Be the Steak in a Boring Inbox

Coming to you today (and most of this week) from my RV – sitting waterside in the Florida Keys.

I came down so my son and his best friend can fish their faces off for a few days – and I’m sitting here on my laptop as my makeshift workstation until Thursday morning… at which point we head on back to Tampa. So, for a few days here, I give up my nice home office… for an office view of the “Gulf of America”. 🤣

Coming up in this issue…

• How to create that one email your subscribers actually want to open (and the weekly newsletter strategy)
• The update on my stats from my ongoing content audit
• A specific use case for the AI connectors to FluentCRM 3.0 – to solve the big problem with double-optin (and why you don’t need double optin anymore)

OK, let’s light this candle…

FEATURE ARTICLE

How To Become The One Email They Actually Open

Let me tell you about the most valuable real estate you don’t own…

It’s the inbox. Specifically, that half-second where someone is scrolling through a sea of unread email, thumb hovering, deciding what lives and what gets the swipe.

Most of what’s in there loses. Yours is in there too, fighting for the same half-second.

Here’s something a reader named Erik wrote to me recently. Last week, I asked whether these newsletter issues were getting too long, and he said:

“Since I proudly still have an attention span longer than a goldfish (a rarity these days), I’ll say I like my newsletters like I like my steak: lots of meat, medium rare thank you. A good newsletter should get the mind cooking in the morning… and yours does just that.”

I’m not sharing that to pat myself on the back. I’m sharing it because of what it tells you about how this game actually works now.

Erik doesn’t open this email because of a clever subject line. He opens it because, over time, it earned a spot. And when I read through the rest of the replies I get, that same phrase shows up again and again… “yours is one of the only ones I actually open.” And I really appreciate it. 🙏

This is one of the HUGE reasons I’m such a fan of the weekly newsletter strategy for solopreneurs (see issue #536 for more). It has been around for a long time. Nothing new about it. But… that humble weekly email might be the single best marketing asset you can build.

The Real Competition Isn’t Who You Think

Here’s the trap most solopreneurs fall into. They think they’re competing with the other people in their niche. The other WordPress folks. The other coaches.

You’re not. You’re competing with everything else in that inbox… the bank alerts, the shipping notices, the other nineteen newsletters they meant to read and never did. And these days, let’s face it… some of those newsletters are just AI slop.

Which is actually good news for you. When the world is drowning in content about as deep as a mud puddle, the bar to stand out doesn’t go up. It goes down. Because almost nobody’s willing to do the one thing that still works.

What Actually Earns The Open

It’s not a trick. It’s a handful of unsexy commitments that compound over time.

1. Be a person, not a brand.

AI can write competent sentences all day. What it can’t do is be you… your specific takes, your dumb jokes, the story about the thing that happened in your yard last weekend. 🤣 Your voice is the one asset that can’t be copied, scraped, or regenerated. So stop sanding it off to sound “professional.” The personality IS the product.

Practical version: write the email to one actual person, not “subscribers.” Use the word “I.” Tell a real story before you get to the point. If a sentence sounds like it could’ve come from any company in your industry, delete it.

2. Don’t sell at every turn.

Nobody wants to be on a pitch-fest email list. There’s no better way to kill your email engagement than to constantly pitch stuff to buy.

But, this lends itself beautifully to the idea of a weekly newsletter. Because your newsletter is that steak, not a coupon for a steak. It is actually helpful and entertaining content – all by itself. Any calls to action and promo would be worked in and around the content, but the content itself is the point.

3. Show up like clockwork.

The open is a habit, and habits are built on reliability. A pretty-good email every single week will out-perform a genius email that shows up whenever you feel inspired. Pick a cadence you can actually sustain and protect it.

Frankly, even if you can’t do it weekly, just do a schedule that you CAN be regular about.

“But What Do I Talk About Every Week?”

So you’re sold on the weekly newsletter. And immediately your brain throws up the obvious objection…

“What on earth do I write about every single week? I’ll run out of ideas by week three.”

I get it. This is the number one reason solopreneurs never start… or start, panic, and quit. I will say, if you just stick to it, you get a lot better at it. Content creation is like a muscle… and you gotta exercise it. The more you do, the easier it gets.

But, you can also set up an ongoing idea assembly line. Your readers will tell you exactly what to write about. You just have to give them room to talk back… and then actually pay attention.

So build in lots of doors for people to respond:

• Invite replies. End emails with a real question and tell people to just hit reply. (That’s literally how I got Erik’s note.)
• Turn on comments where it makes sense on your site, and actually read them.
• Run surveys — not just once, but baked right into your welcome sequence and sprinkled throughout the year. Ask people what they’re stuck on. Maybe place such a survey form right on the “thank you” page when they opt-in.
• Watch your contact form. The questions people ask there are pure gold. They’re flat-out telling you what confuses them.

