Partners and Disclosure

How we use it.Google Workspace Business Plus is the backbone of this business. Email, documents, drive, meetings, the whole back office runs on it. We also administer Workspace tenants for two other organizations outside TNDS, a real estate brokerage and a youth nonprofit. Jacob and Veronica each hold Google's Sell Google Workspace and Sell Google Workspace for Education credentials.

Where it fits. Your team is on free Gmail accounts with the business name typed into the display field. Or you are paying separately for a mail host, a file share, and a video tool, and none of them talk to each other. Workspace collapses that into one bill and one admin console, and it gives you the thing free Gmail cannot: you own the accounts, so when someone leaves, the email and the files stay with the business.

Where it does not fit. If your operation is already deep in Microsoft, with Excel models and Office file fidelity that actually matter, do not let anyone talk you into a migration you did not ask for. Half-migrated is worse than either.

How we use it. Apollo is our prospect list builder, and we use it for one job: technographic filtering. Finding companies that already run a specific tool, in a specific state, under a specific headcount. At that job it is very good.

What we learned the hard way. Apollo catalogs what a company has, not what it lacks. That distinction cost us real time. If your prospecting thesis depends on finding businesses that are missing something, Apollo cannot see it. A company running on free Gmail has no business domain fingerprint and is effectively invisible to the database. We built a 2,391-contact list before running it against our own ideal-customer filter and finding that 30 records survived.

Where we are now. We downgraded our Apollo seat. Our outreach runs on HubSpot plus Google Sheets plus Apps Script, which we built ourselves because we wanted the state machine, not the sequencer. Apollo stayed for list building. That is what it is genuinely best at and we still use it for that.

Who should click this.People whose job is "find me every company in these four states that already runs X." That is a real job and Apollo does it well.

Who should not. People hoping a database will tell them who needs their help. It will not. Nothing will. That part is still work.

How we use it. Script to voice. We write the script, ElevenLabs reads it. It narrates our video work and voices the slide decks that have to stand on their own once they leave the room.

Where it fits. You built a deck or a training walkthrough that has to make sense to someone who was not in the meeting. Written slides do not carry it and a live session does not scale. Narration closes that gap, and once the script is written the audio is minutes of work instead of an afternoon of recording, flubbing a line, and starting over.

The quiet advantage is revision. When a procedure changes, you edit one line of script and re-render. If that narration were your own recorded voice, you would be rebooking a quiet room and trying to match your energy from three months ago.

Where it does not fit. If you are comfortable on camera and your own voice is part of why people buy from you, this solves a problem you do not have. Use your voice. Nothing here beats a person who is good on camera.

And if the plan is to clone a specific person's voice, that is a different product with a consent problem attached to it. Get it in writing or do not do it.

How we use it. Calling Raycast a launcher undersells what we do with it. We built a private extension on top of it, the TNDS Command Center, and it is the control surface for this entire workstation.

It reads from the auditing engine we run against the machine and puts workstation state on one screen: what is live, what is a saved report, what is stale, what is not configured. It launches approved workflows. It shows project state and git status without opening a terminal. Every action routes through one process runner with an allowlist, and the destructive commands are deliberately not registered, because a control surface that can break the thing it monitors is not a control surface.

That extension is private and built for one operator. It is not something you can install. We are describing it because it is the honest answer to how we use Raycast: not as a faster Spotlight, but as a platform we built on.

Where it fits.You are on a Mac, you context-switch between a terminal and a browser and four apps to answer one question, and you have a repetitive multi-step thing you do constantly. Raycast's real value is the extension surface. If you will build on it, it pays for itself fast.

Where it does not fit. It is Mac only. If your shop is on Windows, this is not a conversation.

And if what you want is a launcher, Spotlight is free and it is fine. Do not pay for Raycast to open apps faster. The reason to pay is the extension layer, and that value only exists if you are actually going to use it.

Listing these is the point. A disclosure page that only names the profitable relationships is a sales page wearing a disclosure costume.

Pax8. Pax8 is a software distributor. TNDS is a registered partner. This is not a referral relationship. If we ever provision and support software for you through Pax8, we buy it at partner pricing and resell it to you, and you will get that in writing with a support boundary attached before anything is signed. As of this writing we have not transacted through Pax8 at all.

PartnerStack. PartnerStack is the network that administers the Apollo and ElevenLabs relationships above. It pays us nothing on its own. It is listed here because it is how those commissions are tracked, and you are entitled to know that.

Bitwarden. Bitwarden is our password manager and the only secrets manager we recommend. We have no commercial relationship with them. If that changes, this page changes first.

If you want any of the above without a commission link, email jacob@truenorthstrategyops.com and ask. You will get the plain link and no follow-up about it.

If you want a recommendation with no commercial relationship attached at all, ask for that too. There are good tools in every category that pay us nothing, and we will tell you about them, because the retainer is worth more to us than the referral is.