Macpreneur

Why 'Fighting' ChatGPT Works Magic for This Mac User with MV Braverman

• Damien Schreurs • Season 6 • Episode 136

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In this episode, you'll learn from MV Braverman, an expert in email deliverability and marketing consultancy at Inbox Welcome. 

MV shares her tech setup and why she prefers a Microsoft ergonomic keyboard, despite being a longtime Mac user.

MV and Damien discuss various applications, and also touch on the challenges and nuances of using AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude for business tasks.

Show notes and video at: https://macpreneur.com/episode136

Connect with MV:

Highlights:

  • [00:00] Teaser  
  • [00:23] Introduction to MV Braverman  
  • [01:01] MV's Tech Setup: Macs and More  
  • [01:40] The Ergonomic Keyboard Debate  
  • [03:25] MV's Journey with Apple and Microsoft  
  • [06:59] Comparing Mac Mini M2 and Intel MacBook Pro  
  • [11:08] Essential Apps for Business  
  • [14:32] ChatGPT and AI Tools in Business  
  • [18:49] Challenges with Transcription and Proofreading  
  • [27:45] Exploring Google Workspace and AI Integration  
  • [40:06] MV's Mac Wish  
  • [44:32] Connecting with MV  
  • [45:00] Applying to be a guest too  
  • [45:24] Outro  

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Why 'Fighting' ChatGPT Works Magic for This Mac User with MV Braverman


Teaser

Damien Schreurs: If we go back to ChatGPT, what do you use it for?

MV Braverman: I don't know how to say this. I use it to fight with.

Nova AI: Welcome to Macpreneur, the show for seasoned solopreneurs looking to streamline their business on a Mac. Unlock the secrets to saving time and money with your host and technology mentor, Damien Schreurs.


Introduction to MV Braverman

Damien Schreurs: Hello, hello! Today I have the pleasure to introduce MV Braverman. MV runs Inbox Welcome, an email deliverability and marketing consultancy that helps solopreneurs and small businesses take their emails from sent to seen. She's been a Mac user forever, and it's pretty much all Apple, though many of her clients are not. MV loves breaking down email marketing and tech challenges into simple, actionable steps that work for anyone. MV, welcome to the show!

MV Braverman: Thanks for having me. I'm ready to geek out.


MV's Tech Setup: Macs and More

Damien Schreurs: So, let's jump into the meat of the matter and discuss your current tech setup, and especially which Mac are you using today to run your business?

MV Braverman: So I have two right now. I am on my Mac Mini M2 with an ultra-wide display, and I also have a 2019 MacBook Pro, which at this point is mostly my backup when my continuity camera refuses to work. That's mainly—yes—I have an iPhone 15 Pro and it is basically all Apple here. I only own one Microsoft product, which is my keyboard, oddly enough.


The Ergonomic Keyboard Debate

Damien Schreurs: How come you prefer the Microsoft keyboard over the Apple one?

MV Braverman: It's the ergonomic one. I genuinely do not understand how people can do this all day. I love this ergonomic keyboard once I got used to it. It's amazing. So yes, this is the one Microsoft product I will keep buying until they don't make it anymore.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, so for the listeners who might not know what this keyboard is about, it's really like—if you take the keyboard, imagine you cut it in half; and then, if I remember correctly, the keys are also on a slope, right?

MV Braverman: The keyboard is sloped, and it just gives a more natural positioning to the hands.

Damien Schreurs: So you have your hands really separated rather than having them both together, and they are not flat. They actually angle upward a little bit—like with some ergonomic mouse where you have a tilted design and stuff like that.

MV Braverman: I don't. Actually, I use a trackball. I am super old-fashioned. Yeah, it's not a lot of choices, but this stuff works for me, and I realized when I was preparing for this just how conservative I have become with my hardware—and, like, I signed up for a whole bunch of different SaaS products. I mean, I swear, my 1Password is full to the brim with logins, but I'm very careful about what I download to my Mac, and I'm very careful about my hardware.


