I Spent $10K Testing 100+ AI Tools — These 11 Are the Only Ones You Need — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: My team and I have tested over 100 tools in the past year and some are absolute game changers. Some are just not worth your time and money. All of us keep hearing about dozens of different AI services appearing every day. But what you haven't heard is how to connect them to your workflow so they actually work together and multiply your results. And you definitely haven't seen which tools cost almost nothing but will completely transform how you work.

In this video, I'm going to show you exactly which tools matter, which ones are only useful for very specific niche use cases and probably are not worth your attention, and how to use them without burning through money on subscriptions you don't need and without having to hire an extra person just to manage all of the AI tools. So let's dive in.

I really think for all the beginners watching this video, we really need to start with the basics and talk about large language models. So of course you've heard about ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini—language models created by OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. And all these models help you think and write, but they are not the same.

ChatGPT is the most reliable baseline. It's what everyone knows, and the free version is genuinely useful. Yes, there is a paid tier if you hit limits, but most people don't. Stick with free until you actually need more.

Claude actually has the best writing quality, hands down. If you care about depth, if you care about nuance, if you write a lot of text, if you need reasoning that actually makes sense, Claude is your tool. And again, the free tier works for most things. They're also really good at financial stuff like building your portfolio and helping you make financial decisions.

Gemini is one of the most powerful models in the world. It is Google. And basically because Google owns your inbox, owns your calendar, owns a lot of your search, it is integrating AI directly in your ecosystem. So if you're like me, if you live in Google Workspace, Google Drive, Docs, Gemini starts to make sense because it's already built in there.

Perplexity is the one people underestimate. A lot of my friends told me they started using Perplexity after they heard about it from me and it completely changed their lives. So let me know if you start using Perplexity after this video.

Basically, Perplexity is not trying to replace ChatGPT. It is a research engine. So you ask it a question and it actually searches the web. It finds sources, cites them, gives you grounded answers. And I find them much more thorough compared to ChatGPT when you do the same prompting.

For example, when it comes to a serious question for me—I have very high cholesterol and I'm very mindful of it. I take care of my diet, I exercise, etc.—within Perplexity, I created a workspace. Yes, ChatGPT gives me similar answers, but because it is such an important topic, I really want a tool that is more research-based. So I have a workspace within Perplexity. I uploaded all of my test results there. I keep asking questions about what to eat and what not to eat. And I upload all my new results and it kind of tracks everything.

Of course, I talk to my doctor, but it's just for some very serious questions. Or like when it comes to raising my kids and I have an issue with their attitude towards me—yes, for a quick answer I would ask ChatGPT. But if I want to sit down and really dig deeper into the problem, I would do Perplexity.

And with all the models that I mentioned, the reality is most people can work entirely with free versions. Don't pay for something until you actually hit the ceiling.

Now let's talk about a very powerful thing that emerged last year and that has changed my workflow a lot: AI browsers. You know all the traditional browsers, right? Chrome, Safari, Firefox. But now you've got Atlas by OpenAI, Comet by Perplexity, and several others.

And here's what's actually happening in the industry: these companies realized people use AI for more than just chatting. So basically, these browsers have LLMs built into them and they act as your agents. They can do so much more. You can now ask the browser to not just search for something, but to book something, to buy something for you on Amazon, to pull information from websites.

I use Comet all the time to chat with a YouTube video because it is so good at chatting with videos. AI talks directly to the web and AI works as your personal assistant online. And again, because I like Perplexity, I've been using Comet a lot for a few weeks, and it's completely changed a lot of things for me.

Here are some of my favorite use cases. You need to be logged into your Amazon or whatever you use for buying, but I actually go to Comet and say, "Hey, I need a round tablecloth for my medium-sized table outside. Can you find something that's white, high quality, gives me this luxurious feel of a five-star hotel?" Few seconds later, I get an email saying that the purchase has been made and I trust Comet with small decisions like that.

Another use case: I ask it to go to my Gmail, find what's going on in my kids' school, and put events directly into my calendar and send invites to my husband so that we are there for their performances. This has also been such a game changer. I don't know about you guys, but my kids are at school—one in TK, one in K—and I'm getting so many emails. I'm getting so much information about what they're doing every single day. I just can't keep track. So Perplexity helps me with that too.

And here's a cool use case from my COO. So right now we're looking for a social media strategist. She opens an agentic browser, enters a prompt like, "Look for people on LinkedIn who've been working for these companies who are still in social media who are actively posting about Instagram strategies." And yes, it takes a while because it basically goes—it has vision—and it goes and searches the profiles, but it delivers results for you. It delivers complete lists of people that she needs.

