else I've listed is what you upgrade to when the volume justifies it, not what you need on day one. [the set-up] How to get each one working1. Claude. Connect it before you prompt it. Claude with MCP access to your calendar and inbox starts every conversation with context. Claude without connections is just a chatbot. Then build a Project for each recurring area of your business and load it once with your voice, goals and constraints.
Copy this: "Here is my role, my business, my writing voice, and my current priorities: [paste]. Store this as context. Every draft you produce should sound like me and serve these priorities." Free resource: Anthropic's interactive prompting tutorial. 2. Obsidian. This is slightly more complex to set up, but if you use it everyday for two weeks the habit will stick. Here's my folder system set up, you can keep it fairly simple (mine is screenshotted below). Use links and let structure emerge. Granola can send meeting notes in automatically, then a weekly ten-minute review links them to existing ideas. Free resource: search "Obsidian for beginners" by Nick Milo on YouTube. 3. Notion. This is my main source of truth for team projects. If a project lives in Notion, it doesn't also live in a doc, a thread, and someone's head. This acts as the Master that all team members collaborate directly into. Free resource: Notion's template gallery. 4. Granola. Link to your Calendar. Every meeting note lands in the same shape, which is what makes them searchable a year later. The free tier covers a normal founder meeting load. 5. Perplexity. My go-to for deep, thorough market research. Always click through to the sources on anything that matters to triple check the origins.
Copy this: "Break down the market for [X]. Key players, recent funding, pricing models, and the gaps nobody is serving. Cite every claim using only reputable news sources." 6. n8n. I used to run a lot more through n8n, but Claude Code has taken over most of it. What's left is the genuinely repetitive stuff, the workflows where I want the exact same result every time and no surprises. Free resource: n8n's workflow template library. 7. Kit. Own your audience, never rent it. Social platforms are landlords, whereas your email list is the only audience asset you actually own, so every piece of content should feed it. Free up to 10,000 subscribers. 8. Lovable. The easiest way to build websites. Tell it who the site is for and what a visitor should do, then iterate in small steps rather than one giant prompt.
Copy this: "Build a landing page for [audience] whose goal is [action]. Clean, minimal, mobile-first. Here is my brand: [colours, tone, reference site]." 9. Higgsfield. Build a saved style reference from your existing brand imagery first, so every generation starts on-brand instead of generic. 10. Google Workspace. For all the boring bits. The unlock isn't Workspace itself, it's connecting it to Claude through MCP. That's how your inbox drafts itself and your calendar becomes context for weekly agent check-ins. [the cost] What it actually costsRough monthly, in dollars:
Call it a couple of hundred dollars a month for the lot. Less than a day of a decent freelancer. But here's the bit worth saying properly. You don't need any of that to start. Obsidian is free. Granola has a free tier. Notion is free solo. n8n is free if you self-host. Kit is free under 10,000 subscribers. Claude Pro is $20. [the podcast] Someone said it better than meI listened to episode 37 of Open Residency this week, Mark Brazil talking to Remy Gaskell (@aiwithremy). I'd really recommend sitting down this week with your laptop, Claude and going through this tutorial step by step: Most founders type prompts into a chat box one at a time and start from zero every single session. Every new chat, you re-explain your business, your voice, what you're working on. Then you close the window and it forgets. His argument is that the gap between founders using AI well and badly isn't prompting skill. It's whether you've built something your AI already understands. He reckons that shift alone puts him at five to ten times the output. Have a good week, |
Victoria Prew is an award-winning entrepreneur and CEO who has raised over $10M in venture capital funding (when 2% of VC goes to female founders), scaling tech-first marketplace HURR to become a UK revenue leader.