MV's Journey with Apple and Microsoft

Damien Schreurs: In the intro, I mentioned that you've been using Macs for a very, very long time. So have you always had this Microsoft keyboard since the very beginning? You never use an Apple keyboard?

MV Braverman: Well, okay, so—taking us back in time—I actually had to look it up when OS X was announced. I had used previous versions, but at the time OS X was announced, I had been a Unix sysadmin, and I was on Linux all the time. So when they said, "It's BSD under the hood," I was like, sign me up! And I never looked back; the combination of a great GUI and the ability to fire up Terminal and do Unix things is perfect.

I do not believe that, at the time, Apple even had any keyboards. I don't remember when I found this Microsoft keyboard—it’s been a long time. I think at the time I was like, "I gotta try Dvorak; I gotta try all these things!" So I was experimenting quite a bit, and now I'm pretty set in my ways.

Damien Schreurs: And so did you remap the Windows key to the Command key, and do you have stickers to...

MV Braverman: No, it's actually pretty—like, the Windows key is the Command key; it's pretty equivalent. I don't think my function keys do anything. It would be nice if I could remap them, but I realized that I'm no longer willing to go down these rabbit holes. Also, I know there's now a Globe key—I have absolutely no idea what it does. So I hope it's not important.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. I've never used the Globe key. I think it's used if you press it twice; you can invoke dictation. There are a few things like that with the Globe.

MV Braverman: I mapped that to something else if I needed to; that's okay.

Damien Schreurs: To be honest, I'm also unfaithful to the Apple keyboard. I have a Logitech keyboard.

MV Braverman: They are just tiny. I don't need the clicky-clicky that my offspring do, but I need a little bit of tactile feedback.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. And also, what I like about my Logitech keyboard is that it has three-way Bluetooth pairing. So, number one is my work partition on the iMac; then, I have a second partition, which is all the personal stuff. When I switch to that other partition, I use a second Bluetooth radio, and I have a third Bluetooth radio. I don't remember now if it's the iPhone or the iPad, because I always have both in front of me. I think it's the iPad. It was very, very useful in the past, but now with the ability to use my iMac’s trackpad directly to control the iPad, I don't need—

MV Braverman: We stick with what works.

Damien Schreurs: And so you have the Mac Mini. So, for how long have you had that one?


Comparing Mac Mini M2 and Intel MacBook Pro

MV Braverman: I think I got it a couple of years ago right when it came out. So I ended up with a 2019 MacBook Pro—in 2020, obviously, everything was offline. I don't know how things were where you are, but in the U.S. everything was shut down, especially in California. So I had to hand off my 2015 MacBook Pro to my son for school, and then they just announced the M1. I was like, I don't know, are they really going to stick with it? I'll just go with the last Intel. I am kind of regretting this decision now, although at the time there really weren't any apps that supported that architecture yet. So, in retrospect, after investing so much time and money, they probably would stick with the M architecture. But I'm happy to have the newer M—it's working.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. They didn't—they went directly from the M2 to the M4 Mac Mini. I think it's going to be more common in the future. I don't expect that all models of Macs will go through every processor version. For me, it makes sense that they would wait a bit. But if you have to compare your M2 Mac Mini with the Intel MacBook Pro, what's your experience?

MV Braverman: I confess that usually when I invest in the MacBook Pros, I go for the max. And I would like to complain a little bit about how impossible it is now to upgrade anything, so you have to do everything upfront. I don't know—I remember replacing a hard drive in my 2015 model, I'm pretty sure. I would not try to crack any of my stuff these days, which makes me a little sad. But yeah—I maxed out the hard drive; I maxed out the memory. On this one, however, I actually went with the lowest model because I was like, "Oh, I'll store my stuff in the cloud." So I'm not regretting the hard drive; I am regretting the memory. I should have maxed out the RAM, which is what I'm really finding.

Damien Schreurs: When do you notice that you need more?

