Welcome to the latest edition of The Entrepreneur’s Tech Stack. I’m your host, Simon Owens. For those who don’t know me, I write a media industry newsletter you should definitely check out.
Today’s featured entrepreneur is Scott Purcell. Scott started out his career as a financial analyst, but in 2012 he and his friend Frank Arthur launched Man of Many, a men’s lifestyle publication. “Frank and I used to email each other cool things we’d find on sites like Uncrate.com,” he told me. “Instead of keeping these discoveries to ourselves, we decided to set up our own website, as there weren’t any publications in Australia covering the sorts of things we were interested in at the time. We ran the site part-time —during many late nights and weekends together — up until June 2016 when we decided to quit to pursue the business full-time.”
Many of Many primarily publishes content focused on technology and consumer product news, as well as men’s cultural, lifestyle, and public interest matters. The majority of its revenue comes from native content campaigns from large advertising agencies. The remainder is made up of banner advertising, affiliate revenue, original video and photography production for brands and, more recently, events.
Today, Many of Many has three million visitors each month to its website, over 700,000 social followers, and over 150,000 email subscribers with a 45% open rate.
Scott walked us through the products that are absolutely essential to his business:
TickTick
I’ve considered the move to Notion before but I simply can’t get over the simplicity of TickTick as a personal task management platform. It’s basically an enhanced version of Google Tasks, and without it I’d be completely lost in terms of being able to prioritise my tasks effectively. I’ve just looked up my own stats and over 1,557 days, I’ve completed 2,935/3,164 tasks. I strongly recommend someone checking this out if they’re overwhelmed by the complexity of Notion.
Trello
I love this one because it’s made by an Australian company, Atlassian. While TickTick is for teams, Trello is fundamentally a team project management tool that assists us in creating and managing tasks in an organized, visual manner. Its user-friendly system of boards, lists, and cards allows me to break down complex projects into manageable parts, making the process significantly less overwhelming. Again I know Notion has a similar offering, but at around $10 per month it’s hard to beat.
Calendly
For anyone who has to book a lot of meetings, Calendly is a godsend. No more annoying emails back and forth trying to find a time that works for both (or multiple) parties. Calendly syncs with your Google Calendar to allow people to book during times that you’re both available and is convenient for you. It comes with a ton of flexible options to block out certain days or times as well and you can set a limit on the time of meetings.
Insightly
We’ve looked into other CRMs like Hubspot and Salesforce, but the insanely cheap price of Insightly is hard to look past. It’s simple to set up, easily customisable without the need for a complicated support team, and easily caters to us managing up to 50+ campaigns at a time with ease.
Looker Studio
It might seem overwhelming but once you learn how to set up your own customised reports using Looker Studio by Google, you’ll never look back! We use this to schedule daily reports for all sorts of important metrics like Traffic, Sales, Finance, Email Newsletters, and Invoicing. Best of all, it’s free!
Hype Machine
This is where I turn to for some easy-to-work-to tunes and new discoveries. I still find myself choosing this over Spotify as it often has new artists I’ve never heard of.
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