It’s been a busy week! A new business, a new website version, new technology, new AI coding, a new podcast episode and maybe a new direction. Lots to cover so let’s get to it.

Topics for this week:

• divs.iterations

• 33% Complete

• Starting a Business in a Day

• Writing with Sonnet

• The Easy Middle

divs.iterations

Divs Cloud Solutions LLC is now a business!

To celebrate divs.cloud being backed by an LLC, I took another pass at editing the website.

I made some minor styling tweaks like colors and layout, but those changes are easy.

The struggle for me is the words on the page.

Ideally you would know who you’re writing to when you create a landing page but I’m not exactly sure who that person is yet so I ended up going the other direction by listing some areas I have experience with that I could offer advice.

It’s pretty broad but it’s a place to start.

I’m sure there will be many versions of divs.cloud much like there have been many versions of divs.design, but it’s easier to iterate on something that isn’t great than try to come up with a perfect version from the start.

And overall, I’m happy with the direction for now. Let me know what you think about this iteration!

33% Complete

Back in May, I referenced a podcast stat breakdown on reddit that claimed completing 21 episodes puts you in the top 1% of podcasts automatically because 90% of people don’t make it past episode 3.

After yesterday, The Dev Sync is on it’s way to episode 8 being uploaded next week so we’re more than a third of the way to being in the top 1%. Then we just have to compete with the 20,000 other podcasts that didn’t quit.

For this episode, we talked about my experience using Claude Sonnet 3.5 to build a quick app and the growing potential of coding with AI, but as always, Eric and I did not have trouble filling an hour of talk time.

I’ll be editing this weekend and uploading Monday evening, so if you want to help us on our quest to dethrone Joe Rogan from the top of the 1% of podcasts, you can support the episode on Monday.

Starting A Business in A Day

Starting a business is way too easy.

Divs Cloud Solutions marked the 4th business (all LLCs) I’ve created, but probably won’t be the last.

In one day, I was able to register Divs Cloud Solutions LLC with the state of Indiana. I paid $95 and submitted the application around 12:50 pm EST, and by 2:30 pm, I had an email from the Secretary of State’s office congratulating me on my new business.

An hour after that, I filed for an Employee Identification Number (EIN) so that I can open a business bank account in the near future.

Kind of blows my mind it’s that quick to create a company. Only took a few minutes of setup and a couple hours of waiting.

I think I spent longer setting up a new email address, but even that was quick. I registered [email protected] as the business email, which Google Workspace made super easy by integrating directly into my domain host, Namecheap.

Starting the business easy, I was able to do it in less than a day.

The hard part is making money with the business…

Writing with Sonnet

I had seen rumors on X that Claude Sonnet 3.5 was surprisingly good at writing and reviewing code, so after seeing this thread of examples of what Sonnet 3.5 could do, I was particularly inspired to test it out for myself.

Eric and I talked about in The Dev Sync episode, but I’ll jump into it in written form here.

Kubernetes has been on my list of technologies to catch up on, so this seemed like the perfect opportunity to test out Claude’s capabilities and dive into something new at the same time.

Providing Claude with a pretty vague prompt, I was really impressed with the result. Only a few back and forth messages, and a little trial and error, and I had a working prototype of an AI Story Generating app running on Kubernetes on my laptop.

Claude was incredibly helpful and surprisingly accurate. Usually there’s a small error somewhere when having AI generate code. Typically a button doesn’t work or API endpoint is not the correct path, but in this case, I didn’t have to correct or clarify any of the code generated. I just had to fill in the values it didn’t know, and it was good to go. It even told me how to enable Kubernetes in the Docker Desktop app.

I’m buying into the Claude Sonnet 3.5 hype after that experience. If you’re looking to generate some code, I’d recommend checking it out. You can use it for free, but I ended subscribing for $20 a month to keep chatting after 5 free messages an hour.

Check it out for yourself and let me know what you end up building!

The Easy Middle

Alex Hormozi called me out this week (ok not literally, maybe he will someday) with his Easiest Million Dollar Business to Start in 2024.

Basically there are 2 choices: info business or service/product business.

The info business will ramp up quickly and make more money faster, but it will cap out and turn into a “job” because you’ll most likely have to continue working everyday to maintain it at that scale. You’ll also be the center of the business so it will be very difficult to sell if it’s built around you specifically ("Key Man Risk”).

The other option is a product or service based business that will build much more slowly, but also has the potential to be sold to operate without you or be sold to someone else for way more multiples than the info business ever could.

He also points out that you usually have to pick one and stick with it. It’s very hard to do both and very few people have successfully switched from one to the other, and even fewer have maintained both.

Basically he said you can’t sit in the middle, you have to decide if you want the best chance of success depending on what your goals are.

As you may have noticed from the beginning of this newsletter, I’m wading into “sit in the middle” territory with a design service and a software business so the time may come soon where I’ll have to pick.

Software feels like a better fit for me given my background and given Alex’s advice to continue building on the momentum you’ve made so I’ll be weighing that choice over the next couple weeks.

If you have any suggestions let me know or if you’re looking to be swayed by Alex like I was, you can watch for yourself here:

And that’s it for this week! Started a business, recorded a podcast, had AI write some code, and got told to reconsider everything. Wouldn’t have it any other way!

Those are the links that stuck with me throughout the week and a glimpse into what I personally worked on.

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