Over the past year I’ve talked to a bunch of seven- and eight-figure founders.
And there’s a question I always get, especially from the ones still writing their own emails:
“Do you have a swipe file?”
At first, I was kind of surprised they would all ask me the same question.
But in hindsight, it makes sense.
If I’ve learned anything in 6 years of doing this, it’s that the best marketers are always studying and stealing tactics, formats, and ideas from other smart marketers.
They don’t try to reinvent the wheel.
Which is why - one of my best pieces of advice for anyone looking to build a world class newsletter is…
Start your own newsletter swipe file
And no, you don’t need a super fancy system.
All you need to do is spend a few minutes going through your inbox every week and start saving the emails you find yourself opening, clicking, and buying from.
Over time you end up with a running library of the best emails you’ve come across, so you always have raw material to pull from when you sit down to write your own.
Why you should do this
3 simple reasons:
You’ll never run out of ideas - whenever you sit down to write, you open your swipe file and you’ve got a week’s worth of angles, hooks, and formats waiting for you.
It makes your AI output better - the more good examples you feed a model, the higher-quality the draft comes back, and the less editing you have to do.
You’ll spot trends early - when you’re paying attention to what the top players do every week, you notice shifts before everyone else does.
Now, in case you’re curious…
Here’s my personal system
(Spoiler alert: it’s not fancy at all 😂)
Whenever I find a new newsletter I find interesting, I sign up using a specific email alias. (eg daniel+nw@gmail.com)
I set a Gmail rule so anything sent to that alias skips my primary inbox and goes to a specific folder instead.
Every week I skim that folder and pull the emails that catch my eye.
The ones I really love get moved to a separate “bookmarks” folder.
Whenever I need inspiration, I go straight to that bookmarks folder.
That’s it. That’s the whole system.
Now, as much as I love doing this manually, this is also AI can help you with (and do a great job).
Especially if you end up subscribing to a gazillion different newsletters and your inbox is about to explode with unread emails (like me).
So I built an AI prompt to help you automate some of the steps in the process I laid out above.
The Prompt
This prompt gets your favorite AI tool to scan your inbox once a week.
Then it flags the best emails it finds, waits for you to pick the ones you actually like, and then turns those into reusable templates you can write from.
One heads up before you try it: this prompt needs access to your email, so you’ll want Claude connected to Gmail (or an equivalent MCP setup in whatever tool you use).
If you don’t have that, no problem. Just forward or paste in the emails you want to save instead and steps 2 through 4 will work exactly the same.
