How To Stop Shiny Object Syndrome From Wrecking Your Workflow

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Ever wonder which tools and services you actually need as a solopreneur, and which ones are just shiny distractions?

In this episode of The Aspiring Solopreneur, Carly and Joe revisit one of the most debated sections of their book, Solopreneur Business For Dummies: setting up your company’s tools and services.

From creating rock-solid SOPs to knowing when to outsource, to avoiding the dreaded “tool overload,” they break down how to make smarter choices that actually save you time. Plus, they share how AI can help today (and where it still falls short). If you’ve ever felt stuck between doing it all yourself, hiring help, or buying yet another app, you won’t want to miss this conversation.

Three Episode Takeaways

• Should I outsource tasks as a solopreneur or keep doing everything myself?

  You don’t need employees to be a solopreneur, but you also don’t have to do everything alone. Outsourcing to contractors or companies for specific tasks can save time and prevent burnout. The key is to outsource before you’re desperate. This way, you have time to properly train someone and set up processes that work.

• How do I know which tools are worth paying for?

  Start by identifying the specific problem you want to solve, then choose tools that are simple, affordable, and easy to integrate with your current setup. Avoid chasing “shiny objects” that solve problems you don’t even have yet. Use free trials strategically and actually test them on a real task during the trial period, and start with monthly payments until you’re confident it’s a good fit.

• What should come first: documenting processes or finding tools and services?

  Always start with documenting your processes in the form of standard operating procedures (SOPs). If you try to outsource or automate a broken process, you’ll only make the problems bigger. SOPs give you a clear, repeatable checklist that works whether you do it yourself, hand it off to someone else, or use a tool to automate it.

So, if you are lacking direction, having a hard time generating leads, or are having trouble keeping up with everything you have to do, or even just lonely running a company of one, click here to check out LifeStarr Intro!  

Episode Transcript

Carly Ries: Ever get stuck in the endless loop of picking the perfect tool or wondering when it's time to outsource? In this episode, we break down how solopreneurs can set up the right systems without falling into the shiny object syndrome. From creating simple SOPs to deciding what to automate, outsource, or tackle yourself, we share practical strategies that save time, money, and headaches. Plus, here why starting small, testing tools the right way, and knowing when to bring in support can make all the difference in your business. You're listening to The Aspiring Solopreneur, the podcast for anyone on the solo business journey, whether you're just toying with the idea, taking your first bold step, or have been running your own show for years and want to keep growing, refining, and thriving.

I'm Carly Ries, and along with my cohost, Joe Rando, we're your guides through the crazy but awesome world of being a company of one. As part of LifeStarr, a digital hub dedicated to all things solopreneurship, we help people design businesses that align with their life's ambitions so they can work to live, not live to work. If you're looking for a get rich quick scheme, this is not the place for you. But if you want real world insights from industry experts, lessons from the successes and stumbles of fellow solopreneurs, and practical strategies for building and sustaining a business you love, you're in the right spot. Because flying solo on business doesn't mean you're alone.

No matter where you are in your journey, we've got your back. Joe, you know what is funny? So in today's episode, we are talking about setting up your company tools and services. And these two chapters, when we were writing the book, really stick out to me because they were the ones that were like, no, let's do it this way. No, no, no, Let's do it this way.

Oh, no, no, Let's do it this way. And it's just so funny that we're now talking about it in a podcast because it just sticks out for me. I'm really excited to dive into it today. I'm going to to pass the baton to you.

Joe Rando: Okay.

Carly Ries: so I'm curious, just your thought process because in the book, we didn't really list a lot of the tools and services because they're always changing.

We're gonna have supplemental stuff with that. Tell us your thought process.

Joe Rando: Yeah. I'm not gonna list any tools because there are too many, this would not be a sound bite. It would be a sound tome. We don't need that. But I do wanna talk about just kind of the ways to think about it because depending on what you're doing, there are a lot of different options.

But the first thing is there are two ways of kind of offloading work from yourself, and one is to outsource, which we'll call services, and the other is to use tools to make things easier. And regardless of what you're going to do, whether you're gonna take something, keep it for yourself, outsource it, or use a tool, you wanna start by creating a procedure, like a process for doing it. I call them standard operating procedures or SOPs. And that means just making a kind of step by step checklist kind of thing of this happens, this happens, this happens. Because whether you do it yourself, whether you give it to someone else, or whether you try to implement it inside of some software tool, that's gonna be really helpful to working efficiently.

So that's always a good place to start. I don't know if you have any thoughts on that, but, we've never found a situation where that wasn't helpful.

Carly Ries: No.

Joe Rando: And just as an example, let's say, the last episode we talked about onboarding, right? So your onboarding standard operating procedure might be something like send a welcome email, Set up a project folder for that customer, create an account for them in your accounting system, and then send them an invoice, Which might not be onboarding, but you know, it can be very simple, but it still should be documented because it'll make it easier to go through that list, see what you're missing and get a standard operating procedure that makes sense.

So that's always step one. from there, if the process isn't really right, don't try to automate it. Don't try to outsource it. Because, if you outsource it and train somebody on a process that doesn't quite work, it'll probably never get fixed until you go in and fix the mess. If you're trying to put it into a into some kind of software system, again, a broken process is almost worse than a software system because it won't even think to fix it.

