Friday, December 12th, 2025 
SwipeFile: Inspiration for your marketing.
CopywritingCourse: Get good at selling your stuff.

Let's jump in with a swipe!

Swipe:

One of my favorite sets of ads ever is the VW Bug collection of ads from the 1950's to 1960's, which included bangers like this:

While everyone in the era was promoting bigger, flashier, faster cars....VW went the opposite with a super small, slow, yet extremely cheap and efficient car.

Wisdom:

Everyone wishes they started earlier, but almost no one realizes how much runway is still left.

At age 10 you think someone who is 20 is sooo old.

When I was 18 I remember talking to a family friend who was 30 and I literally couldn't comprehend being THAT FREAKING OLD.

The trend continues all the way till ya die.

So whatever you are now....someone is looking back at you and thinking "wow look at that youngun!"

Interesting:

One interesting thing about a lot of AI apps I've seen come out is many of them will simply get swallowed up by existing LLM's as they keep adding features.

This was an app I thought was cool because it has an easy use case...

Take a crappy picture of the food at your restaurant, and this will digitally "re-plate" the picture and make it awesome:

It's for a particular industry (restaurants). It saves all your previous images. Maybe in the future they can help compile menus.

The problem is that MANY people can just use a basic free LLM to do the same thing to their images.

For example I had this bowl of soup recently:

It's not a great photo, but what if we have AI spruce it up.....

Looks yummy right!

So while I get excited when I see neat apps like that, I also get nervous than most people can just sooooo easily use a free LLM to accomplish the same thing, that why would they pay for it?

It's kind of the interesting thing about a lot of AI apps....unless there's some "moat" around it's capabilities it's just a matter of time before it gets swallowed up.

Picture:

I'm about 5 weeks into being a dad and it's still really fun to watch my little neural network learn and grow (and eat and poop) 🤣

Hanging out in the gym:

He's doing yoga with me 🤣

Taking him for walks in my kangaroo shirt:

I put him in a cooking bowl for fun and it looked funny 😂

Essay:

This "Law of Distribution Arbitrage" basically says "Things work, until they don't."

I've seen this many times over the years...a technique or even whole industry works really well, until it doesn't.

People find out about the techniques, competition increases, and then you have to switch it up.

Here's a few things I've personally witnesses:

Works: Post anything on YouTube and get lots of views. Doesn't Work: Competition for eyeballs goes way up and now you have to really earn those views.

Works: Make random motivational images on Instagram and grow a huge following. Doesn't Work: That type of content gets saturated and stops working as well. Video moves in and gets more popular than pics.

Works: Short form videos boom as all platforms rush towards it. Doesn't Work: So much short form is out there and competition increases.

Works: Be a drop shipper and sell any products online. Doesn't Work: More people get into the game and middleman margins trend to zero.

Works: Post SEO articles with the correct slug and become #1. Doesn't Work: Competition gets fierce and everyone competes for one spot.

Works: Ran giveaways on AppSumo and got massive signups. Doesn't Work: Kept doing giveaways till the quality fell and novelty wore off.

Works: Buying cheap ads for $0.25 to grow newsletter. Doesn't Work: Ads got way more expensive and tracking became harder so it wasn't economically as viable.

The lesson here is: Do things that work….until they don’t. Then do something else! It's just the normal course of business throughout time.

Splurge:

We asked people on this email list what they planned to do for 2026, and here were the results:

In order of popularity it's been:
#1.) Build or scale a business
#2.) Create a digital product
#3.) Start a side hustle
#4.) Create a newsletter
#5.) Write a book
#6.) Build a software

I'm so curious what people are going to build new year in 2026. I'm personally putting tons of focus into emails and private consulting for companies.

Hope you have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora

P.S. Checkout some wins from Copywriting Course members:

"Learning copywriting is showing me what makes people say yes." -ML

"I used what I learned in one proposal and got the gig!" -PW

"The critiques helped me finally articulate what I do and who I help. I didn’t realize how confused my message was until I fixed it." -DB

We also do weekly Live Reviews each week....we clip them up for members to watch:

3rd generation loses 90% of the wealth

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