Every one of those is a person handing you a content idea. The problem was never a shortage of topics. It’s that they’re scattered across replies, comments, form submissions, and survey results… and who has time to read all of it and spot the patterns?

OK, now’s that time in this issue where we mention AI again… 🤣

Because, this is a perfect job for AI. Point it at all that feedback and have it scan for patterns… the same questions coming up over and over, the exact words your audience uses, the pain points that keep resurfacing. Especially once you’ve trained your AI on who your niche market is and what you’ve already published, it can hand you a running list of “here’s what your people keep asking about.”

In fact… that’s exactly how this article happened.

I had my AI dig through all of the replies to last week’s newsletter, looking for patterns. The thing that kept jumping out? “Yours is one of the only emails I actually open.” That became the piece you’re reading right now. The idea didn’t come from me staring at a blank page. It came from my readers… I just used AI to help me hear them clearly.

You can connect your AI to your email to scan for word patterns in replies to your site’s emails. You can have it tap right into forms submissions (from Fluent Forms) and read all the entries and give you a full report on the findings. Run as many surveys as you want… have AI do all the heavy lifting.

This isn’t in any way about having AI write your content… it is about using AI to help you spot the ideas and know how best to talk to your people.

The Quiet Payoff

An engaged email list is the cheapest, most durable marketing asset you can build.

Think about where else you’d build an audience. On social, on YouTube, on whatever platform’s hot this month… you’re a guest on rented land. The algorithm decides who sees you. The rules change whenever the platform feels like it. The inbox is different. It’s a direct line to people who chose you, with no algorithm standing in between. Followers are rented. A subscriber who looks forward to your email is yours.

So if you don’t have a real weekly newsletter yet, let this be your nudge. Build the asset you own, show up every week, become the one email they actually open… and let your readers themselves tell you what to write next.

The welcome sequence is the handshake. The newsletter is the friendship.

WordPress News & Updates

Unblock removes the limits of the Gutenberg editor. This new plugin lets you turn a single block into any HTML element, style it with real CSS, and bind it to data… all inside the native editor, no PHP required. There’s a built-in AI assistant too, so you can describe what you want and it builds the block for you. I grabbed a lifetime license and have been testing it myself… it’s promising as a way to get AI-driven designs into Gutenberg without the usual mess. Check out Unblock.

SiteGround auto-installed an AI plugin on customer sites — and people are furious. SiteGround pushed its “AI Agent” plugin across its hosting network as the default connector for WordPress 7.0, without most customers realizing it was coming… and some reported sites crashing because of it. A good reminder that your host shouldn’t be making those calls for you. See the reviews blowing up on WordPress.org.

Patchstack is warning WordPress 7.0 could spark a rush to steal AI API keys. Remember that plain-text API key storage issue I flagged a couple weeks back? Patchstack’s CEO is now saying it out loud: with sites storing valuable AI credentials, hackers have a brand-new payday, and he expects “an absolute rush” to go after them. Read the full warning.

The Vercel AI Gateway plugin gives your site one key to hundreds of AI models. Instead of juggling separate accounts, this new connector (built on WordPress 7.0’s AI client by core contributor Felix Arntz) routes your site to 40+ providers — Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI and more — through a single API key. See the Vercel AI Gateway plugin.

WordPress turned 23 — and Matt Mullenweg used the moment to wave a white flag. In a strikingly un-celebratory birthday post, Mullenweg made a direct public appeal to WP Engine’s investor Silver Lake to end the lawsuit: “You’ve won. I submit.” Whatever side you’re on, the exhaustion in it is hard to miss. Read the rundown.

Rapyd Cloud — the BuddyBoss hosting people — rebranded to Levamo… and I’m not sure why. Same team, same platform, same infrastructure, just a new name. And honestly? I don’t think it’s a smart move. “Rapyd” (even with the funky spelling) actually captured the selling proposition… it’s hosting built for speed on heavy community and membership sites. “Levamo” tells me nothing. You lose the one word that said what you were about. If you’re a customer, the only real change is “Levamo, LLC” on your invoices. Here’s their announcement.

WooCommerce 10.8 is out, restyled to match WordPress 7.0. The May 26 release brings Woo’s admin in line with the new 7.0 look and adds a handy banner that warns you when your browser drops its connection mid-edit. If you run a store, update both at the same time so things don’t look slightly off. See the WooCommerce 10.8 notes.

WPForms added “Smart Edit” — build and edit forms by just talking to it. You can now change an existing form with plain conversational language right inside the builder (“show the comment field only if age is over 21”), and there’s a new CSV entry importer too. Even better, it’s in the free version. More on WPForms Smart Edit.

WP Replai puts a 24/7 AI support agent right inside your site. It answers visitor questions in any language, walks people through fixes, and qualifies leads… and the conversations stay in your own WordPress database rather than routing through someone else’s servers. You feed it “skills” written in plain Markdown so it follows your actual policies. See WP Replai.

