The $24,000 Email: Built in 4 hours, Runs for $5.62

Every morning at 6:00, an email is waiting for me with everything I need to know about AI related news for the day. Five to seven stories, a summary, sources linked, in my brand voice. I didn’t write it. Nobody sent it to me, a digital workflow did. Today, the 62nd volume of The Daily AI Brief arrived this morning, before I woke up.

So, what’s your time worth? For easy math, let’s assume it’s $100 per hour.

That email saves me an hour of research every morning: 20 hours a month, or 240 hours per year. multiply 240 by $100 and you get $24,000 in annual savings.

Replace $100 with the actual value of your time you’ll know exactly what saving an hour per day is worth.

THE HOUR I WAS LOSING

Staying up-to-date on current AI trends is part of my job. Clients pay me to help them sort through the noise and direct them towards signal. So each morning I did the manual crawl: trending stories on social media, newsletters, industry publications, etc. One hour of research per morning was my routine for months. Some mornings more.

WHAT I BUILT INSTEAD

I ran the idea of creating an automated daily research email through the four questions from Issue 03 of The Leverage Point. It passed all four. Staying current with AI is core to how I differentiate. My internal dialogue: “If the internal system I build breaks one morning the blast radius is just me.” Worst case scenario is I go back to skimming news like it’s last year. It checked all the boxes, so I built it myself with AI.

The actual system:

Every morning a scheduled action wakes up in GitHub. It runs unattended. I built it once (after multiple iterations) and now it runs on autopilot. The original build took about 4 hours of planning and iteration.

The action scrapes the Hacker News front page, hands over info to Claude, and asks “which of these stories are related to AI and are worth paying attention to?” I use Firecrawl to scrape the articles that make the cut, then Claude writes the brief: five to seven stories each morning, a quick 1-2 sentence summary at the top, my preferred brand voice rules enforced. The result is a MODRN (my company) branded email and lands in my inbox at every morning at 6:00 AM Pacific. It even ships on the weekends (which I mostly ignore.)

The boring parts took the most work build out the system. The job fires twice and checks the clock so daylight saving never shifts the 6 AM deadline. A one-line instruction makes duplicated sends virtually impossible. When part of the workflow fails, it doesn't fail silently. Instead, I get an email alert, and if email itself is down, it opens a GitHub issue that finds me along the way.

Good engineering is what makes automations trustworthy, and trust is what actually makes a workflow worth the effort. An automation you have to fix every week is pointless. Those 62 email sends haven’t been perfect. I had an API key expire, my inference budget hit $0, an email provider had a hiccup. I built the system to fail loudly with email alerts, and all of the fixes took minutes, not hours. That’s the goal: not “it never breaks” but “it breaks loudly and makes sure I know". I understand each step well enough to initiate the fixes, and that is critical to its success.

RECREATE IT YOURSELF

1. A scheduled GitHub Action (automated workflow) fires each morning.

2. Firecrawl scrapes Hacker News for the best content.

3. Claude picks 5-7 of the best stories.

4. Firecrawl scrapes the winning articles.

5. Claude writes the brief and summaries per my brand voice instructions.

6. Python renders the branded HTML.

7. AgentMail sends me a copy & Resend sends to the subscriber list. (I’ll be depreciating AgentMail after a few more successful deliveries via Resend.)

8. A static file tracks the volume number and disallows duplicate sends.

Running cost: subscriptions and API spend I already have available. Incremental inference cost for the 62 sends was $5.62.  A latte costs more than running the entire system for 2 months.

FROM TOOL TO PRODUCT

The Daily AI Brief started as a solution for a real personal problem. It was lane three (Vibe-code) from issue 3 of my newsletter, and it was by the book: my data, my filter, my inbox. Then some people in my network became curious. So now there's a signup page on gomodrn.com and the same 6 AM brief also goes out as a broadcast to subscribers.

The public version grew out of my solution without it changing jobs. The only change was the addition of Resend, which handles the broadcast to subscribers.

RUN IT UNTIL IT GETS BORING

I built the system for an audience of one (me), and it ran it everyday until it became boring. The boring version became the public version.

Nobody buys a prototype. People buy the thing that work flawlessly for months, has been debugged, and solves a real problem. My problem might not be your problem. Time and will tell if this version is valuable to the market. I also began shipping an elevated version of the original that aggregates a week's worth of AI business use cases across various industries. My suspicion is the new version will become even more valuable than the original.

 WHERE THIS IS ALL GOING

The Daily AI Brief is the beginning of something even bigger. The working title for the bigger thing is The Everything Email. In simple terms, it’s a morning email that's a high-level snapshot of your day.

Not just your calendar events. It also pulls in client updates, stuck points, who owes what to whom, what changed overnight, employee updates, segmentation by personal and professional, all in one morning snapshot.

All of that already exists in the systems I've written about in the first three issues plus this one of The Leverage Point. Your team knows your clients and other stakeholders. The brief, in its current form, knows the world.

The Everything Email concept is the merge between the two, and it's the same architecture: scrape internal data, filter data with AI and prioritize, apply the design logic, send it. All while you sleep.

The hard part is creating a single source of all your internal data. Most businesses I talk to struggle with that. I can help.

 HOW YOU CAN BUILD YOUR OWN "DAILY BRIEF" IN THE NEXT 24 HOURS

What is the one hour per day routine that you’d love to automate? For a lot of people, it’s email, and usually it takes much longer than one hour in the inbox. For others, it’s 30 to 60 minutes of checking feeds, dashboards, or comms platforms (e.g. Teams, Slack) before real work starts.

Write down the exact steps as a sequential list. The list you created is the basis for your automation spec. Mine was scrape the sources, pick the stories, summarize each one, add my brand template, email to me at 6 AM.

After Issue 03's framework you know which lane it belongs in. Price your hour, multiply by 240, and decide; should I build, buy, or vibe-code a solution. Then act: buy means a reasonable solution is currently offered - buy it, build means you’re hiring a developer, and vibe-coded means your producing your own internal solution(s) using AI. If time is your greatest asset, then a workflow like this is the solution.

If you’d like to check out The Daily AI Brief, you can subscribe here: https://gomodrn.com/brief

Screenshot of the Daily AI Brief: Volume 62

 WHAT WE SHIPPED LAST MONTH

1. The morning brief you just read about, now publicly available.

2. MODRN’s fist ChatGPT ad campaign.

3. The direct mail automation teased in Issue 03:  fully operational, and survived its first live test. It will get a full breakdown in a future once it proves itself.

TOOLS I’M TESTING

Locally (an iOS app) plus LM Link running small models locally via LM studio. If I’m off grid I still have AI. It’s slow and it’s basic, but it works.

PATTERN I'M WATCHING

The global workforce transition from managing AI chats to creating full-stack AI projects going mainstream. A year ago the big skill was prompt engineering. Now it's project scoping, agent management (steering), and maintaining systems like the one in this issue.

Find the leverage,

 -Terence