Joe Casabona (00:00)
New tools are coming out at a seemingly breakneck speed these days. Every day there's a new AI tool that promises to bring us even more productivity and do more and make our bed and cook breakfast. Every tool that we're already using is integrating APIs, NPCs, AI. There are simpler tools coming out and these are coming across your desk. They're coming across my desk.
and you're probably wondering, should I switch? I'm getting kind of sick of my old tool. Should I switch to my new tool? Well, my friends, as a professional tool switcher, I have come up with a framework to figure out if and when you should switch, if switching tools is really worth it. And that's what we are going to talk about today. Hey everybody, my name's Joe Casabona and here on the Streamline Solopreneur,
I teach you that productivity is not about doing more. It's about doing less better. Now let's get into it. So I thought now would be a great time to talk about this because, well, you know, we're getting into the holiday season. There's going to be lots of Black Friday deals. Also, in a couple of episodes, I am doing a productivity tools draft with my friends and we are going to be talking about a lot of tools.
And what I don't want is for you to listen to that episode and think, â“ man, I should switch every tool I use to the ones that they mentioned. And you know this about me, right? I am a chronic tool switcher. I talked about how I switched from Dropbox to Google Drive over the summer. I've considered if I should be switching to
Calendly or SavvyCal from Cal.com, which I switched from Calendly to Cal.com. I've switched to do and task manager apps more times than I can count. So how do you know when to switch? How do you know if you're just messing around with something or if you're just wasting your time? That's the problem that we are here to solve today. And
I have come up with a four question framework to determine if it's worth switching tools or not. Number one, is the tool painful to use or does switching outweigh the pain you're feeling when using the tool? If a tool is buggy or slow or is making it harder for you to do your work, then yes, absolutely.
it is time to switch tools. So if the answer to this question is yes, right? Does switching outweigh the pain you feel or just has the tool become too painful to use? Then yes, you should switch. Does the new tool have a feature you absolutely need? I think we've probably seen this before, right? There have been â“ new tools enter the market.
and they are going to have more modern features than the tool we're currently using.
A great example of this is when I switched from Loom to Tela. You know, there was...
A lot of reasons for me to not want to switch. But, you know, I mean, for one, I was getting loomed for free with my educational email address. But Tela has been such a crucial part of my workflow that it's totally worth me paying the extra because Tela is newer and it just it has better, more modern features. So does the new tool have a feature you absolutely need?
If the answer to that question is yes, then maybe you should switch.
is the level of effort to switch nearly zero.
Because I mean, like if there's no skin off your back, right. And switching is easy, then yeah, I mean, then you could switch just to see if you like it better. Right. But if it's going to take you hours, right. Like switching from Evernote to anything. Right. Took a really long time. Switching from Ark to anything. Well, actually, I wish I had switched to Vivaldi from Ark because they have an importer, but switching from Ark to Brave.
was hard because Arc makes it hard to export anything. So is the level of effort to switch near zero? If the answer that is yes, then go for it. But if it's no, then you need to evaluate some other things. And number four, I haven't talked about this one publicly too much, but does the product have staying power? This was a calculation I made.
when I was switching from Arc. I made a decision at that point that I'm not going to switch to a tool that is new for something I rely on heavily. That is hard for me to get in and out of. And so staying power, and I'll talk about this more. We're going to look at some examples, but staying power means time.
Has it been around for a long time? Has it proved that it's been around for a long time? Or and or does it have a business model that makes sense? In the case of Arc, neither of those were true. And so if I were applying this today, I would have never switched from Chrome to Arc or Safari to Arc, whatever browser I was using at the time. So those are the four questions.
Does switching outweigh the pain you feel when using the tool? Does the new tool have a feature you absolutely need? Is the level of effort to switch to this new tool nearly zero? And does the product have staying power?
So with those four questions in mind, let's look at a few examples. I did a whole episode on switching from Dropbox to Google Drive. So let's run through these four questions looking at that. All right. So you already know the verdict, right? The end I did switch. So does switching outweigh the pain I feel? Yes. Part of it was I was like annoyed at the way that they changed their business model.