PDFDraft generates PDFs straight from your WordPress dashboard. A free drag-and-drop builder from ThemeGrill that turns posts, or anything you design, into invoices, certificates, contracts, and proposals — auto-filled with your site’s data and generated locally, nothing sent to third-party servers. See PDFDraft.

TECH FOCUS

Turning Off Email Double-Optin. Doing This Instead…

Last week, I talked about how FluentCRM 3.0 shipped with an MCP server built right in… 25 tools that let an AI like Claude actually read and write to your CRM.

Cool in theory. But I know how that stuff sounds. “Great, another AI feature.” 🤪 So this week I want to show you a real, specific job I’m using it for… one that solves an actual problem.

FluentCRM does not have a built-in way to automatically purge dead-weight subscribers. There’s no setting that says “if someone joined, ignored my entire welcome sequence, and never engaged… drop them.” It just doesn’t exist out of the box. And honestly, most email tools have some version of this same gap.

While you could always build a re-engagement sequence with FluentCRM, there has never been anything automated about it. And, with standard double opt-in, you basically have just one shot at it.

Why does that gap matter? Because of where email deliverability has gone.

The short version: unengaged subscribers actively hurt you now.

It used to be that a bloated list full of dead subscribers was just… wasteful. You paid to email people who’d never open anything. Annoying, but mostly harmless.

Not anymore. Gmail and Yahoo now decide whether you land in the inbox based heavily on engagement. So when a chunk of your list never engages, it doesn’t sit there quietly. It drags down deliverability for the people who DO want to hear from you. Your good subscribers start missing your emails because of your dead ones.

Which means keeping a clean list stopped being a nice-to-have. It’s now the thing that determines whether you reach the inbox at all.

So, here’s what I’m up to…

I’m in the middle of a full, business-wide audit right now (I’ve mentioned this spring cleaning before). Part of that has been going function by function through all my email automations and the list itself… cleaning house. And while I was in there, I found something interesting…

113 people sitting in “pending.” These are people who had opted in to get this very newsletter, but were not getting it because they never clicked the link to confirm their email.

Think about that. Double opt-in is supposed to be the “safe,” careful choice. And even doing it by the book, I’d quietly accumulated 113 people I’d lost entirely. Not because they didn’t want in… a lot of them probably just never saw the confirmation email, or it landed in spam, or they got distracted. Whatever the reason, the result’s the same. Gone.

Some people just let it rip with single opt-in specifically to get around this issue. It is a fact of life that a decent percentage of people never confirm. But, I’d rather figure out a better way.

So here’s the approach I’m setting up…

I run single opt-in (no confirmation step), so a new subscriber gets what they wanted immediately and drops into my welcome sequence. They get access to The Solopreneur Toolkit and they’re in for the next newsletter issue. No friction, nobody lost to an unclicked email. But then I gate hard on engagement, in two stages:

• Stage 1 — the front door. When someone finishes my welcome sequence, I check whether they opened or clicked anything in it. That’s the most interesting content I’ll ever send them. If it couldn’t earn a single click, no random broadcast is going to do better. So they get cut. Fast. In my case, my newly revised welcome sequence is sent over the course of 10 days. If they don’t open any of them or react in any trackable way, they’re cut.
• Stage 2 — the ongoing loop. Everyone who passes Stage 1 gets watched on a 90-day timer. Go quiet for 90 days, you enter a re-engagement sequence. Still nothing? You’re off the list.

The bar isn’t “did you confirm your email?” anymore. It’s “are you actually engaged with what I’m sending?”

Good system. One problem: doing this by hand is miserable. You’d be digging through your CRM every few days, hunting down everyone who finished the welcome sequence with zero engagement, removing them in batches. Nobody keeps that up. So the list rots.

FluentCRM has had a tracking hole for quite awhile… and that’s that there is no automatic way to trigger any automation based on INACTIVITY.

And THIS is where the MCP server earns its keep.

Instead of me running those queries manually, I’m building a routine where Claude connects to FluentCRM through that MCP connection on a schedule, scans for the dead-weight subscribers, and purges them automatically. I just get a report. The gap that FluentCRM doesn’t fill on its own… filled. Not by waiting for the plugin to add a feature, but by pointing AI at the data and telling it the rules.

Claude can look up the people who fit the criteria in both stages – and automatically purge them or add to the re-engagement automation. Once set up as a Routine that runs every day, I no longer have to think about it.

That’s the part I want you to take away, even if you never build this exact thing. The MCP stuff isn’t just a party trick. When a tool doesn’t do something you need, you used to be stuck waiting for the developer to build it (or hiring someone to code a custom workaround). Now? You write down your criteria, hand them to AI as a system, and let it run on a schedule. The tool’s missing feature stops being your problem.

Anyway. If you want the full breakdown… single vs. double opt-in laid out properly, the confirmation tactics, and how to build this engagement-gating system step by step… I went deep on all of it here:

→ Should You Use Double Opt-In On Your Mailing List?