The modern marketing landscape requires an unprecedented balance between rapid execution and strategic clarity, a challenge that frequently leaves creative teams fractured across disconnected platforms. For Chrissy Lim, the co-founder and CEO of Protaigé, solving this operational friction is the culmination of a diverse 30-year career spanning law, advertising, and multiple ventures in AdTech and B2B creative services. Having previously established Quickcut’s Singapore office to revolutionise print advertising workflows and subsequently running her own B2B content marketing agency for 12 years as creative director, Lim possesses firsthand insight into the systemic gaps that plague traditional marketing structures.

Today, she channels that experience into Protaigé, an autonomous AI marketing platform engineered to orchestrate and deliver complex marketing campaigns at scale. Headquartered in Singapore and built by industry veterans with a track record of leading global campaigns for brands like Adobe, SAP, and Coca-Cola, Protaigé addresses the disconnect between intricate creative workflows and the relentless speed of modern consumer demand. Backed by an advisory board of seasoned marketing leaders from global platforms and consultancies, the company empowers modern marketing teams to execute campaigns faster, more consistently, and at a significantly greater scale.

Terng Shing Chen shares the tech tools he uses to run SYNC PR

As a founder operating at the intersection of technological innovation and traditional design, Lim’s personal tech stack reflects a deliberate effort to combat tool sprawl while preserving room for genuine human artistry. From using terminal-based AI to build internal trackers to maintaining her creative muscle memory in traditional design suites, here are the essential digital tools driving Lim’s daily workflow.

Manage your day-to-day with Claude Code (paid)

Claude Code has become my daily non-negotiable, which is not something I would have imagined five years ago. I have always had more ideas for internal tools than time or engineers to build them, and Claude Code closes that gap. I access it through Terminal, and as a non-developer, I have found it surprisingly intuitive. What makes it so powerful for me is that it is plugged into our actual systems, our code, database, and GitHub, so I can build small, genuinely useful apps and pull real answers straight out of the business without waiting on anyone.

Running a startup means being nimble and resourceful, and we are constantly finding ways to DIY a solution to an immediate need while we scale. Claude Code takes that instinct to another level, letting a lean team do far more than its size suggests. Recently, I used it to build our own platform-growth and user-insights tracker.

Protaigé for your own marketing (Paid)

I use Protaigé to run our own marketing. I built it to solve the problems I spent years living with as an agency founder and creative director: fragmented tools, repetitive production cycles, and the pressure to move fast across markets without letting the brand come apart in the process.

Most AI tools fix one piece of that puzzle and leave you to stitch the rest together, which just shifts the friction somewhere else. Protaigé is built to think and execute like an agency, running the whole marketing lifecycle end to end. From strategy and production to execution across channels, our Brand DNA system keeps our tone, visual style, and positioning in its memory, ensuring everything it produces stays consistent by default.

The way I actually work with our platform is through Maia, our AI account director. I message her and she picks up the job, whether I CC her on an email, add her to a Slack thread, or loop her into a Zoom call. Having her means there is no onboarding lag when someone new joins or a freelancer comes on; they just tell Maia what they need. This has fundamentally shifted where I spend my attention, taking the execution off my plate so I can focus on insight, creative direction, and judgement.

Use PostHog to monitor user behaviour (Paid)

PostHog is how I stay close to our customers without getting in their way. I mainly use it to observe real users moving through our product in real time. There is a limit to what dashboards and funnels can tell you: numbers can show you what happened, but watching someone hesitate on a screen or click an option you did not expect tells you why. For a product person, that is gold.

I will often watch a run of sessions before making a product decision, because it keeps us updated on how real people use Protaigé, rather than how we think or hope they do. It has caught user friction where we would have never spotted it in data, and it has stopped us from building for a user who does not exist. Sitting with real sessions is one of the simplest ways I have found to stay grounded in what we are building and who we are building it for.

GitHub as a project management tool (Paid)

GitHub is an obvious addition, but it earns a place on my list because of what we have achieved with it beyond code. We have customised it into a lightweight alternative to Jira, so all our project management lives in the same pipeline as the code itself. This means there is no gap between planning a piece of work and shipping it; the ticket, discussion, change, and release all sit in one place, and nothing gets lost in the handover process between a planning tool and a building tool.

Tool sprawl is one of the quiet killers of startup momentum. Every extra system is another place to check, another thing to keep in sync, and another context to switch to. Keeping delivery and planning under one roof means engineering and product are not speaking different languages across different apps. For me, GitHub is less a developer tool and more a channel through which I can run a tight, single-pipeline delivery process.

Expand your creativity with Adobe Creative Cloud (Paid)

For all the AI in my working life, Adobe Creative Cloud is where I go to flex my human hand. I use it for the advanced, original design work and the pieces where the point is craft, not speed. It is the counterweight to everything else on this list. My view is that AI is extraordinary for scaling volume and maintaining consistency, but the original, exceptional idea that has not been done before still comes from a creative person. Adobe is what I reach for when I am doing that work myself.

Staying hands-on creatively is very important to me. It is easy to lose your feel for the craft when your days are spent in Terminal. Retaining muscle memory keeps my judgement calibrated about what great should look like.