So try to make sure that you've got these down pat before you start to do it. With respect to outsourcing, we talk about solopreneurs, and I feel like there's kind of a little bit of I won't call it an argument, but a disagreement in the world of solopreneurship of the people that believe that you have to do everything yourself to be a solopreneur versus us who say, you don't have employees, but you can outsource things to contractors, to companies, to people, to do the things that aren't worth your time doing. But you wanna outsource before you're desperate, because then it's harder to outsource it effectively. It's harder to train the people up effectively to what you need. So don't wait too long.

You know, as it starts to get, gee, I wish I had more time. Find that one thing, a couple of things that you can get somebody else to do for you, and you will find yourself much happier. Now going on to tools, and I'm just talking away here, Carly. Don't know if you have anything to add,

Carly Ries: No. You're Okay. You're good.

Joe Rando: Okay.

Carly Ries: Alright. You know I cut you off if I need to.

Joe Rando: So anyway, when you start talking about tools. And this is something that I am so guilty of. I wanna find the coolest tool. I wanna find the most awesome tool that's gonna solve the problems I'm gonna have in five years. And if you can find a tool that can bring you there, great. But sometimes it's good to start with simpler. You want to kind of, identify the problems or the procedures that you want to automate, want to fix, and stay away from the shiny object syndrome. You want to find one that just makes it easier. Obviously, affordability is usually a good thing especially when you're starting out as a solopreneur. So, you know, figure out what issue you're trying to solve. Make sure the tool is pretty easy to use, that you're not gonna be banging against the wall. check reviews and things. If you're dealing with other software, try to see if there's an integration. If there's any reason for those things to interact, it's nice to have a native integration. There's always that option of using, Zapier to do it, but that's another expense. It's a little more complicated.

And then one of the cool things you can do is if you can get a free trial and try it out with something you're trying to do and see if it works and you like the way it works, that's great. And sometimes they'll give you, a free month or a free couple of months. Those kinds of things, even if it's just seven days, get in if you're gonna do it, sign up for the seven days and have the time allocated to go in and try it with something real so that you make sure that's the thing you wanna start paying for. Start off monthly. If they have a discount of you know, two free months, if you pay for a year, great. Once you know you want it, do that. But until then, pay monthly in case you say, you know what? This isn't cutting it.

And you can walk away of only blowing, tens of dollars instead of hundreds of dollars. I guess the other thing now is that we cannot not talk about. After especially after being an Inbound last week is AI.

So AI.  just AI and have it do everything for you, said somebody somewhere, and it's not there yet. I mean, AI is fine. It's great. It's exciting.

I use it all the time, but you have to be careful not to try to run with it too much until you're sure it's going to behave well. There's a lot of talk about agentic AI. That's AI not just giving you information or text or writing for you or critiquing your writing, but actually going out and doing things for you. This is gonna be a game changer. But right now, we are in September 2025.

I would be careful with it. I don't think it's quite there yet. It could be a real time waster, but it's something to keep an eye on because at some point, it's gonna be pretty amazing for helping you do routine chores that you don't necessarily wanna spend your time doing.

Carly Ries: Did I clean my house yet?

Joe Rando: Yeah. I know. That's the thing. We don't have the robot. We don't have the robot with the AI to actually do any real work, but you know, we've got the stuff that it can help with now.

I mean, if you wanna crank out an email, and you write the email, but you want it to be a little more, you know, elegant, especially if you train up the AI with your writing style, You can, create emails a lot faster. You just give the skeleton, it makes it, then you edit it, and a very nice email can go out in much less time. You know, the idea of summarizing things is fantastic.

So using email for, things like summarizing meetings, summarizing long, documents or whatever. I like using it for brainstorming, coming up with ideas. I'll give it a list of things that I think are good ideas and it'll come back and go, yeah, what about these? And I'm like, yeah, you know, some of them are dumb, few of them are good. And it's really good for helping you create standard operating procedures if you've got rough notes.

So that's one thing that you can do that can really help you with this whole process and using AI. AI is a helpful assistant at this point. I wouldn't personally be ready to, as I said, at this point in time, to let it run off and do work for me without supervision. You definitely wanna keep an eye on it before it goes out into the world. That's kinda where I'm at on this.

Carly Ries: Perfect. And you can train your AI to not use em dashes or colons.

so Delve used to be a giveaway and emojis. I do think it started to simmer on Delve and emojis. Maybe just for me.

Joe Rando: I created a GPT, and basically, all it said was don't use em dashes. It still used em dashes. I had it write up an Emily Dickinson poem in the style of Emily Dickinson who's famous for using em dashes. Four stanzas, 32 em dashes.

Carly Ries: And I feel bad for the em dash because they were useful and can be useful, but they're just overdone now.

Joe Rando: Yeah. what really bothers me is, I use a lot of colons and semicolons in my writing. I didn't use em dashes, I think it's, like, three keys on the Mac. But I use a lot of colons and semicolons, and I'm hearing people say, oh, that's a dead giveaway that it's AI. I'm like, no. It's me.

Carly Ries: Yeah. I know. Anyhoo. Well, Joe, thank you for all that.

I have nothing else to add. I think that was all very informative. And listeners, thank you so much for tuning in. As always, leave that five star review for real. We would so appreciate it, and we may even start shouting out your name.

Share this episode with a friend and subscribe on your favorite podcast platform, and we will see you next time on The Aspiring Solopreneur. You may be going solo in business, but that doesn't mean you're alone. In fact, millions of people are in your shoes, running a one person business and figuring it out as they go. So why not connect with them and learn from each other's successes and failures? At LifeStarr, we're creating a one person business community where you can go to meet and get advice from other solopreneurs.

Be sure to join in on the conversations at community.lifestarr.com.