🎤 The SWIPES Email (Friday, August 8th, 2025)

Friday, August 8th, 2025 ​
​SwipeFile.com​​​: Inspiration for your marketing.
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Swipe:

This was the original Apple Newton that was released two years after Steve Jobs was fired from Apple.

It was a flop :-(

The product was cool, kind of like the first "Palm Pilot" type device, but it was way too early.

It was pre-internet, expensive, bad battery life, and just not useful enough for people at $700 in 1993 (that's like $1,600 now).

Steve Jobs was a product genius, with almost everything he made being a success because he could tell what people would actually use and want.....and after he got fired I think a team thought this expensive product would work, but it didn't.

This flop reminds me of the Apple Vision Pro and some other Apple products (like their Alexa competitor) that were very technologically advanced, but not exactly what people wanted.

It took 5 years worth of technological advancements before the iPhone was released, and a technology like the Newton was finally ready for prime time.

My opinion is that if Steve Jobs were alive today he never would've released something like the Apple Vision Pro with all it's VR capabilities....but rather a simple, stylish, lightweight set of glasses with basic text/image interface on it.

I think the important lesson underneath all this is knowing what specifically people want before making it.

Wisdom:

Most people aren't depressed.....they need a quest!

Humans are unique in that we ruminate on the past, the future, or events that are happening 5,000 miles away that we have no impact on.

People need to have quests and things to distract them from this, and pour their energy into more productive things like family, friends, career, community.

Interesting:

This is a funny image showing that prioritizing great content, making great stories, and making great systems is still what works right now...but a lot of attention is paid to letting AI rip and make hundreds of thousands of low-authority pages:

In my personal consulting, I'm seeing a lot of companies try all-AI content, but then quickly realizing it's not landing as well.

People don't want mass amounts of content, they want real results/stories/examples they can emulate.

AI can of course help make this, but just putting out a bunch of random AI advice won't be a defensible business for very long at all (bc everyone can do it, so it's no longer as valuable).

Picture:

It’s hot in Austin during summer so water activities are fun. We snuck into a buddies pool and used it 😬

First gotta clean that pool:

Then sauna’d!

Essay:

Having a longterm goal is very important.

If you don't, you might just do random things that add up to nothing (although this isn't a bad thing if your goal is to just chill).

10 years ago, Mark Zuckerberg put out this 10-year master plan, and so far, everything has come pretty much true:

The lesson to learn about this is to have some idea of where you're going.

It's a hard thing to come up with sometime, but it's helpful to make some rough roadmap of what you want.

This roadmap could be for your business life OR your personal life (or both)!

Splurge:

Saving money is the same as making money.

I did an anti-splurge this month to see where I can save money. Here's some random places I've identified:

• I was spending $140/mo to host NevBlog my old blog. That's $1,680/yr! I reduces that by 3x by calling my host.

• I pay $4,600/yr to host course videos on Wistia. Theoretically YouTube does this for free. We might move over videos

• Stopped paying a bunch of random subscriptions I don't use (small pieces of software generally). I look for companies that have added zero updates to their products.

• I rolled a few services into ​GoHighLevel​ like Calendly and ManyChat..

• I pay $1,200 for Framer to host ONE page (our ​/join​ page). That join page makes back way more than it costs, but internally we are trying to rebuild it with our native community software. It reduces complexity this way.

• Moved most of my banking from Bank of America to Ally bank...the online banks just have way more features, pretty much zero fees, and wayyyy higher interest rates.

• For the last 3 years in a row I've got my property taxes reduced by nearly $200,000 each year by contesting my house value with a lawyer. This reduced my property taxes by a lot.

• Moved from HypeFury to Buffer for social media management (saved $600/yr).

• Replaced MyFitnessPal with ChatGPT.

• Got rid of all Adobe products (I rarely use them anymore) and replaced images with Canva, and video with Camtasia.

• Replaced buying almost any information with YouTube and ChatGPT.

Sincerely,
Neville Medhora

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

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