SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion reviews the software and SaaS services he uses to run his online business. He emphasizes that this is his personal toolkit built over 32 years, not a list of products every entrepreneur needs.
• AI: ChatGPT for general work, Claude for writing, and QuillBot to make AI-generated text sound more like his own writing.
• Video & Audio: CapCut, Captions, HeyGen, Hydra, Opus Clips, and ElevenLabs for AI video, editing, captions, and voice cloning. Adobe Premiere Pro and Audition handle professional editing and podcast recording.
• Business: Uses Kartra for e-commerce (though he's not completely satisfied with it), Libsyn for podcast distribution, and multiple email providers (AWeber, Gmail, Outlook) to avoid relying on a single service.
• Productivity: RoboForm for password management, Keyboard Maestro for Mac automation, Dropbox and iCloud for backups, plus Google Drive, Sheets, and Microsoft Word.
• Streaming & Hardware: OBS, Zoom, Elgato products, Stream Deck, Rodecaster Duo, and Camtasia for content creation and live streaming.
Key takeaway: Build your software stack gradually. Choose tools that solve a real problem rather than trying to own every product available. He also strongly promotes podcasting—especially being a guest on podcasts—as one of the most effective marketing strategies available.

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Episode 1149 – Software & SaaS
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.
[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 1149 and Screw the Commute podcast. Today I'm going to talk about software and software as a service items that I use. I probably forgot some because there's going to be 42 on this list. Okay. Now, I don't want you to get all whacked out and think, oh my God, I got to have 42 different things to be successful online. Well, remember, I've been doing this for 32 years, okay? And a lot of stuff has gone by the wayside and been replaced with new stuff. But you don't have to do everything that I'm talking about today. But there's a lot of good stuff here that maybe you didn't know about. So there'll be 42 of them. And I hope you didn't miss episode 1148. That was gadgets that would help you out. And of course, all the ones that I mentioned, I think there was 25 of them. I don't have all of them because they don't make sense for me. But there are some that I forgot to tell you, and that has to do with tripods and mini tripods and phone holders for your cell phone when you're doing videos. So stick that on episode 1148. Anytime you want to get to a back episode, you go to screwthecommute.com/episode number. Gadgets was 1148, but you got to add the tripods and phone holders on that one.
[00:01:50] All right, all right, so let's get into today's. Oh, one other thing I forgot to tell you. We just put up our podcast masterclass free on YouTube. I've charged as much as 500 or more dollars for this class, one on one with people. So definitely if you want to learn how to be a great podcast guest, and I'm not talking about good or okay, I'm talking about great podcast guests and get invited back over and over again. Then you want to listen to the first part of this. Then the second half is if you are interested in or even thought about having your own podcast. This is how I got invited to the white House. I've got these Facebook hacks to get in front of hundreds of thousands of people and so forth. So you go to screwthecommute.com/pod and that'll take you. That's a short link that'll take you to YouTube where you can watch that. And do me a favor, even if you can't watch the whole thing at once, let it play to the end because that helps me with the YouTube algorithm. And of course, like and comment and I'll respond to you personally. Okay, let's get into today's episode. I'm going to go quickly through here. I might stop and comment on some of these things to tell you what they are, because some of them have weird names, but. And some of them, you know, you.
[00:03:13] You've probably used an already. So let's get going here. All right ChatGPT. I use that like crazy all the time. I use Claude for, uh, more writing stuff. And along with that, I use Quillbot to make sure anything that I have Claude write for me sounds like me because I put all my samples into Claude, and then I put it in when it writes something for me. I put my $0.02 worth in, and then I put it into Quillbot that says, hey, this, uh, looks 2% like it was bought, written, and 98% looks like it's Tom. Okay, well, that's pretty good, right? Most of my stuff I get 100%. Looks like it was written by me. If you go through that training, I think I don't know what episode that is. Okay. Another thing for video is Capcut. You may have been seeing some of my Facebook stories and reels where it's, you know, really crazy good editing. And it's a lot of times it's just me plugging some pictures or video into Capcut captions is another one that we use for captions on our videos, and it'll do a lot of cool stuff. Hey Jen, HEYGEN is where we do the clone, the video clone of me. So when we're doing, uh, you can just type in a script and there I'll be in different outfits and everything delivering the lines, right? So Hydra HYDRA that's something when we, we made the babies of me with a little baby with a beard and, you know, talking, you know, in a baby voice.
