📚 Turn Newsletter Overload Into a Weekly Digest

Reading Time: 3 minutes

Hello AI Enthusiast,

What if you could stay on top of every newsletter you subscribe to without spending hours reading them all?

Sara Cadena, a UX designer and tech coach from Latin America, joined our AI Agent Bootcamp to solve exactly this problem. The result? Newsletter Digest, an automation that reads her incoming newsletters, extracts the key information, and delivers a personalized summary straight to her inbox.

The Problem

You know the feeling. You've carefully curated a list of newsletters on topics you care about, from AI developments to industry trends, marketing insights to productivity tips. Then they all arrive at once, and suddenly your "reading time" becomes a backlog you'll get to "someday".

Sara described it perfectly: "I don't have enough time to read and learn from my curated list of newsletters". Every day meant checking her inbox, archiving less relevant emails, flagging the interesting ones, and blocking time to read that never quite materialized. The newsletters she subscribed to for learning became a source of frustration instead.

How Sara Built It

Before diving into building, Sara worked with our AI coaches to scope down her ambitious idea into something achievable. As she put it: "The bootcamp always reminds me of scoping down ideas, breaking down all these ambitious projects into a three-step process".

Here's the automation flow Sara created using Make:

📧 New newsletter arrives → triggers automation (OUTLOOK)

🤖 AI reads and summarizes the content (OPENAI)

✉️ Sends personalized digest to Sara (OUTLOOK)

Step 1: Watch for Incoming Newsletters

Sara connected her Outlook account to Make to watch for new messages from her newsletter subscriptions. When a new email arrives from one of her curated sources, the automation kicks in automatically.

Step 2: AI-Powered Summarization

The heart of Sara's automation is the OpenAI module that processes each newsletter. The AI reads the full content and generates a synthesized version with a consistent structure that makes information easy to scan and retain.

The output includes a two-word title capturing the main theme, a one-sentence description, five keywords with definitions to build vocabulary, and important dates to watch.

Step 3: Deliver the Digest

The summarized newsletter gets sent directly back to Sara's inbox in a clean, consistent format. Instead of scrolling through walls of text, she gets the essential information distilled into something she can actually read and act on.

What Sara Learned Along the Way

Building Newsletter Digest taught Sara lessons that go beyond the technical:

Scope down ruthlessly. Sara's original vision was more ambitious, but working with coaches helped her focus on a working prototype first. "Think small, think small, think small", she recalls.

Always save your work. "I forgot to save, so I lost my automation and had to rebuild it." Fortunately, it was a three-step process. The lesson? Save early, save often.

Privacy matters. Connecting personal accounts to automation tools raised important questions. "How much access am I willing to give these tools?" It's a consideration worth thinking through before you build.

Ask for help. Sara booked 15-minute calls with coaches for every issue she encountered. "A lot of the solution can come up during that conversation which makes life easier".

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We'll be back with more AI tips soon!