Shane’s Recommended Marketing Books and Tools

Astro is my recommendation for building a fast, content-focused website. It lets you publish pages with very little JavaScript and gives you control over your code and content. It's a framework rather than a visual website builder, but working with an AI coding agent makes it much more approachable.

Cloudflare Pages is where I recommend hosting an Astro site. It serves your pages through Cloudflare's global network, supports custom domains and HTTPS, and gives you preview deployments to check changes before publishing them.

I no longer use Google Analytics. My recommendation is PostHog: it brings together web and product analytics, session recordings, feature flags and A/B testing. You can see what people do on your site, find where they get stuck and test whether a change actually helps.

Also, PostHog have the greatest self-aware marketing of any company I've ever seen. Check out their site, it's amazing.

MailerLite is my recommendation if you want to get started without making email marketing a project of its own. Use it to build your mailing list, send newsletters and set up straightforward automated email sequences. Start here if your needs are simple.

ActiveCampaign is my advanced recommendation. Its automation builder lets you create follow-up sequences that respond to what subscribers do, segment your audience and send more relevant messages. Choose it when you need more control over your customer journeys than a simple newsletter tool gives you.

A password manager is one of the most useful tools you can set up, and my recommendation is 1Password. It lets you use a different strong password for every account without having to remember them all, and keep passwords and other sensitive information in one place.

Specification documents, SOPs (standard operating procedures), strategy and planning documents and any other business related document you can think of belongs on Google Drive. Drive is also where you can store all other files related to a business or project. Use it with the desktop app to sync your Drive folders with local files and you'll always have your business critical files at your fingertips, on any device, anywhere. Even if you are a solopreneur, I recommend using Google Drive, because once you start working with people, it is simply the best environment for keeping files in sync and working on documents collaboratively.

If you're starting out solo, Trello is just one of many tools you can use to manage your tasks and projects. How useful it is for a single user depends on the kind of work you do and how you use it. But as soon as you start working in a team, no matter how small, Trello really starts to shine. It's free to use, highly customizable and very, very useful

Dodo Payments is my recommendation for selling digital products or software when you want payment processing, subscriptions and merchant-of-record tax handling in one place. It supports both one-time purchases and recurring payments, with APIs and hosted checkout options to connect it to your product.

If you want to use Stripe, look specifically at Managed Payments. Stripe acts as the merchant of record for these transactions and handles indirect tax compliance, fraud, disputes and transaction-level customer support. This is a different service from standard Stripe Payments; check that your country and product are eligible before building around it.

For a simple way to sell an ebook, template or other digital download, I recommend Gumroad. It gives you a storefront and checkout without building your own sales system. Gumroad also acts as the merchant of record and handles sales tax collection and remittance, which is an important part of why it makes this list.

Lazyweb helps you make automated, evidence-based improvements to your website and product with AI. It draws on real experiments and examples from other products to give your agents concrete ideas for what to improve. I recommend it for turning that research into practical changes to your pages and product experience.

T3 Code gives you a user-friendly interface for working with AI coding agents and different models. It's the workspace, or harness, around the agent: a place to give it tasks, follow its progress and review its work. You connect the supported providers with your own accounts.

DataForSEO is a very affordable, effective source of SEO data for your agents. Its APIs provide search results, keyword data, backlink data and more, with pay-as-you-go pricing. Give an agent access and it can use that data for keyword research, competitor analysis and SEO investigations on your behalf.

ScrapeCreators gives your agents access to public social media content and data through an API. It's a great tool for content research and competitor research: finding videos and posts, comparing how they perform and studying what's working in your market.

OpenRouter lets you access models from many different providers through one account and API. It's a useful way to choose a model for a particular task and try alternatives without setting up a separate integration for every provider. You pay for the model usage rather than needing a separate chat subscription for each one.

kie.ai gives you API access to a range of image, video, audio and language models. I use it to let agents generate images with different image models, even when I don't have a subscription to the service behind that model. It's a practical way to give an agent the right creative tool for a specific job, using prepaid credits.