🎤 The SWIPES Email (Friday, May 8th, 2026)

Friday, May 8th, 2026 
Sponsored by Ahrefs

Swipe:

This is a funny trend I've been seeing on a ton of social accounts:

Millennial PR team vs Gen Z team

It shows how Millenial's will write description-ary copy, while Gen Z's will just give 3-word endorsement 😂

Here's a bunch of other example's I've seen:

Wisdom:

This is a great piece of advice about saying "yes" to things if you work a job and want to move up:

This is a hotly contested piece of advice, because many people DON'T want to say "yes" to taking on more work because it means......doing more work!

But if you keep a "yes attitude in life you are viewed as a more useful person and less replaceable, and therefore more valuable.

Interesting:

On OpenAI's Instagram they posted a funny prompt to turn anything into a crappy hand-drawn looking image like this:

The prompt is this:

Redraw the attached image in the most clumsy, scribbly, and utterly pathetic way possible. Use a white background, and make it look like it was drawn in an old computer painting program with a mouse. It should be vaguely similar but also not really, kind of matching but also off in a confusing, awkward way, with that low-quality pixel-by-pixel feel that really emphasizes how ridiculously bad it is. Actually, you know what, whatever, just draw it however you want.

So I decided to try it on a picture of SwipeFile's homepage.....

⬇⬇ ...and got this 😂⬇⬇

Works great!

Picture:

My little buddy just turned 6 months old, it's been such an honor and privilege to watch him grow up!

We did a little birthday cupcake for him:

He was mesmerized by this candle 😂

Hanging out with the guys:

He loves the throw-the-baby-in-the-air thing:

It's fun because a lot of our friend group have kids the same age now:

Essay:

I love little conversion hacks like this, but they're not always accurate.

For example this shows a picture with "averted gaze" increases ad effectiveness by 30%:

averted-gaze-gets-30-more-facebook-sales-1777945116412.jpg

The problem is if you run this same experiment in many places over many products, it'll often fail.

For example we added in our SwipeFile categories pages "Most Popular In This Category) and it raised conversions by +46%!!!!

However the next month, it was down to +18%, and now it's almost exactly the same conversion as without them.

Temporary things like holidays, a viral social post, an email blast or just randomness can spike-or-tank these results.

So while I LOVE conversion hacks like that, I've learned over the years from hundreds of tests that SOMETIMES stuff like this works.

It's worth spending time on, but not all your time.

Splurge:

Funny story from TheHustle of the highest return ad ever:

This specific add shown below got a 25x return (or maybe even more) and ran for a full year as BY FAR the best performing and converting ad:

Internally it was called "The Cold Man" ad, and for whatever reason out of hundreds of ad attempts, this random image and headline outperformed everything else by far for a full year.

Sometimes it's just so random how some ads just hit, and others flop.

Hope you have a great weekend!
Sincerely,
Neville Medhora