MV Braverman: Well, when I boot up and it tells me that I'm out of memory. But also, I have recently discovered the MacApps subreddit, which is a very dangerous place. I have been trying some of these things that people are raving about, and I'm realizing just how many resources they actually take. There's this super cute app called Typiebara—a cute little capybara that types along with you. It's adorable, but it takes up a decent chunk of my limited resources. So sadly, Typiebara often has to go. I'm used to adding things I need to login items, and now I'm very careful about that. So that's my main regret, truthfully.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. And so how much memory do you have now on the Mac Mini?

MV Braverman: It's 8 gigs. Oh, the Mac Mini is 8 gigs—I know, it was the lowest. I have 16 on my MacBook Pro, which is a lot older. Believe me, I am kicking myself a bit.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. I would say that even in 2020, 8 gigabytes as a minimum, or as the default memory for a computer, was a bit cheap on Apple's part.

MV Braverman: I mean, my kids are gamers, and they assure me that 8 or 16 is pretty decent. But I've done tech support quite a bit, and it doesn't sound right—not from my memory of what it's like to use Windows—but it's not my problem.

Damien Schreurs: Okay.


Essential Apps for Business

Damien Schreurs: So let's switch gears and talk about the applications that you rely upon to run your business.

MV Braverman: I looked at it with a decidedly unscientific eye, and I realized that I basically have four or five things that I absolutely use constantly. 1Password is my password manager—I highly recommend it. My browser, which is Arc—I’m going to put an asterisk to it—I love a lot of things about it, but it does seem to be no longer as developed, so I am cautiously looking for an alternative. But it has some features that I absolutely love. I don't know about you, but I do not understand why the default Dock is at the bottom, when we have a lot more real estate side to side. So one of the first things I always do is move the Dock to the side. Similarly, why are the tabs at the top when they're taking up real estate, whereas in Arc, the tabs are on the side, which makes a lot of sense to me.

It also has this amazing feature of auto-archiving my tabs, because I have the dreaded disease of tabitis, where I open tabs and never close them. In the past, I was slightly embarrassed to admit it, but before Arc, I would switch between Firefox, Chrome, and Brave every month. I would open my new browser, cover my eyes, close all the windows, and start fresh. Now, it's like if I haven't opened it in a week, it's probably not important—let's archive it.

Also, renaming my downloads is surprisingly fabulous. I no longer have files called, like, "Final Final Draft V5." They're actually named something that makes sense, which is really awesome. So Arc accounts for like 90 percent of my time.

Damien Schreurs: So is this a default feature of Arc for downloads?

MV Braverman: It's one of their AI features. I don't use any of the others—this is the only one that I actually use. I think you have to turn it on. Then my other big apps are Slack and ChatGPT—that’s pretty much it. Oh, Zoom, of course—sorry, I do all my meetings in Zoom. I do have others; I can't commit to either Evernote or Notion and other things, but these are like 90 percent of my time. I also use the unappreciated and unheralded old school Apple Stickies, which I really like. I actually have a lot of physical Post-it notes—I don't use them that much—but I really do use the fake Post-it notes. And one really cool feature about it is that you can pin a note so it does not get lost. You can't accidentally get rid of it. And I know you're going to ask this later, but one thing I discovered recently is that you can now save them to your Apple Notes, which is amazing. So now they’re kind of synced.


ChatGPT and AI Tools in Business

Damien Schreurs: If we go back to ChatGPT, what do you use it for?

MV Braverman: I don't know how to say this—I use it to fight with. It's really, mainly, a brainstorming partner. I will never put out content by just saying, "ChatGPT, write about this," or just telling it, "Write me something." Instead, I say, "Here's my info dump—this is what I'm thinking. These are my random ideas. Please help me organize this. Give me feedback. How can I structure this for a LinkedIn post?" And I ask it to take on a couple of personas of people whose work and style I respect, to say, "How would they say this?" And so I go back and forth a lot—but it really is very helpful. With actual humans, we have that whole notion of needing five positive interactions to one negative one. I don't have that problem with ChatGPT; I can just say, "This is nonsense. Do better." And sometimes it does.

Damien Schreurs: Have you tried the rating or ranking technique where you ask it to rate its own output? Did you try that?