[00:04:55] We use Hydra opus clips is good for divvying up a bunch of, you know, if you have a long video cutting it up into little shorts and it's pretty good, pretty darn good. We can't use all of them. They don't make sense because they're out of context. But we can use 30 to 40% of the ones that it clips out for us. So that's opus clips 11 labs is makes a voice clone of you. So you can do a short version or a really in-depth, I put three hours of my voice into it to get a really super high quality voice clone, but you can do it as little as three minutes or a couple minutes. That's 11 labs. That's spelled out ELEVEN labs, and then a lot of simple stuff. Gmail, Google alerts is where you can put some keywords in your name and your competitors names, and it'll alert you when they're in the news. Outlook is one of the email programs we use a Weber is another email program that we use. Uh, very highly respected Savage comm is another one that we use for email. You know, you might say, well, how come you just don't use one Tom? Well, I've been around 32 years and, you know, things come and go. All right. And so, uh, it's good to not have all your eggs in one basket also. Kartra is the shopping cart we currently use.
[00:06:23] I'm not the happiest with it, but that's what we're using right now. Elgato is a company that creates our stream deck and our teleprompter and our lights that I can control by sitting here, rather than having to stand up and go set the lights up and, and turn them on and come back and sit down and make sure they're looked right and all that. Uh, stream deck is one where you, it's, you can make shortcuts on this keypad and do open programs, turn the lights on and off, do all kinds of stuff with it. So that's a stream deck. I didn't have that till within the last six months. All right. After 32 years. So you don't have to have that stuff. Adobe Premiere Pro is their highest end video editing software. I have Mark our video guy uses the the the the the Mac thing. I forget what it's called. I use Adobe Audition. That's what I'm recording into right now for this podcast. We use Adobe Creative Cloud to have access to all kinds of stuff, PDF and all the kind of things that Adobe will do. Libsyn LIBSYN is what distributes this podcast. So we have loads and loads of places that play podcasts. And so I have accounts at all of them. And then all I have to do is upload once to libsyn and it distributes it to all these other places. So I only upload it once. And Larry actually does that for me. And also remember, uh, you definitely want to listen to that podcast master class at screwthecommute.com/pod.
[00:08:04] And like I said, please let it play to the end and then go back and listen later. If you can't listen to it all at once, but take good notes. I mean, it'll really, really rock your world as a guest where you can start that immediately. Having your own podcast takes a little bit more planning and stuff, but being, starting guesting and being on other people's podcasts and, and getting in front of all those audiences. Amazingly powerful. But I'm telling you how to do it at a super high level. And a lot of things that I'm teaching on that pod, on that episode, excuse me, on that podcast masterclass is things that nobody else is doing, and you will stand out like so much to the host and impress the heck out of them. If you do the stuff I'm telling you on that masterclass. Okay, let's see where I'm at here. Rodecaster app. So I have this thing where the, the, the microphone goes into this little mixing kind of board called a rodecaster duo. It's a small one. It's not the big super one that's got, you know, for bands and stuff. So just love it. It's, uh, it's really great and it helps better sound on the microphone too. It has presets for the microphones. ipiccy.com is a totally free thing where I can edit photos. Now I don't need it as much as I used to because of just telling ChatGPT it's image two model, which is great.
[00:09:43] What I want, but I still use it all the time. If I had to go and change, resize a photo or put some arrows on things and you know, just all and you can. I used to create my Facebook stories from scratch in it, but again, now I can just tell ChatGPT to do it. But at any rate, it's a very handy thing. It's totally free. All right, fal.ai. If you've heard my AI hacks, um, masterclass, It's a place where you put so much money up, like ten bucks, and then you can use all these fancy AI models Gemini and Cling and Vo and all these are in there, and it just subtracts a little bit from your ten bucks every time you use them. A robo form is something I used for password manager, highly encrypted, and it keeps all kinds of other stuff, you know, Social security numbers, safe combinations, things like that. Roboform keyboard maestro is a thing on the Mac where you can again, make little shortcuts and it'll type in War and Peace if you want. It'll type. Uh, and that's something I used to promote short keys all the time, but I'm working more on the Mac now, uh, because the, the podcast is done here. So I'm sitting here a lot of times three, three times a week doing the podcast. So I learned more about running a Mac.
