Our Go-To Tech Stack: Strategic Business Systems for Online Businesses

Written by Alyssa Schneider, Founder/CEO of Creating Freedom Agency

Every service provider will have a different tech stack recommendation. Your Threads feed is full of them. You’ve probably signed up for eight different trials and forgot half of them exist (quick – make sure you aren’t paying for any!). 

We’ve tried A LOT of tools for online business over the years. Some lasted a month, some are still running our business daily, and some didn’t make it past the 8-hour test day. These are the strategic business systems that have survived the cut. Not one of them is perfect, but it’s as close as we’ve found.

Notion: Your Business Operating System

Notion is where our entire business lives. SOPs, project management, client portals, content calendar, strategic planning, meeting notes – ALL of it. It’s not just a tool we use… It’s the foundation everything else is built on.

Aireanna Elanah moved her entire business to Notion after taking a group program and using our Organized Chaos Notion Hub. Before that? A smattering of tools, things written down in random places, losing information left and right. The classic “I know I wrote that down somewhere” situation.

We helped her customize it through a DWY setup – a couple office hours in our group program, the template, and a 1:1 customization session (yes, you can add it at checkout). Now her entire business lives in Notion too. She’s been publicly quoted saying “your notion dashboards are the only thing i’m obsessed with opening every day,” which honestly is the best testimonial we could possibly ask for.

She’s not just using what we built for her either – she’s building her own dashboards now, customizing views, actually using the system instead of it sitting there looking pretty. That’s what happens when ~Notion clicks~ – you go from scattered and reactive to organized and in control.

We’ve built countless custom Notion spaces for clients – internal operations, client-facing portals, even personal life organization. Once you see how everything can connect and talk to each other instead of living in seventeen rando different tools, it’s hard to go back.

Dubsado: Client Management & Automation

Dubsado handles client onboarding, contracts, proposals, invoices, questionnaires, and workflow automation. Everything that happens between “interested in working together” and “project complete”.

Our client Cami already had Dubsado when we started working together, but it was… kind of a mess. Half-built, inconsistent, with notes from her previous project manager basically saying “this could use some attention” in multiple areas.

We rebuilt the entire system from the ground up. Cami runs a fast-paced, multi-six-figure agency with a lot of customization for each client, so we couldn’t just automate everything and call it a day. She needs room for flexibility, and an overautomated system simply can’t give her that.

Instead, we automated the touchpoints that make sense – reminders, task creation, Slack notifications, follow-ups – all integrated across different platforms to make sure nothing gets missed. Some things need a human touch, some things the system handles automatically. The key was strategically seeing the big picture and knowing which is which.

She’s gone through an entire rebrand since then. Increased her revenue by $100K year over year. Restructured her service offerings. And Dubsado grew with her through all of it because the system was built to be flexible.

ThriveCart: Sales & Checkout Platform

ThriveCart handles your checkout pages, payment processing, upsells, order bumps, and sales automation. One-time payment instead of a monthly subscription – which honestly, you don’t see anymore.

Ashli already had ThriveCart when she came to us, but her setup wasn’t working as well as it could be. She runs The Doers, a membership community with free and paid tiers, a HUGE library of resources, and an active affiliate system. Members were upgrading and downgrading, and nothing was automated. She was manually processing changes, updating access, trying to keep track of who should have what – all while receiving regular DMs about said errors.

We did a full audit of her ThriveCart setup and rebuilt a lot of it from scratch. Now when someone upgrades from free to paid? It happens automatically in the system. Downgrade? Same thing. Access adjusts, billing updates, they get moved to the right tier without Ashli touching anything. It’s wild how difficult this actually was to set up before this upgrade (a lot of Zapier involved).

She’s also running campaigns – annual signups, different program offerings, all managed through ThriveCart. And because it’s an active community, the affiliate processing needed to work seamlessly. Her affiliates get paid automatically, she gets paid, commissions process without her lifting a finger. She probably doesn’t even know it’s happening half the time, which is exactly the point.

For anyone selling memberships, subscriptions, digital products, courses, or running affiliates – ThriveCart handles the complicated backend so you’re not manually processing every transaction and access change.