MV Braverman: I should. I'm a little scared of this. I feel at this point we have so many AI tools—like, for Java applications, you write your resume with AI, you submit it to an AI. It's going to be like that classic video of two Google Homes talking to each other. I think we're getting to that point, so I'm not sure if I want to ask ChatGPT to rate itself, but I might ask it, "What would such-and-such person think of what you just said?" I like having at least some human in the loop.

Damien Schreurs: I used to use ChatGPT to help me find titles for the episodes. Now I do it myself, but I had a very elaborate prompt about what makes viral or appealing titles. It would then spit out a bunch of options, and I would ask, "On a scale from 1 to 10—10 being the most appealing—how would you rate these?" I would then select a few or combine them to create variations. It's funny because it created titles for me through a template; then I rated them: this one is a five, this one is a four, this one is a seven, this one is an eight.

MV Braverman: I mean, it's good to be self-aware. Usually, I would ask, "What would my ideal customer or ideal listener think of this?" and then provide me with fake quotes in the customer's voice. It's kind of helpful.

Damien Schreurs: And have you tried playing with the latest model—the 03, the 03 mini, the reasoning one?

MV Braverman: A little bit. The 03 mini—I thought it was terrible. I thought it was even less capable than the others I was used to. The 03 was interesting, but I did not have the patience to wait for it, so I'll probably play with it later. But I'm actually pretty happy with how much it has learned about me; the 04 is usually pretty sufficient for me. Again, I do have a paid account, so I got it. Then I look at the memories and save them—and I'm like, "Why?" But it's working.


Challenges with Transcription and Proofreading

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, so I've been using the 01 mini to proofread the captions for the podcast—the video version that goes to YouTube. We record the video using Squadcast, and then it goes into Descript for editing. I don't know if you have experience with Descript, but the transcription is not that good. Actually, maybe it's my accent—I don't know, maybe it's the topic—but...

MV Braverman: Me.

Damien Schreurs: ...and it tends to hallucinate in the transcription. Yes, it does. So from time to time, it invents words, completing sentences; it makes up sentences or half-sentences that I never spoke, or that the guest never spoke. I have to clean up a bunch of things; and sometimes, you need a well-thought-out correction. Usually, you have to put "well" and then a symbol, right? And it's all together, instead of being separated. I was fed up with needing to correct that manually in Descript—every time, even though it looks like a word processor and it’s very easy to select sentences or words and press delete, to correct text you have to press the letter C, then a pop-up appears asking if you want to change just that instance or all instances. It's a mess, and I would say 90 percent of the time it works. Then, for some reason, 10 percent of the time it takes two words that were next to each other and collates them. Then I have to correct it again. I'm fed up with losing so much time.

MV Braverman: Tell it it's English and not German, where they just smush words together into one giant word.

Damien Schreurs: So one day I decide, "Okay, let's export the captions as an SRT file, and let's see which of these AI tools is capable of proofreading an SRT file while preserving its format." For people who don't know, the SRT format basically has timestamps. There’s a number—say, number one—and then you have a time range, like 0:00:00 to 0:00:05. Underneath, you have the sentences that are spoken during that time. When I have a 20-minute video, it’s roughly 400 timestamps. I played with ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Gemini—I completely forget about it—was totally incapable of understanding.

MV Braverman: I do like NotebookLM, but Gemini is a joke.

Damien Schreurs: ChatGPT 4.0—Gemini couldn't handle it. I needed to use 01 and the 01 mini; they were working okay. For some reason, the 03 mini is lazy. If I gave it 400 timestamps, it would only spit out 50 or 60. I reduced the number, and again, one out of two times it doesn't complete the job. It's like I give 100 timestamps, it spits out 70 and then says, "The rest will be the same," instead of clarifying. So I had to go back to 01. 01 does the job, but it takes roughly four to five minutes for every 100 timestamps. I realized the more timestamps I give it, the more it starts to combine things. Sometimes, once I gave it 400 timestamps, I ended up with 350 because it combined some of the text. It was completely over the place. And imagine: five minutes for every 100 timestamps for a 20‑minute episode means about 20 minutes just to proofread.

