🧰 Smart tools. Useful tips. Weekly.

Hola friend 👋,

I’m Josep. Each week, I hunt down practical tools and productivity hacks to help digital doers like you do more with less effort.

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This week: AI tools to streamline your workflow.

I’m tired of the copy-paste grind: open ChatGPT, write a prompt, tweak it, copy the result, paste it elsewhere, edit, repeat.

It works… but it’s clunky, repetitive, and honestly a little soul-crushing.

This week’s tools go beyond that. They’re designed to save time and slot right into your workflow.

Whether you're researching, writing, or building something from scratch, they’ll shift how you think about using AI. And hopefully, help you work faster with fewer clicks.

Plus: a dead-simple SEO fix, a prompt trick worth stealing, and a fast way to spot what your audience really wants.

Let’s get into it.

Perplexity

AI Chat

I’m a massive ChatGPT user, but I’ve started branching out, especially for research. And Perplexity is the one I keep coming back to.

Why? Every answer comes with real citations and links, so you’re never left guessing where the info came from (or if it’s made up). Unlike ChatGPT, it’s built from the ground up to search the web, and it does it fast.

I use it constantly for quick overviews, topic research, and fact-checking content I create: blog posts, newsletters like this one, even video scripts. It saves me time and gives me confidence the facts are solid (of course, you’ll need to do your own due diligence too).

It’s not my go-to for creative writing or tone-heavy tasks (e.g. coding) – ChatGPT and Gemini still shine there – but when I need accurate info quickly, Perplexity is always open in a tab.

🛠️ Alternative to: ChatGPT, Google, Claude

👉 Visit: perplexity.ai

💰 From $20/month | Free plan available

AnythingLLM

Local AI Chat

Messing with local AI tools is usually a headache. You need Python, npm, weird CLI commands… and while that’s fun for a few oddballs, for most of us it’s a productivity killer.

That’s why I really like AnythingLLM. It installs like a normal desktop app, no coding, no setup drama. Once it’s up, it’s basically your own local ChatGPT, fully under your control. Also, you can use their paid cloud version.

You can plug in any major LLM via API: Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT, Mistral, Perplexity, and dozens more. But if you prefer to run everything locally? It works with open-source models too, via Ollama, Hugging Face, etc. Just fire it up, and you’re running a full AI assistant on your own machine (you'll need a decent computer for this).

But it goes further than just chatting. You also get access to more advanced building blocks like vector databases and embedders (that’s how your AI stores and 'remembers' knowledge). There’s RAG support, web scraping, web search, and a few other gems.

The real ChatGPT killer, though, is the Agent Flows builder. It lets you create custom AI-powered sequences for pretty much anything. For example, you could build an assistant that scrapes trending news and content and helps you write original social posts for your business.

🛠️ Alternative to: ChatGPT, LM Studio, LangChain

👉 Visit: anythingllm.dev

💰 From $50/month | Open source version available

Dify

AI Agents

Building AI workflows usually means juggling messy code, API calls, and cloud services – total chaos. But Dify flips that. It’s a no-code, visual builder that lets you create multi-step AI agents and workflows with logic, RAG support, and more.

You can plug in any LLM via API (OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, Mistral, Perplexity…) or run open-source models locally. It also includes vector databases, conditional logic, loops, parameter extractors, and more. You can even embed your custom workflows (like a custom chat agent) directly on your site or web app.

Use cases are endless: automate personalized email outreach, generate SEO audits, summarize research, or build an internal knowledge-base chat. Personally, I’m planning to use it to power a chatbot for our site’s internal resources – stay tuned for the results.

🛠️ Alternative to: n8n, LangChain, Zapier

👉 Visit: dify.ai

💰 From $59 a moth | Free plan available

📣 App Deals & Offers

Some useful tool deals we spotted this week, which are worth a look if you're into smart savings.

💸 BonoHost: Host unlimited websites, domains and emails. Lifetime deal for $64.99

💸 CloudFilt: CDN provider to accelerate your website and block malicious traffic. Lifetime access for $59.

💸 Qolaba: Unified AI workspace with GPT, Claude, Gemini, and more. Lifetime deal for $69.

✨ Totally Off-Topic… But Brilliant

SparkToro

If you’re tired of guessing where your audience spends time online, SparkToro gives you fast, data-backed clarity. Let’s say you run a bagel store in New York.

Type in a keyword, like “sourdough bagels in New York”, and in seconds it shows the top websites, social accounts, podcasts, YouTube channels, hashtags, and search terms your audience actually uses and visits most.

Want to go deeper? Drop in a competitor’s site (e.g., newyorkerbagels.com) and SparkToro reveals where their audience hangs out, so you can try to convert those into your clients.

SparkToro have a free plan that allows you to do 5 searches a month, but its data currently covers only the US, UK, and Canada.

🛠️ Alternative to: Ahrefs, Semrush and Audiense

👉 Visit: sparktoro.com

💰 From $38 a month | Free plan available

⚡This Week’s Productivity Hack

Want to craft better prompts without starting from scratch? You can, and it’s a game changer.

Here are two powerful methods:

1- Reuse & adapt from prompt libraries

Sites like God of Prompt and Anthropic’s library offer thousands of proven prompt templates. Just pick one that fits your goal, tweak a few details, and you’ve got an effective, ready-to-use prompt – no guesswork needed.

2. AI-powered prompt drafting

Ask your fav AI model (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) to refine or generate prompts tailored to your task. I use this for image-related jobs – telling the AI to detail layout, lighting, or scene context often brings ideas up I’d never think of myself.

These two approaches save me time and deliver sharper, more reliable prompts, no endless tweaking.

If you’re still writing every prompt from scratch… this simple system could transform your AI workflow.

🍿 Plot Twist of the Week

We thought our backlink profile was rock-solid, until Ahrefs flagged dozens of broken backlinks pointing to 404 pages on our site 😬.

Each of these dead links is silently draining valuable link equity and letting potential referral traffic slip away. If you are not into SEO, you need to know this is pretty bad for your Search Engine Rankings – e.g. traffic that comes from Google.

Here’s how simple it is to fix:

Open Ahrefs → Site Explorer
Add your domain name
Check the Broken Backlinks report.
Either restore the page or set up a 301 redirect.

This took only a few minutes, and recaptured a fair amount of link juice that was otherwise lost. As you can see in the screenshot above, even massive publications like the NY Times have broken backlinks.

Don't have Ahrefs? Hit "Reply to this email" with your site's domain (sorry, only 1 domain per request), and I'll send over a free report to the first 25 subscribers that answer this email – we may take a couple of days to get back to you.

Lesson learned: Don’t let your link equity leak. Run a quick check for broken backlinks regularly, fix them fast, and reclaim what’s rightfully yours. And of course, always use 301 redirects when you unpublish a page, or change its URL.

That’s it for this week. Thanks for reading! Next time, we’re diving into the world of content creation: smarter content workflows, and faster results.

Cheers,

Josep

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