Dan Koe's 9-App Productivity Stack

Dan Koe built a 7-figure one-person business without hiring a single employee. No team. No office. Just a laptop and a stupidly systematic approach to content creation.

He blew up on Twitter (500k+ followers as of late 2024) by writing daily threads about solopreneurship, philosophy, and building digital businesses. The whole brand is built on Twitter distribution, then monetized through courses and digital products.

His courses teach the exact system he used to escape the 9-5 grind. Topics like writing, building an audience, creating digital products. Very meta but it works when you're living proof the system actually generates income.

YouTube channel sits around 300k subscribers (early 2025) with long-form content about deep work, attention management, and systematic thinking. The aesthetic is super minimal, almost philosophical. No flashy editing or clickbait thumbnails.

The Dan Koe tools list reflects his whole philosophy. Everything is about clarity, focus, and building systems that work without constant babysitting. If a tool doesn't multiply output or reduce friction, it gets cut.

Kortex is Dan's second brain. Every article idea, course concept, and random thought that might become content eventually gets captured here.

He treats it like a networked thinking system. Ideas link to other ideas. Concepts from one project connect to frameworks in another. This prevents the scattered notes problem where good ideas die in isolation because you forgot they existed.

When writing a YouTube script or Twitter thread, he's pulling from months or years of accumulated thinking instead of starting from scratch. That's how he publishes so consistently without burning out. The hard work happened gradually over time.

Dan's mentioned building what he calls a "personal monopoly" through systematic knowledge capture. Your unique combination of experiences and insights becomes defensible when you actually document and connect them instead of letting everything evaporate.

Kortex replaced Notion for him because the graph view and linking felt more natural for creative work. Notion is great for databases and project management. Kortex is better for messy, non-linear thinking that eventually becomes polished content.

Dan uses both Gemini and Claude for different parts of his content workflow. Not because he's indecisive. They serve different purposes.

Gemini handles research and ideation. He feeds it broad topics and gets back frameworks, counterarguments, and different angles he might not have considered. Speeds up the thinking process when developing course material or YouTube scripts.

Claude is the editing partner. After writing a rough draft, he pastes it into Claude and asks it to tighten arguments, spot logical gaps, or suggest better transitions. He mentioned preferring Claude for this because the outputs feel less robotic than ChatGPT.

The key is he doesn't use AI output directly. It's a thought partner, not a ghostwriter. The final product is still his voice, his ideas, his argument structure. AI just makes the process faster and catches things he'd miss in the third edit.

A lot of creators treat AI like a content factory. Dan treats it like a research assistant and editor. The distinction matters when your whole business is built on authentic, unique thinking instead of churning out generic blog posts.

Midjourney and Figma handle the visual side of Dan's one-person content empire.

Midjourney generates thumbnails, social media graphics, and visual assets for courses. Before AI image generation, he'd either hire designers (expensive, slow) or use stock photos (generic, forgettable). Now he creates custom visuals in minutes.

The aesthetic stays consistent across YouTube, Twitter, and course materials. All minimal, slightly abstract, philosophical vibes. That consistency is easier to maintain when you're prompting an AI with the same style guidelines instead of explaining your vision to different freelancers.

Figma handles the more structured design work. Course layouts, landing page mockups, visual frameworks for explaining concepts. He maps out user flows for digital products before building them, which saves weeks of rework when something doesn't make sense.

Course slides get designed in Figma too. The visual frameworks (diagrams, flowcharts, concept maps) get reused across different content formats. Create it once in Figma, then repurpose it for YouTube, Twitter threads, and email newsletters.

As a solopreneur, design bottlenecks used to slow everything down. These two tools removed that constraint entirely. Not saying the output matches a professional designer, but it's good enough for digital products and gets done in 10% of the time.

Typefully is how Dan manages his Twitter empire. 500k+ followers didn't happen by accident. It required systematic publishing for years.

He writes threads in advance and schedules them for optimal times. Usually batches a week's worth of content in one sitting, then Typefully handles distribution. Removes the daily pressure of "what do I tweet today" while maintaining consistent output.

Performance tracking happens here too. Which threads drove the most engagement? What topics resonated? What flopped? After months of data, patterns emerge that inform future content strategy.

Twitter is the top of Dan's funnel. Threads drive traffic to YouTube, which drives course sales. Without Twitter working smoothly, the whole business model breaks. Typefully keeps that engine running without requiring constant manual posting.

He's talked about treating Twitter like a product, not just a social media platform. Every thread is an experiment. Typefully provides the infrastructure to run those experiments systematically instead of randomly tweeting whenever inspiration strikes.

The Dan Koe productivity apps all serve one purpose: multiplying the output of one person. He's not trying to build a team. He's trying to build systems that make a team unnecessary.

Kortex captures and connects ideas. AI tools (Gemini, Claude) speed up research and editing. Design tools (Midjourney, Figma) remove creative bottlenecks. Typefully automates distribution. Boostcamp keeps him healthy enough to sustain the pace.

Even using Slack solo is part of the system. He treats it as a searchable database organized by project. Years of links, references, and ideas living in dedicated channels. Weird? Maybe. Effective when you need to find something from 2 years ago? Absolutely.

The whole stack is about leverage. Each tool either creates content faster, distributes it more effectively, or maintains the energy to keep going. Nothing is there just because it's popular or everyone else uses it.

Building a 7-figure business alone isn't about working 100-hour weeks. It's about systematizing everything that doesn't require your unique brain, then focusing all your actual thinking time on the 20% that moves the needle. The Dan Koe tools list reflects that philosophy perfectly.