MV Braverman: That sounds awful. Honestly, I would go back to the source and just try running it with Whisper. See...

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. Mac Whisper is much better, but the problem is that—oh no, you're right—I could go with Mac Whisper, but I don't have it. Mac Whisper works well for monologues, but not for interviews.

MV Braverman: Hmm.

Damien Schreurs: It is not capable of splitting the speakers. In the end, I found a solution with Claude. With Claude AI, I give it these 100 or 150 timestamps. Claude AI has a smaller token window—it accepts only so much input—but it has a larger window for input than for output. So yes, you can feed it the entire caption file, but it’s only capable of spitting out 4K or 8K of output. The input is sometimes too much.

MV Braverman: Really? I don't use it very much, but it once gave me what felt like freaking novels when I was trying to create some things. That's so interesting.

Damien Schreurs: I'm using the free version of Claude—I’m not on the paid version. So maybe there is a limit for the output tokens. But Claude is super fast. I give it 100 timestamps, and it spits out the proofread file. It never changes or compresses things—it’s Claude. I'm really impressed by how well it handles language.

MV Braverman: Interesting.

Damien Schreurs: I'm still not paying because I managed to set up my four-step process for proofreading the SRT, but then Claude would close on my browser, and a week later I’d have to go back to it to do the job.

MV Braverman: Hey, if it works, it works. I do have a couple of third-party tools like Merlin that use multiple models. I think they’re also worth trying, but it sounds like if the free version is working, then that's great. The paid one might not be much better.

Damien Schreurs: Well, the paid version of Claude gives access to a bigger model. If I remember correctly, I have the smallest model they offer. I don't have access to projects in Claude... Have you played with that?

MV Braverman: I like the idea. It's sort of like Canva projects and folders—I like the idea of putting things in projects—but I never really do that. I just start new chats all over the place. But many other platforms have adopted projects. Actually, ChatGPT now has projects—pretty much everyone has projects at this point. They're all just borrowing the idea from each other.


Exploring Google Workspace and AI Integration

Damien Schreurs: You mentioned NotebookLM. What do you use it for?

MV Braverman: I dump a whole bunch of data into it, and I am a Google Workspace user and admin—I get paid for it, I pay for it—and I'm a big fan. I hope that, unlike many of its other products, Google does not kill this one.

Damien Schreurs: Me too.

MV Braverman: I like it because—though I don't do that whole "make the podcasts talk to each other" thing—I can add a whole bunch of YouTube videos or dump transcripts from a course and have it help me summarize things, or aggregate a whole bunch of sources. It's a lot less creative than other models and is just able to hold so much information. Supposedly, I'm going to get access to a larger version even though I don't think I need it, but I'm looking forward to checking it out.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, for listeners, if you are also on Google Workspace the good news—if I can call it that—is that Google has decided that, rather than waiting for us to sign up for Gemini, the Gemini features are now integrated into all their products.

MV Braverman: Whether you want it or not. Let me just say that the subreddits are full of posts asking, "How do I turn this off?"

Damien Schreurs: The issue is that I've looked into it. I don't know if it's smart or sneaky—I think both—but basically they've combined Gemini with smart suggestions and capabilities in all their Google products. So in Gmail, you have auto-completion; when you start typing a sentence, it will suggest the end of it. Even if you're on the first line of your email, it will show you, "Hi [recipient's first name]," and you just press Tab and it writes it for you. This is now linked with Gemini. So if you say, "I don't want Gemini," you won't get these features, including the ability to have calendar entries created based on email content. This is one of the smart features.

MV Braverman: Which is not very predictable either. Like, why can't you just give me a button to add something to my calendar? So what you're saying is basically that Gemini is like the Clippy of 2025.

Damien Schreurs: And actually, if you are an admin—I am an admin for Google Workspace—you could, I think, decide by a cutoff date whether your users have these smart features enabled by default or not. I don't remember exactly what happened—I didn’t do anything special—but one day when I logged in, I got a pop-up asking me, "Do you want to keep using these smart features?" It explained that Gemini was linked to them. And if I said, "No, I wouldn’t want Gemini," then I wouldn’t have all the features that I rely on in Gmail and other apps. So I turned it on, though I have mixed feelings about Gemini being integrated like this.

