Creator's MBA

The Sunday Edition

Your weekly, 5-minute playbook for growing consistent digital product revenue using AI and growth flywheels.

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In this issue

→ My open rates are at 56% while everyone else is panicking

→ What Gmail's Gemini AI is actually doing to your emails

→ Why the fundamentals are protecting the creators who got them right

→ The P.S. has a 2-minute scorecard link

This Week's Deep Dive

My open rates are at 56%

While everyone else is panicking about AI.

Everyone in my world is talking about it. Email open rates are dropping. Gmail's Gemini AI is changing what lands in the inbox. And a lot of creators are watching their numbers slide.

Then there's me, looking at my stats and seeing something different.

Last week, my HobbyScool newsletter held at 56% open rate. My Creator's MBA list came in at 51.55% — actually a little higher than my usual baseline. And the HobbyScool list is over 38K.

That's not a coincidence. And it's not luck.

Here's the thing. The AI inbox shift is real. Gmail is now acting as an AI-powered gatekeeper — reading every email, generating summaries, surfacing some messages and quietly deprioritizing others. It doesn't delete the ones it skips. They just disappear into the noise.

But the creators who built their newsletters the right way — strategically, with reader-first value — aren't the ones getting filtered out. They're the ones thriving.

Read that list again. None of that is new. It's what I've been teaching inside Newsletter Profit Club from the start.

Here's what I mean. Gemini focuses heavily on the first 100-200 characters of your email to generate its summary. If you open with a generic greeting or a long story build-up, you're wasting prime real estate. The Teach and Pitch Method front-loads the insight before anything else — which is exactly what the AI is looking for.

The Mini Magazine Method creates scannable, structured emails with clear value. Same thing. Readers love it. AI rewards it.

If your open rates are sliding, the answer isn't a new hack. It's the fundamentals — value-first content, a strong sender relationship, and a monetization model that works whether subscribers click or not.

The creators best positioned right now are the ones using email as the primary value delivery vehicle, not as a pure traffic channel. If that's not where your newsletter lives yet — now's the time.

Before You Go

Talk soon,
Destini