Each week I’ll have a curated list of links from the latest tech to just interesting reads or videos, as well as updates on my own entrepreneurial endeavors. Thanks for joining on this journey!

Topics for this week:

• Divs Design is Nearly Done

• Too Many Tools

• One Page Love

• Gemini Ultra

• No One Wants to Run Boring Businesses

Divs Design is Nearly Done

As mentioned last week, the “divs” brand is alive and well. With a surprise prospect of a potential client this week, it was the right motivation to give the agency arm a proper home, and something to direct people to if they do want to use my service.

After a few days of tinkering in Webflow.com, I have something that will work for now. divs.design is a fully functioning landing page, complete with working payment plan options! Let me know what you think if you get the chance to take a look, and pass it along if you know of a business in need of a landing page or some custom web development!

Too Many Tools

A line that particularly stuck with me this week was in a newsletter from Pat Walls of Starter Story:

This hit home pretty hard. I tend to want to optimize for the best tool (and idea) before starting, but reality is there are too many tools. Each one is good at specific things, but nothing is good at everything, no silver bullets. So I’ve stuck with Webflow.com due to the ecosystem around it and generally I enjoy using it. This is especially while trying out a Webflow specific component library called Relume which considerably sped up the creation process. I would highly recommend checking it out if you’re in the Webflow game.

Before Webflow, I was heavily considering Bubble.io, and then I may still end up using carrd.co for super cheap and simple landing pages. And just this week, I’ve run across two other Webflow alternatives: typedream.com and framer.com. I may end up giving them a shot in the future as well, but for now I feel confident in committing to Webflow. The more important thing is to pick one and stick with it, there will always be too many options.

One Page Love

Continuing the Web theme, I stumbled onto OnePageLove.com when I was looking for design inspiration. It’s the perfect repository of web design examples, a large portion of which were built using Webflow.

Digging through the listings, I found a number of very impressive examples. I’m slowly figuring out what Webflow is capable of, but I’m not quite to these levels yet, so I’ll be coming back to a handful of these examples to see what I can pick up. Good to know what the competition is up to, and fun to look at truly creative and unique sites.

Gemini Ultra

Of course, no newsletter is complete without covering the blazing pace of AI.

Google released Gemini Ultra this week, which is intended to compete in performance with OpenAI’s GPT-4. Formerly Google Bard, now it’s Gemini, which is free, and Gemini Ultra, which is a $20 subscription. I haven’t tried it out yet, but I’ve watched a few videos to see what others have found. It does look like it performs well, it’s surprisingly fast when GPT-4 seemed fast already. Naturally each model will have it’s own strengths and weaknesses so probably won’t be a clear winner. One thing going for Gemini, though, will be that it can integrate directly with other Google apps like Gmail, Maps, and Google Docs, which I haven’t found a painless way for GPT to do. Easy email and spreadsheet access could be a big win.

Videos from Wes Roth and Fireship below:

No One Wants to Run Boring Businesses

We’ll wrap up with a little business talk today. Codie Sanchez has been pushing the idea of boring businesses for a while now, and in this presentation, she paints an interesting picture of where things are headed.

There are a number of not so glamorous businesses, such as laundromats, piling up that are going to need owners and operators, but there are fewer and fewer people interested in something like that when the promise of overnight social media fame or the next billion-dollar unicorn is much more exciting. It will be interesting to see where the trend leads, but clearly Codie has a plan, and has executed well, creating a holding company full of businesses that are less popular, but still valuable.

Her entire talk is about an hour but it’s worth a listen. Check it out below:

And that’s it for this week! Another newsletter about the web, websites and building websites.

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

If you want to start a newsletter like this on beehiiv and support me in the process, here’s my referral link: https://www.beehiiv.com/?via=jay-peters. Otherwise, let me know what you think at @jaypetersdotdev or email [email protected], I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for reading!