I highly recommend that you not just listen to this video, but you go and install one of the agentic browsers for yourself. It's really easy to onboard because you can copy all your bookmarks, all your saved passwords, your browse history. So you're not starting from zero. And also, if you're using Atlas, for example, it has your ChatGPT memory.

The next tool I wanted to talk about is called Notion, and it is not a note-taking app. That's what people think, but it's actually your business operating system and it's my business's operating system. My team has everything in Notion: every process we follow, every template we use, every contact, every standard operating procedure, product playbook, content calendar, task management—all of it. It is a beautiful system, beautifully designed. I absolutely love it.

So when you join the team, you go to Notion and that's your entire onboarding because you get access to everything. But what makes Notion powerful is that it gives you the ability to connect all of the other tools that you use through automation.

Basically, you can build custom automations that run between Notion and everything else. Let me give you a real example from our operation. When I approve a new topic idea for this channel, I click the approve button in Notion. A workflow starts automatically. It creates a task and sends it to a team group via the messenger that we use—we use Telegram. Then it starts a reminder chain so that as the deadline gets closer, the team gets automatic reminders: "We have to help Marina with research. We have to do this." Nobody gets a message from me. I'm eliminated from the process. Nobody has to check email. The system just works. That's the power of Notion plus automation.

And yes, you will need to spend some time first of all transitioning to Notion, onboarding, uploading all your documents and everything, but oh my god, once it's there, it's like your digital co-worker.

If you're solo, it's probably not worth it yet because it really depends how simple you want to be. I hear that a lot of solopreneurs just rely on like a Google Doc or their notes and it's totally fine. But some solopreneurs want to be like pro-level. You know, when I started my company, I also had everything in notes. But when I started hiring, it was like an extra task for me to transition to something that everybody could access. So if you're planning on scaling, if you're planning on hiring more people, maybe start with Notion. If you feel like, oh, I'm just going to do it by myself, you can just stay in Google Docs or notes.

The next two tools are Zapier and Make. The last time I said Make, a lot of people were upset. Basically, these are tools that do the same thing, but I want to explain what they actually are. Most people think they are for developers and they're not. My YouTube producer uses them all the time and she's not a developer. She's an English teacher by education.

So what automation tools do is they watch one app for something to happen and then they automatically trigger an action in another app. You don't touch it. It just happens. And you can build as many processes as you want, as complicated as you want them to be. And because everything is so visual and intuitive, you're basically just connecting dots.

So what's the difference between these two? Zapier is the easier one. The interface is visual. It's simple to understand, and it has thousands of pre-built automations that are ready to deploy. You just connect the apps, log into the apps, and it works.

Make is more powerful and flexible, but sometimes it requires some developer knowledge. With Make, you can build automations that Zapier simply can't do, but it has a learning curve. You might need to work with the code a little bit, or you can just tell AI to build it for you and AI will handle it. And again, they're simplifying the process every week. And every week there is something new. So I would urge you to give it a try and just build some basic automations because, again, with AI, it's not about listening to this video. It's about going ahead and trying and spending maybe a day just playing with all the tools and seeing and witnessing how they actually transform a process for you.

Okay, Otter. I love Otter. And it's not just a transcription tool, though I use it a lot for transcription. I would record a voice note on my phone, send it to Otter, create a transcript, create a LinkedIn post, and I use that a lot for conferences where I listen to a lot of talks and I just want to have all of the voice notes combined and sent to my team.

But basically, it's not just that. It's also a meeting intelligence system. You can record a meeting, a call, a podcast episode, anything with audio. And by the way, Otter joins all the calls that you schedule automatically. It transcribes them in real time. And then the most important part, it analyzes everything. It identifies who's speaking. It generates an automatic summary of the whole meeting. It pulls out action items showing who's supposed to do what. It tracks how much time each person spoke. And you can search through entire transcripts by keyword.

It actually matters a lot because I don't have to attend every single team meeting. I don't have to pause the meeting for someone to take notes and remind me to do something later. Otter can attend for me and after I get a full report instead of spending an hour in a meeting.

Now to the next tool. You've heard me saying a lot of good things about it. I love it. Just yesterday we were creating a presentation for all of the guests who come to my podcast and we created them with just like a standard Google Slides to PDF. When you do a PDF presentation like that, it's not mobile-native and most guests would just scroll through my presentation on their phones. But the tool called Gamma not only helps you with your decks with AI, it also adjusts the decks for every phone screen. So when you open a Gamma presentation on your phone, it's actually vertical. The text is easy to read. Everything is arranged in a beautiful way, not these PDF slides that are horizontal and your eyes start hurting a few slides in.