ThriveCart Learn+: Digital Product & Course Host Platform

ThriveCart Learn+ hosts your digital products, courses, and membership content. Course modules, drip scheduling, customizable course structures, student dashboards, progress tracking – everything you need to deliver your content without the recurring platform fees.

Sarah was using Kajabi when they announced another price increase – this time jumping to $249 USD per month. As a Canadian, that translated to roughly $350 CAD monthly. Over a year, she was looking at $4,200 CAD in subscription fees – just for one piece of her tech stack.

We moved her to ThriveCart Learn for a one-time payment of $700 CAD. First year savings? $3,500. Every year after that? The full $4,200 stays in her business instead of going to a software subscription. She’s delivering the same courses, her students have the same experience, but she’s not hemorrhaging money every month on platform fees.

The course builder works, the student experience is clean, and because it’s part of the ThriveCart ecosystem, there’s no weird handoff between checkout and course access. Someone buys, they get their login immediately. That’s it.

Pair that with ThriveCart’s sales and checkout capabilities – upsells, order bumps, abandoned cart recovery, affiliate management – and it’s kind of a no-brainer for anyone selling digital products or courses.

Interact: Quiz & Lead Generation Platform

Interact is a quiz builder. People take your quiz, you get their email and info about what they actually need. Simple as that. But, their capabilities are far from simple.

Alethea of Copy, with Spice was expanding from website copywriting for service providers into brand strategy and working with more ecomm & product-based businesses. She had this brilliant idea for a quiz – her take on brand archetypes, but way more dialed-in for her specific audience.

We built it in Interact, integrated it with Kit and Showit, and the quiz became a whole thing. People were talking about it, sharing their results, obsessing over the custom illustrations. The branding was absolutely stunning and it felt premium without being stuffy.

Hundreds of signups in the first week. Conversations started everywhere. Brand engagement shot up.

The best part was the backend setup: we created custom email sequences for each of the twelve brand archetypes, then split those by business type – service-based vs. product-based. That’s 24 different email funnels, all triggered and automatically figured out by Interact based on how someone answered the quiz.

Now Alethea’s audience is segmented based on hyper-specific data. She’s not sending the same generic message to everyone. She knows exactly who she’s talking to and what they need because the quiz already told her.

How These Tools Work Together

These aren’t random platforms we threw together – they actually work as a fully functional, strategic business system.

Notion is the hub. Your projects, client information, SOPs, content calendar, strategic planning – it all lives there. When you open a project in Notion, you see everything connected to that client and that work.

Dubsado handles the front end of the client relationship. Someone inquires, it sends the proposal, collects the contract signature, processes the invoice, and stays on top of every touchpoint from there. Once they’re officially a client, that information can automatically connect to Notion where the actual project work happens.

ThriveCart processes sales for anything you’re selling – courses, templates, digital products, memberships. Someone buys through ThriveCart, gets immediate access through ThriveCart Learn+ if it’s a course, and you’re not manually granting access, sending login credentials, or paying for yet another subscription.

Interact fuels your lead generation. Someone takes your quiz, gets segmented based on their answers, enters a specific email sequence, and eventually lands on a ThriveCart checkout page when they’re ready to buy. Or they book a call and enter your Dubsado workflow.

The point isn’t that these are the only tools that exist or even the only ones you’ll use. The point is that they work together without creating gaps where things fall through or requiring you to manually connect every single step.

You’re not copying information from one platform to another. You’re not wondering where something lives. The systems can talk to each other, and you actually get to run your business instead of managing software.

Building Your Tech Stack

Building a tech stack with strategic business systems takes time. You’re not going to set all of this up in a weekend (and you shouldn’t try). Start with the foundation, add what you need as you grow, and don’t add tools just because someone on social media said you should.

You don’t need all of these platforms at once – or maybe even at all. What works for our business and our clients might not be what you need right now.

Not sure how to build YOUR tech stack? Book a Systems Session and we’ll figure out what makes sense for where your business actually is, not where you think it should be.