Yesterday during a meeting, my co-founder, Xavier, and I had an “ah-ha” about the future.
Beyond making things easier and more productive, we are most excited about all the ways AI is going to help businesses add additional profit centers with very low effort and friction.
This might look like a consulting agency that builds AI-powered software for lower-tier support, while reserving white-glove service for premium clients.
Or that could look like running a media asset like an AI-assisted newsletter and monetizing it through ads, subscriptions or affiliate sales.
Our prediction? Businesses that used to cap out at $500K - $1 Million in annual revenue will easily cross the billion dollar mark if they create additional profit centers with AI.
Never in history has there been a time where this kind of wealth generating was this accessible.
While I’m super excited when I think about all the ways AI is going to make life and business easier, there’s a down side to being “AI-pilled” (aka a delusional reality where investors and tech bros are drinking the automate-everything-replace-everything-scale faster-remove-humans-Koolaide)
It’s important to stay grounded and recognize the limitations of AI, while building a brighter future. Our take:
✅ AI isn’t “set it and forget it.”
✅ Humans still need to be in the loop.
✅ The hybrid approach is the best approach right now.
✅ But if you start building the structure now, you’ll be ready to furnish the house later.
Because even if the tech isn’t fully there yet, it’s coming. And the people who build foundations early will adapt faster than the people waiting around for perfection.
🧩 The Sourcing Problem (and the only way to solve it)
If you’ve ever thought, “I can’t start a newsletter, it’s too much work,” you’re not wrong.
The work isn’t only writing.
It’s the constant friction of:
👀 finding something interesting
🧠 having a unique voice and perspective
📌 standing out instead of adding to the echo-chamber of content + AI slop
😵 Keeping track of all your “ah-ha” moments
🗑️ giving up and starting again
So here’s the fix: reduce friction at the source.
A few questions to sit with this week:
What part of your content is repeatable and can be supported by AI?
What part requires human judgment, curation, or care?
Where do you keep losing insights because you don’t have a capture system?
While it’s not possible yet to automate your brain, you can build a system that catches your thinking before it disappears.
🛠️ TECH STACK
When it comes to keeping track of your insights, this is where Xavier is a wizard. He recommends the following:
📌 NotebookLM (Google’s AI tool)
Drop in links from YouTube, podcasts, PDFs, and articles. It can synthesize across sources, summarize, and help you pull themes
📌 Perplexity (and their Comet browser)
Think Google, but it returns a clean, Wikipedia-style answer built from real sources, fast. Great for research and trend scanning.
📌 YouTube + podcast transcripts
You don’t need to sift through hours of content. Most of the time, a transcript already exists. Once you grab the transcript, you can extract what you need without the manual headache.
Try this today:
Next time you’re watching something you want to share, don’t trust your memory. Save the link immediately into a folder called: Newsletter Sources (or whatever content you're creating). One extra second. Huge payoff.
💸 NEWSLETTER BUSINESS LAB
A lot of people still treat newsletters like social media. Like something you should put out to stay visible.
But newsletters can be an actual business asset. And once you have an engaged audience, the math starts mathing.
You don’t need a massive following. With 1,000 subscribers and a modest conversion rate, you can already generate meaningful revenue.
A great example of this is Ben Tossell, the creator of Ben’s Bites.
He started the newsletter simply to help himself understand what was happening in AI. He was just a dude curating tools and news he genuinely found useful.
In about a year, Ben’s Bites grew to 100,000+ subscribers and turned into a real business, monetized through:
Sponsorships in the daily newsletter
A paid Pro tier with deeper analysis
Affiliate and partnership opportunities
This wasn’t content for a lead funnel. The newsletter became the product.
That’s the conversation I’m personally interested in having.
And if 100,000 subscribers sounds out of reach, don’t fret.
Even if you only had 1,000 subscribers, a conversion rate of 2 percent would result in 20 sales. So whether you want to sell a $27 How-to PDF, a $10 newsletter subscription or a $5K program, small lists have an ROI especially when you build an engaged audience.
⚖️ AI ETHICS
When “Big Brother AI” moves markets, who wins, and who loses?
The U.S. military operation that captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro last week rippled through markets.
That’s because shares of Palantir Technologies rallied more than 4% on speculation alone that their AI and geodata platforms may have played a role in the operation’s intelligence or planning.
As governments increasingly rely on private, billion-dollar technology companies for intelligence, surveillance, and data analysis, who decides how these tools are used?
AI isn’t just shaping productivity or content workflows anymore. It’s increasingly intertwined with how governments operate overseas, how conflicts are managed, and how power is used or abused. And the more normalized that becomes, the harder it is to question later.
Remember, markets drive priorities. In the AI era, it's important to ask: What kind of future are we ultimately funding?
📨 P.S. If you’re building a newsletter and want to eliminate the weekly scramble, that’s exactly what we help our customers do.
And if this sparked something, forward it to an AI-curious friend. Or they can subscribe here.
To 2026 + Beyond,
Lucy Elizabeth & the Spiral Team