Right. They were going to apply some VAT tax that didn't apply to me. But also they were basically like, well, you're using a personal account. Right. The plus account is only for personal use. And I'd been using that for years. So like it just kind of felt like they were trying to like railroad me into upgrading for no reason. â“ But also drive Google Drive has made it easier for me to coordinate with most people across all of my teams.
because the work I do for Justin Moore at Creator Wizard, he's all in on Google Drive. The work I do for RSS.com, we're all in on Google Web Suite. And so I don't need to worry about anybody who has a Dropbox account. My VA, Ana, she has access to my Google Drive, right? She doesn't have to use my Dropbox or worry about running out of space. So yeah, switching was...
Yes, like the pain, the small pains that I did feel using Dropbox were alleviated with Google Drive.
Does the new tool have a feature I absolutely need? Okay, so this is like a no-ish as far as like storage goes. And so I was already paying for Google Drive, right? I was already paying for like the upgraded version of Google Workspace or whatever it's called now. â“ And so this was like kind of a consolidation move, but
One of the reasons that I ended up upgrading the Google workspace from like the basic starter or business starter to the business standard, whatever their plans are called, is I need a signature tool because I am doing a lot more contract work and the upgraded version of Google Drive has that. And Gemini is now my main AI tool. So from moving from the
Whatever it is, seven, eight dollar a month plan to the sixteen dollar a month plan. I was able to not have to pay for. Dropbox. Which was whatever it is, 200 bucks a year, whatever it was, I was paying. I don't need to pay for Claude. I chat, GPT's on the chalk on the chopping block. And so what is that? That's 200 a year plus 40 a month for however many months I've been using it.
And then I didn't have to go out and buy a new signature tool like HelloSign or whatever. So no, in the sense that Google Drive didn't offer me something really new that I needed at the moment, but upgrading to Google Drive gave me more than what I needed and allowed me to consolidate tools. OK, number three is the level of effort to switch nearly zero. Yes.
Since Dropbox and Google Drive both have like these native Mac apps, I could basically just copy everything from Dropbox over to Google Drive. I did take time to clean things up. But I didn't necessarily need to do that. And, know, like I had just paid for Dropbox, so like nothing was going to break immediately. So that was also I did have some time. But as far as like moving the files over.
It was like leaving my computer on overnight. The biggest level of effort was with my automations and. You know, so the total time to move. Probably an hour, maybe two hours. But again, like the amount of money I'm saving is actually more than than my hourly rate for two hours. So totally worth it switching in that regard. And does the product have staying power?
I mean, if Google doesn't have staying power, I don't know what does. So, â“ yeah. Yes. The answers to the questions. Yes. No ish. Yes. And yes. So the verdict is I switched. Now let's look at a different one. Cal.com. I considered moving from Cal.com back to Calendly because they used to let you modify the
the emails that go out when someone books and they don't let you do that anymore except for on a paid plan. And that annoyed me. And I'm like, if I'm going to pay for something, I might as well pay for Calendly. So I ran this test. Does switching tools outweigh the pain I feel? No, absolutely not. It's 15 bucks a month for Calendly. Maybe it's like 12 bucks a month for Calendly. If I really need to modify the emails,
which I didn't, they made the change like six months ago and I didn't even notice. So how often do I have to do that? I could upgrade to team, to the team plan for one month, same price as switching to Calendly, except it's a, it's a one month thing. So the pain does not outweigh switching. Does the new tool have a feature I absolutely need? No. In fact, I think cal.com has more tools.
Or at least I use more of the tools than I did on Calendly. So no. Is the level of effort to switch nearly zero? No. I'd have to re- like I'd have to reconfigure all of my calendars. I probably have like 10 different calendars. I'd have to connect all of my accounts back up. I'd have to pay. And then I'd have to switch out all of my links everywhere.
And does the product have staying power? Yes, I would say like Calendly definitely has staying power. It's like the verb, Calendly has become the generic term for scheduling link. So three no's and a yes verdict. Don't switch. Definitely not worth it. And I didn't. It was I realized pretty quickly it wasn't worth it.
me switching. So this test like saved me a bunch of hours and time.