MV Braverman: It's not good. It lies. I once asked it to help me with a Sheets formula, and it lied. How can you lie about creating a formula for a product you should know everything about?

Damien Schreurs: Yeah. Now, in Gmail, when I'm composing a message, I have—in light gray—I think it is Option-H, Command-H, showing me a keyboard shortcut labeled "Help me write." I was composing a reply in French to one of my French-speaking clients, and I said, "Okay, let's try it." It suggested "Help me write." I pressed the shortcut, and then it said, "Sorry, I'm not available in French," even though you can see I'm writing in French. It's a reply to an email that was originally in French. Why suggest something you can't do and then complain afterward? I thought, that's really bad user interface. 

But on the flip side, I had a client who sent me a screenshot of an issue on her phone. It was an email she received—possibly from Outlook—but then in the Mail app on the iPhone, all the header text was jumbled, and she couldn't read the email properly. I took the screenshot (after cropping out personal information) and gave it to ChatGPT, asking, "What's the problem? What could be causing this?" It provided a very detailed explanation that made complete sense and actually covered more ground than I anticipated. I copy-pasted the answer from ChatGPT into my Gmail reply, and then I asked, since it was in English, "Help me write." The response that was crafted based on ChatGPT’s input was pretty good. I altered maybe 20 percent—I added a few things and changed some wording so it sounded like me. For once, I was like, "Wow, Gemini—one point, you get a star, you get a golden star from me today."

MV Braverman: I wish you would tell me, because it's actually kind of hard to get through the headers in Apple Mail, which I love to look at. When you sometimes want them and sometimes don't, it just doesn't work well.

Damien Schreurs: Basically, ChatGPT's answer was that there could have been a corruption—the email message might have been corrupted during receiving or while going through different servers, or the issue might have been with the sender. The last recommendation—and I passed it on to my client—was to double-check if the issue arose with the same sender and then ask the sender what email client they are using to send such messages. It was mostly common sense, but it did save me time coming up with a reply. I'm a pretty slow email writer and a bit of a perfectionist—I overthink every sentence and can spend an hour on an email reply that, if I had used dictation or a voice memo, would have taken less than five minutes. But when it comes to the written word, I'm super picky.

MV Braverman: Yep.

Damien Schreurs: Very good. So let's move on to the next section of the show. You already alluded to a "ha ha" moment. Do you want to continue with what you had, or do you have another one to share?

MV Braverman: I don't know if I have anything more really recent, truthfully, but yeah—I recently discovered that I can tell Stickies to save to my Apple Notes. I think we underappreciate the need for ephemeral daily notes—just scribbles that don't need to be saved forever. I don't need to structure them for Notion or Evernote or whatever. Sometimes, because I do back and forth with ChatGPT a lot, I want to save something from way back when that was actually good, but it won’t let me pin stuff, which drives me crazy. So I can just copy and paste it to a sticky note, and now I can save it in Apple Notes so I can view it on my other device, which is great.

And this isn't recent, but I think a lot of people don't know about this and I keep suggesting it to them. I often get asked, "I don't want to keep paying for Workspace anymore—how do I get my email? I want business email, but I don't want to pay for Workspace." And if you are a paying iCloud user (I pay 99 cents a month—now $2.99), you can get up to five domains hosted by Apple, and they do really well with authentication. So if you're on Apple and don't want to spend money on Workspace, just do this. It's great—I highly recommend it.

And of course, I always give a plug for passwords. I know that nowadays there’s a password manager built into some systems, but my recent discovery is that it’s not going to do what I need. You can't share passwords with anyone who's not in your secret group. So I can't ask my clients to securely share passwords with me, which is what I really need. Therefore, I still recommend a third-party password manager. Time Machine and a password manager are two things you absolutely must use. I get off my soapbox there—I talk about this a lot—but I mean, I think we both helped someone in SPI whose hard drive was lost completely.

