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During a freezing afternoon walk in January this year, I got completely AI-pilled by my friend Phil.

I remember him telling us all about how we were going to build a newsletter AI system in 2026 and how it would be our one big objective for the year. The lesson that we took from 2025 was that, although we were great at doing many things, the most profitable thing is to do one thing extremely well and at scale, and so I had decided to double down on newsletters.

I said to him, "My goal for 2026 is to build this AI system." 

He said to me, "Your goal for 2026?! How about you just open Claude Code and build it in 24 hours?"

You probably remember the moment you were AI-pilled as well. 

If not, I'm bearish on you. 

When I got AI-pilled, I realized that the only thing that mattered in my business right now was understanding this technology and how it was changing the future of my business.

So in February, I flew to Costa Rica and then Cabo for two founder events.

In just a few days, I saw a handful of founders with businesses that started less than a year ago and were completely led by AI agents. 

They were one-person businesses DWARFING my revenue. 

I was most impressed with an ex-Amazon software engineer who had started an e-commerce brand and scaled it to half a million a month with no employees and an insane AI operation system.

AI has gotten so good at building everything that it shifted the comfortable question "What can I do with AI?" to the uncomfortable question of "What can’t I do with AI?". If multiple one-person businesses make half a million a month, why couldn’t my business do the same?

As I returned to my team, we started to build our AI writing system for newsletters, and my friend Phil was right. It took us less time than I expected. It didn't take us a day, but it took us a month. It did not take us a year.

Here's a fair warning, though: the system is not going to let you fire 69 marketers from your team.

Really, I'm tired of every other LinkedIn post being "I fired 47 marketers with AI."

It's ruining many personal brands' reputation.

To be fully transparent with you, we've had newsletter clients who churned because they thought they could write newsletters themselves. They read like dog shit, and their engagement has been going down. It's been a frustrating lesson to see that if your buyer is not self-educated enough to know what great looks like, they may fall for the illusion that they can build an AI system themselves that produces a good output. 

In today's world, the difference between good and great is everything. 

Founders are outsourcing their newsletters to AI without any proven system, and their emails started reading like everyone else's. These founders went from being a reference in their space to sounding like a bot.

Nobody wants to read their content anymore because every email follows the same pattern.

For a lot of these businesses, the newsletter is the conversion engine.

Frankly, we’ve looked into some of the biggest media businesses out there, and I have been scared of how low some of their quality has become. 

Every marketing email now sounds like this:

[clears AI robotic throat…]

"Nils was a struggling business owner, And he used to try all these different things, and none of it worked, but then he went to this event and then, EVERYTHING CHANGED. This event is not like all the other events. This is for real people who want to do the real thing. If you are serious about business, then you should sign up."

The problem isn't AI. The problem is handing AI something it doesn't know how to do yet... sound like a specific human, for a specific audience, on a specific topic... without giving it any of the context it needs to do that.

But there is good news.

The good news is that attention is a zero-sum game. 

That means that the worse AI content your competitors produce, the less good your own content needs to be to stick out in such a world. Many people say that the bar has never been higher, but I would actually take the opposite stance and say that the bar has never been lower. 

You literally only need to sit down as a human being, think for yourself, and put your words on a computer. 

You're going to sound different than everybody that used an AI prompt while scrolling through Subway Surfers or LinkedIn at the same time.

With that said, you also need to use AI. If you do not know what great looks like, you will never be able to teach AI to write great newsletters, which is why I want to share this system with you today.

Fair warning, it's gonna take 90 minutes to set up. 

Anybody who tells you that you can plug and play a system faster than that is probably also selling peptides, a $99 course, and a revolutionary AI lead generation program.

Here are the 3 steps.

Step 1 - Install Claude Code

Start here: Claude Code installation link

Claude Code is Anthropic's agentic coding tool that lets you run Claude directly from your terminal. As a team that used Claude web for a long time, we find Claude Code to be way better for two reasons: 

Step 2 - Set up your folder

The folder has four layers and each one gets more specific and overrides the one above it.

Set up your folder inside a GitHub repository so all of your team members can download it on their local device. 

Step 3 - Set up your commands

A command is a saved workflow. 

Instead of typing the same instructions every time, you type one word and Claude already knows exactly what to do... which files to read, in what order, and what to produce. 

Think of it like a keyboard shortcut, but for an entire writing process.

Every time you want to write an edition, here's what you do:

The system gives you a strong first draft. 

But you might usually still need to edit because you're the one with taste. You know what good looks like for your audience, your voice, your business. The system handles the repetitive work so you can focus on the 20% that actually requires you.

And if you need help building this system, let's talk. 

/Nils

Ps. missing Costa Rica, ngl