So Gamma is built for people who want presentations to look modern and for everyone who just makes presentations all the time.

Okay, the next one is a tool that completely blew my mind this past year. This is where you feel like we are in the AI age. So basically, Replit democratized building apps and building tools. The best way to work with it is to first talk to an LLM that I mentioned at the beginning of this video. You talk to ChatGPT or you talk to Claude and you tell him like, "Hey, I want to develop an app that does this, this, and that. Ask me questions about the development of that app or about the flow inside the app and give me a prompt for Replit." And then once the prompt is created, you paste it into Replit and it builds what you want. You test it, you might want to fix the bugs, but they also have a built-in QA automation, and suddenly you have a custom tool that saves your team hours of work.

So here's a real example. Our producer on Lingua Marina YouTube channel built an entire language learning app on Replit. Because you know what we used to do a lot? We used to create PDFs for some classes that we have on my Lingua Marina channel so that students have something visual after they finish the class because building an app for every single video is a little bit complicated. Not anymore. Now we can build an app for every single video—like practice your idioms, practice your pronunciation, practice your essay writing skills.

So one of the most recent apps that she built is basically: you take a test, you answer questions, the app evaluates your English level, gives you feedback, all without her writing a single line of code. She told AI what she wanted and AI built it. Yes, it had bugs at first. That's normal. She fixed them and boom, she has this custom tool that we can offer to our students.

Okay, ElevenLabs. I actually had Matty, the founder of ElevenLabs, on this podcast. And most people still think that ElevenLabs is just for voice generation or like voice over on YouTube. This is outdated thinking. You can make your voice answer your sales calls. You can sell your voice in a marketplace. You can build AI call centers that sound human. That's all ElevenLabs.

Now, here's how we use it in our day-to-day. So I recorded my voice multiple times using different mics and uploaded it to ElevenLabs. Now, when I'm traveling or focused on strategy work, my team doesn't need to interrupt me with like, "Oh, Marina, can you record another voice over?" They simply open ElevenLabs, choose text to speech, select one of the voices that fits that video best—because there are different mics, there are different intonations—and they're able to play with it. They were able to play with stability, similarity, and get the intonation as close as possible to my real voice.

Just compare: this is me speaking, and this is the generated version my team created.

Another tool that we absolutely love in my team is called Midjourney. It generates images from text descriptions, but more importantly, it edits existing images. You can replace text on images. You can change backgrounds. You can remove objects, alter clothing, add effects, and completely transform photos with natural language prompts.

Now, my team uses Midjourney to tweak our thumbnails. When we post a video, we normally have maybe 10 different thumbnails. We have so many ideas and we want to test them. We ask the designer to create one and then we just ask Midjourney to create different versions of the text on that thumbnail. The prompt should include the exact font that you want, its size, and other details. By the way, I'll pin the prompt in the comments below this video.

And by the way, our team also stores all our best prompts in our Notion playbook so that everyone on the team can access and use them.

Image generation doesn't always work perfectly on the first try. You need some patience. You need to play with it. You need to see what's working for you. But once you get the hang of it, you can generate unlimited design variations instantly.

By the way, if you want some tips on prompting, let me know in the comments below and I can make a dedicated post in my YouTube community.

Okay, tool number 11: HeyGen. HeyGen generates realistic AI videos from text. You write a script, you hit generate, and the AI tool creates a video with an AI avatar speaking your script in a natural voice. And of course, you can create your own avatar. You just need to record yourself and give permission to the app. And the quality is now genuinely professional.

Hello everyone. I wanted to thank you for your incredible support. Your engagement and encouragement mean the world to me. I appreciate every one of you.

Real use cases: product demos without filming everything, educational content for onboarding new team members, promotional videos for launches, explainer videos if you need to make videos in different languages. You customize the avatar, the background, the clothing, and you generate multiple videos in a single afternoon.

So what I want you to understand from this video is it's not like we use AI and replace people. The thing is this year I started hiring more people because I want to explore more tools, because I want to see how we can increase our output. And when I see that one of my managers can now do 100% more things, I just want to hire another manager and amplify the results. Right? It's entrepreneurship for you.

There's not a single tool that will go from the beginning to the end without humans. I feel like AI is new productivity. It's not replacing everything, for now. Things move fast. I'm also just trying to adapt here. But I want you to start building your own AI system because when you connect the right tools together, they multiply your and your team's output. And that's the actual advantage.