Damien Schreurs: And yeah, unfortunately, when you don't have a strong backup strategy, people learn the hard way by losing important documents, and then realize that we need a better backup strategy.


MV's Mac Wish

Damien Schreurs: If you were in charge of the Mac division at Apple, what would be your first priority?

MV Braverman: Oof. I had a funny answer, and then I have an actually awesome answer. My funny, quality-of-life answer is that I get random bings and dings on my Mac, and I have no idea where they came from. If they could just zip me over to the tab or app where they originated, that would be fabulous. But my serious answer is—in the intro I mentioned that Arc is my favorite browser. I really like it; it has some quirks, but overall it sets a high bar. However, it's not being developed much right now. So what I really wish is that Apple would give up on the Safari business, accept that Chromium is the way—even though we don't like Chrome—and take Arc, make it Apple-y. That would be my absolute dream.

Damien Schreurs: Yeah, I must say that I'm using Arc as well—but it's more my scratchpad browser, my research browser, yes.

MV Braverman: Hmm. What is your—

Damien Schreurs: My standard... but I don't have a default browser.

MV Braverman: Your default.

Damien Schreurs: I'm using them all. I use Safari for things I want to easily synchronize with my iPhone and iPad, and for Apple-related tasks. Then I use Google Chrome because I'm on Google Workspace—I have a business Google account, a personal one, and even a family account, with different profiles. That's perfect for that.

MV Braverman: You can do that in Arc. I do it.

Damien Schreurs: But it seems you cannot sign in with a Google account and have it fully synchronized with Google's servers?

MV Braverman: No, you can sign in, but you can only sync the same profile on multiple devices. Even on your iPhone—I haven't…

Damien Schreurs: What I'm really interested in is having something that synchronizes through Google's servers. That's all. For that, you need Chrome. There is no other choice. But then I have Firefox for whichever client work I do, because it's the browser that's most supported when I teach online for one of my clients. For that client, they recommend using Firefox over Chrome, Safari, or Edge. So I've decided, "Okay, let's go with that," because anyway...

MV Braverman: I did not see that coming, because usually it's the other way around—95 percent of the time.

Damien Schreurs: And here we're talking specifically about a tool called BigBlueButton. BigBlueButton is an online teaching classroom platform. It offers capabilities similar to Zoom, but it's more tailored toward online training—and it's my favorite platform for providing online training. It works better; it's more stable on Firefox compared to the others. I suspect that's because BigBlueButton is open-source software.

MV Braverman: Interesting. Have you tried Zen Browser? I've heard about it. It uses the Firefox engine, or something like that. But yeah, it's an open-source project, which apparently is pretty awesome, so I'm going to try it out. Still, I need the Chrome extensions, unfortunately, so I'm stuck in some ways.

Damien Schreurs: I think that's my wishlist. It's not going to happen, but it would be awesome.

Damien Schreurs: So thank you very much, MV, for sharing how you're using your Mac to run your business.

MV Braverman: Thank you for having me. It's a topic I don't often get to talk about, so it's really nice to be able to share a little bit.


Connecting with MV

Damien Schreurs: Very good. So where can people find you online?

MV Braverman: I am most active on LinkedIn as a social platform—just search for MV Braverman. And my website is inboxwelcome.com. I also use email quite a bit, so mv(at)inboxwelcome.com is a great way to get ahold of me.

Damien Schreurs: I will put all that information in the show notes.


Applying to Be a Guest Too

Damien Schreurs: And so, if you, like MV, would like to share how you are using your Mac to run your solopreneur business, it's simple: just visit macpreneur.com/apply. 

If you are already on Podmatch, just click on the button and you will land on the show profile. 

Otherwise, fill out the application form and I will get back to you within a few days. 

Once again, it's macpreneur.com/apply.


Outro

Damien Schreurs: If you found this episode helpful, please share it with a fellow solopreneur and tag both MV and me on LinkedIn. And until next time, I'm Damien Schreurs, wishing you a great day.

Nova AI: Thank you for listening to the Macpreneur Podcast. If you've enjoyed the show, please leave a review and share it with a friend right now.