[00:11:16] So Keyboard Maestro is is good for that. And I just recently got this thing. It's I don't even know how to pronounce it. It's mouse or mouse pose. And I think it has that little thing above the e so posi or something. But it makes a a big. When I click the mouse, it lights up red and and it's good for screen capture videos. If you don't have Camtasia or some expensive one, it lets people, whenever you're doing screen capture training videos, people in the old days would. You couldn't see where the mouse was and you'd lose your train. You couldn't track what they were talking about. But this, you know, you click or you double click and it lights up twice as big and all those kinds of things. And it has, uh, I think when you click, it has a keyboard sound. And so that's a mouse pose, MOUSEPOSE. Uh, another obvious one is Zoom. Use that all the time. Obs is what we're going to be using for live streaming when I roll out my show. Um, highly educated idiots. And also it's going to be connected to a thing called restream, which this is all stuff when you're doing live outside of YouTube live and Facebook live. Uh, Dropbox is a backup thing. Icloud is a backup thing. Of course, Chrome and Safari browsers. Now there's all kinds of browsers, brave and duck, duck, go and things like that, but I just use Chrome and Safari.
[00:12:53] I use Chrome basically, and I only use Safari if something doesn't work or if I'm having trouble with Chrome. Uh, Google Maps we use all the time, right? I'm reading the all so, so I wouldn't forget all of these software programs I'm reading off of the note function in the Mac that I'm working on right now. So that's notes and it's called notepad on a PC. Microsoft Word used that to write my ebooks and to convert. When I'm all done with word, convert it to PDF. That's Adobe stuff. Google sheets I've used lately because I don't have the whole Microsoft Suite on this Mac, so don't. I don't use it enough to warrant paying a lot of money for it. So Google Sheets, Google Drive, Kindle create is another software to make Kindle ebooks. They give you the software. And not only will it help you make Kindle eBooks, it'll. You click another button and it helps make the ebook ready for print. So print on demand. Uh. Logi tune. I don't know if that's how you pronounce it, but this, you know, I have an external webcam, a Logitech webcam in addition to my Elgato teleprompter up there, but it allows you to, you know, tune the, the camera, make it zoom or how wide the shot you want it to be and that kind of stuff. Meetup is another thing I use. I got a couple hundred members in my meetup here in the Hampton Roads area, and Camtasia is the the screen capture software that I use on the PC, but I'm looking to have one on the Mac, and I don't want to buy a new $300 Camtasia to do it.
[00:14:42] So I'm looking at some other ones for the Mac. So there was 42 different things I use. And like I said, you don't need all of them, but some of them you may have never heard of. And some of them you say, oh, well, Tom's using that. It must be pretty good. Like for instance, if you do a podcast, you go use libsyn to distribute it for you. If you decide you want to up your game on audio, you get a rodecaster, a duo and hook it up with a decent microphone, you know, so there's all kinds of stuff there. You can go back and listen to this thing over again. Of course, it will be in the show notes. So so there you go. That's 42 different things I use. And I'm sure I forgot some because I was just sitting here going through, you know, going to applications and writing down all the ones I use. But I'm sure I must have missed something. And software as a service that's called SaaS SAAS, you know, that's where you log on to things. And a lot of these ones that I said today, you know, hey, Gen Hydra, opus clips, 11 labs, gmail even, I mean, it's all software as a service where you're logging into things.
[00:15:48] So it's, it's easy for me to forget one of those. So, so there you go. Hey, I'm telling you, go over to screwthecommute.com/pod and listen to that masterclass and take good notes. And even if you don't do your own podcast, which, like I said, that got me invited to the white House and all kinds of cool things. And it allowed me to get to people that I couldn't really get to normally because you have a podcast, but the guesting is something you can immediately do and go right to the top of the heap. If you do all these things I'm telling you about because most people, most guests don't do them. I've had over 500 guests on screw the commute, and there's not been one that's done. All the things that I that I teach you in this, but I'm the one that's been invited back 13 times and been on some of the biggest shows in the world. Right. And some of them don't normally have a person more than once. And I've been on three times. All right. So, check it out at screwthecommute.com/pod. And then of course, if you want help on this and all the other million things, you got to be successful online. Check out my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and my school at IMTCVA.org, certified to operate by SCHEV. And I will catch you on the next episode. If you're ever around after you're trying to fool around with 42 different software programs. All right, catch you later.