The Ultimate Sales & Marketing Tool Stack for Course Creators: What We Use at Forte Labs
What software you use ultimately doesn’t matter as much as the quality of your content, your offer, and your audience.
And still, the decision about what tools to use can keep your brain occupied for days and weeks (when you’d rather spend time teaching and delivering your course).
Let’s take a shortcut, shall we?
In this post, I want to share with you what a minimum viable tool stack looks like for course creators and which specific tools we use at Forte Labs to power our sales and marketing.
The minimum viable tool stack for course creators
At a minimum, here’s what you need to market and sell your course:
Marketing
website hosting and a website builder (you don’t even need that necessarily if you’re just starting out)
an email service provider to send out your newsletter and sales emails
a social media scheduling app to schedule posts on your social media channels
a survey tool to get information and feedback from your audience and customers
Sales
a checkout solution and payment processor to make sales
a course and community platform to deliver your course and let students connect with each other
The tools we use at Forte Labs
Here’s a complete overview of the software and apps we use on a daily basis to serve every part of our funnel.
Website
GoDaddy: We purchased our domains on GoDaddy but namecheap is a great alternative. I honestly don’t see a big difference between these providers.
Webflow: This is the website builder behind our fully revamped buildingasecondbrain.com website. I’m working with a dedicated Webflow developer to set up and maintain the site. But if you want to set up a website yourself with Webflow, they have extensive free training.
Testimonial.to: A great tool to collect and showcase text and video testimonials that has become more and more powerful since we signed up. I used it to create our Wall of Love as well as embed mentions of the Building a Second Brain book.
Bitly: A simple URL shortener that helps us create short and easily shareable links such as basb.io/youtube.
Google Analytics: Google’s free analytics platform is our go-to place to track website traffic and conversions.
Email Marketing
ConvertKit: Our preferred email marketing hub to nurture our audience. I use it to send the weekly Forte Labs newsletter, set up simple landing pages, deliver lead magnets, send automated email sequences. We also use it for communication with our students during the course.
Palladio: This is a new tool by Brennan Dunn to create customized email templates that stand out in the inbox. We’ve used it to infuse our brands into the Forte Labs newsletter and any Building a Second Brain related emails. It also allows for further personalization of what an email recipient sees in the email, but we aren’t quite there yet.
Social Media
Buffer: We use Buffer to schedule content on X, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. I typically batch-process this once a week.
Canva: Canva is our go-to tool for creating simple images, e.g., for our blog posts, event banners, social media. Our brand designer created branded templates in Canva that we can easily customize to create shareable quotes like this one.
Organization, Automation & Content Management
ClickUp: ClickUp is our project management tool of choice. Every department has their own workspace that’s set up according to PARA. We also store documentation such as SOPs in ClickUp. Here’s an example of the Marketing space:
Notion: I mainly use Notion to create publicly shareable pages such as our Media Kit for Building a Second Brain.
Google Drive: Can’t live without a cloud storage solution! Google Docs is still my go-to word processor to create drafts and get feedback. I’ve also set up our Google Drive according to PARA.
Airtable: Airtable is our main data hub. On the sales side, all purchases flow into Airtable, which then trigger automations so the customer gets the exact access and information they need. On the marketing side, I use Airtable to create simple forms such as this one to collect data.
Zapier: We can’t live without Zapier. It connects and sends data from one tool to another. For example, it can send submissions to an Airtable form to ConvertKit.
Checkout & Payments
SamCart: A flexible checkout solution that makes it really easy for us to spin up new products and landing pages to sell them. Here’s an example of one of our checkout pages.
Stripe: Stripe integrates with SamCart to allow us to collect money from our customers.
ParityDeals: I implemented Purchasing Power Parity Pricing with the help of ParityDeals to make our course more accessible across the world.
Course Delivery & Community
Circle: We’ve gone all-in on Circle as THE platform to power our Building a Second Brain courses, community, and live cohorts.
Zoom: Still the best solution to run virtual events and webinars.
Other Useful Tools
Help Scout: Help Scout is our customer service tool that allows us to manage all incoming emails and requests within one inbox. We also use it to embed a help beacon in the lower right-hand corner of the Fortelabs.com site that customers can use to view FAQs and send us a message directly. (Update: We’ve since switched to Zendesk but I still prefer Help Scout.)
Luma: If we want to host a public event such as a free workshop, I create it on Luma. It’s free and makes it super easy for your participants to register and receive reminders.
Everytimezone.com: We have an international audience, so when scheduleing any live events, we want to make it easy for people to see when it will take place in their timezone. This nifty free tool allows you to create a link to help people do that.