Okay, and then the third one. Switching from Arc to... Now, when I originally wrote out this outline, I was using Brave and then my friend, shout out to my friend Liam Dempsey, and compatriot over at our local podcast, Art Local, he mentioned Vivaldi. And that's a pretty sweet browser. So I'm going to talk about it from that point of view, even though I technically went Arc to Brave to Vivaldi.
I used Brave for like five days before switching to Vivaldi. So. Ark.
does switching outweigh the pain I feel? Yes, the performance in Arc has degraded considerably since May. And so. It became nearly unusable, which is when I decided it was time to switch.
Does the new tool have features you absolutely need? No. It's actually the case that the other browsers have fewer desired features. I still, none of the browsers I've looked at does profiles the way Arc does. And I miss it deeply. So no, really Arc still like has more features that I would use.
Is the level of effort to switch nearly zero?
So if I was considering ARK to brave, â“ it's not. ARK made it hard to export almost anything, which is crazy because it's built on Chrome where you can export everything. But Vivaldi has an ARK importer. And so, yes, if I was switching directly to Vivaldi, yes, it would have been near zero. And does the product have staying power?
Yes, both Brave and Vivaldi do where Arc doesn't. And again, when I created this outline, it was before Arc got acquired by â“ Atlassian. Right? If you haven't heard that, that happened. And those are the people who make Asana and I think Trello and a bunch of other things. But just being in the browser business ain't it, right? This is why
The browser company abandoned Arc in the first place and they will say that they didn't abandon Arc.
Arc is still, we still do Chromium updates, but you left Arc to build a new browser with AI built in that had a $20 a month plan. So like, it's really hard to see. It's really hard for me to figure out if Atlassian is going to keep supporting Arc because there's no business model there. And like, I don't know the people at Atlassian, but based on their software stack,
Like, I don't know that they do a lot of things for the love of the game. Right. But both Brave and Vivaldi have other business models. Right. Brave's whole thing is privacy. And so like and they have â“ they have like â“ a VPN built in and an AI chat thing built in. And then the same thing for Vivaldi. They've got
a VPN and like a number of other tools that they're using to monetize their stuff. They're also donation where, but like I don't that worries me sometimes. But, you know, I did look into Vivaldi to see like, hey, am I just going to switch to another browser that's going to leave me? But both Brave and Vivaldi have been around for like 10 years, nine, 10 years. like, again, staying power. So.
The verdict here is I switched, but it wasn't as clear, right? I weighed numbers one and four much more heavily because it's a problem when a tool I use, a tool that I have open for 80 % of my days doesn't perform well, right? And then...
they go off and get sold and in May they announced that they were feature complete and they'd only been around for like a year or so. You know, they built Arc up as this big, we're changing the way browsers work. And then they bounce when they realize, this actually isn't making us any money. So one and four were weighed a lot more heavily here, but also like three with, you know, if I'm subbing in Vivaldi for Brave, three would have been easy as well. So.
There you go. How do you figure out if you should switch? We've got four questions. Is the tool painful to use or does switching outweigh the pain it feels to use the tool? Does the new tool have a feature you absolutely need? Is there a low level of effort to switching and does the tool you're switching to have staying power?
So that's it. That's it for this episode. If you want, you know, if you â“ want to see me do this for any other tools I've switched to and from or are considering, let me know, you know, how does this test measure up when I switched from â“ Airtable to Notion? Right. How does it measure up when I was moving from bare to Apple Notes or whatever to Obsidian? Right. Happy to do more of that.
If you want to tell me, you know, I'd love to hear how you're applying this test to go over to streamlinedfeedback.com link will be in the show notes and you can actually send a voice note. You got to upload it. I am working on a tool to make it easier to send voice notes to the show. But â“ if you want to send a voice note, you can upload it at streamlinedfeedback.com or just send me a text, you know,
a form, a text-based message via the form. But that's it for this episode. Thanks so much for listening and until next time I hope you find some space in your week.