In this section I review one AI-powered application and demonstrate how it can be used to create new value. This week is a bit different. The subject is a bundle of tools rather than a single app, and as always I only mention things I have used myself.
I have brought up Lenny's podcast in earlier issues. It is one of the best product podcasts out there. Back in issue 28 I covered Lennybot, an AI assistant built on Lenny's interviews. This time I want to point you at something else from the same place.
If you take an annual subscription to Lenny's newsletter, you get a year of access to a long list of paid software, the kind of access that would normally cost you thousands of dollars. I subscribed. My year includes Notion, Granola, Railway, Replit, Gamma, Lovable, Canva, Cursor, and a few more. If you are experimenting with AI, the newsletter alone is worth the price. The product pass on top of it makes the decision easy.
Why a bundle like this helps
Trying a new AI tool usually means signing up for another annual subscription before you know whether it fits how you work. That commitment, more than the price, is what holds most people back. A bundle takes the worry away. You pay once and get a full year on each one, which is long enough to tell whether something earns a place in your week. Two weeks is rarely enough. A short trial runs out before you have built anything you care about, so you judge a product on its first screen and move on.
Here is what you actually get for the money. Notion keeps your documents and plans in one place. Granola records meetings and writes up the summary. Railway hosts a prototype once it is ready for real users. Replit and Lovable turn a plain description into a working app. Gamma drafts slide decks from a page of notes. Canva covers design, from a quick social image to a polished one-pager. Cursor is there for the moments you want to edit the code yourself.
A few of those are vibe-coding platforms. Replit and Lovable both let you describe what you want and get back something running, and the cheapest way to find which suits you is to push the same small project through both and watch where they differ. The skill you keep is the way of working, more than any single product, which is the argument I make in this issue's piece on executives and vibe coding.
A typical afternoon for me strings several of these together. Granola summarises a call, I drop the notes into Notion, one of the vibe-coding apps builds a rough prototype of the idea that came up, and Gamma turns the result into a deck for the next meeting. Recent examples, all small: a landing page for an event, a dashboard for a number nobody tracked before, a calculator to settle one pricing argument, a form that replaced a messy email thread. Each took an evening, and none of them needed sign-off from IT.
It also helps that Lenny picked these. He and his podcast guests have spent years working out which products earn a busy team's time, so the list is far from random. It reads like a set someone chose on purpose, which counts for a lot when something new launches every week and most of it will not last.
Lenny has also posted a couple of short videos on getting the most out of the pass. They are a solid primer once you have joined. Here is the first:
And here is part 2:
Your action step
If you have been meaning to try a couple of these AI tools but kept putting off the separate sign-ups, this is the week to do it. Take the annual subscription, then pick one real task. Turn your last workshop's notes into a short deck, or rebuild a manual spreadsheet as a small app. Run the work through whichever of them fits, and watch which ones you come back to on your own. If a single rebuild like that saves you an hour each week, the subscription has already paid for itself, and you have found out which tools deserve a permanent place. To get started, head to Lenny's newsletter.
If you want help deciding which AI tools are worth standardising on across your teams, and how to build the habits around them, that is part of what I do in AI strategy advisory engagements and in hands-on sessions as an AI keynote speaker and workshop facilitator.