The shift from accumulation, the five-step sequence and the leverage you need. As a founder, your tech stack shouldn’t be a tax on your venture. It’s best to build it deliberately, so it can help you move. 

Theunis Duminy runs Vertiqal, an SA AI implementation consultancy that helps companies connect AI to the systems where their data actually lives. And he shared with us the five steps to help you build your founder stack for success.

Stop adding tools to plug gaps and start building a connected stack on purpose. Build your stack with purpose.

“One person with the right system can do what previously took 10 people. The limiting factor isn’t budget or team size — it’s whether you’re thinking clearly about where your data lives.”

Start with the philosophy that governs everything else. Buy for the problems that are genuinely solved and don’t change: accounting, payments, calendar. Build for the operational layer where your way of working is the actual edge, instead of paying forever to retrofit yourself into someone else’s tool. Get this call right and the rest of the stack falls into place. 

Here’s how to decide what to buy and what to build.

Before you build anything new, clear the bloat. Most founders are quietly running thousands of rand a month across overlapping tools they barely use. Audit the stack, kill the duplicates and the dead weight, and centralise the operational data those tools were fragmenting. This is what frees the budget (and the clarity) for the system you’re about to build. 

Here’s how to stop paying for SaaS you don’t need.

With your data centralised, the unlock is letting AI actually work with it: talking to your systems instead of clicking through them. Connecting Claude to where your business data lives turns a generic assistant into one that answers from your real numbers, clients and projects. This is the step that makes the whole stack intelligent. 

Here’s how to connect Claude to your business data.

Not every automation is leverage. Many are just patches shuttling data between tools that shouldn’t be disconnected in the first place. Before you build, learn to tell a leverage automation from a useless one, so you spend your time on the workflows that do real work rather than glue you’ll maintain forever. 

Here’s how to spot a useless automation before you build it.

Now put leverage to work. With the stack lean, the data connected and a clear sense of what’s worth automating, build your first genuine workflow; the kind that does work that wouldn’t otherwise happen. This is where the whole build pays off, turning your tech stack from something you maintain into something that works for you. 

Here’s how to build your first n8n automation.

These five steps are drawn from Automations Every Founder Needs in Their Stack: A Practical Founder OS, Theunis’s full masterclass inside the Founder Collab. The full session shows you the complete Founder OS underneath the sequence:

You’ll also get access to 40+ other masterclasses from SA founders and operators on sales, fundraising, UX, paid media and more inside The Founder Collab.

Get more SA tech and business news, tips and business-building workflows and subscribe to The Open Letter.