I’m doing something a little different this week. Instead of writing about digital revenue strategy, I want to tell you about a tool I built, because I think it might actually be useful to a lot of you.

Here's the problem I was trying to solve: I manage a list of my members in a Google Sheet, and I wanted to send personalized emails in small batches (write once, send many) that actually land in their Inbox — not Promotions, not Spam.

Mailchimp and the other ESPs are great for sending newsletters to thousands of readers, but they route through shared IP addresses and shared infrastructure, and Gmail knows it. Your beautifully designed newsletter ends up in Promotions while the scrappy plain-text email from a colleague lands right at the top of the inbox.

So I worked with AI to build a small tool that sends personalized emails directly through my Google Workspace account, using a Google Sheet as the list. Any column in the Sheet becomes a merge variable — name, organization, beat, region, whatever you track. You can filter by tag, preview each email before sending, and every sent email lives in your Gmail Sent folder as a record.

For local news organizations managing sales leads, member lists, donor relationships, or press contacts, it’s a simple and effective way to reach a decisionmaker directly. This is the workflow I chased for years when I was a publisher, and, since I’m not a coder, I never could quite get the right solution before AI coding became a thing.

I'm calling it Inboxed, and I'm building a SaaS version now. (My current version is a desktop app; the SaaS version will be as simple as signing in with Google.)

Because you're subscribed to this newsletter, I want to offer you something: Sign up for the waitlist at getinboxed.app and you can be part of the free beta. If everything works and we move forward with a paid solution, you’ll also lock in founding member pricing — significantly better than what we'll charge after.

If this sounds useful, I'd love to hear from you. Reply to this email and let me know what you think, or just head to getinboxed.app and sign up.

Thanks for reading the Playbook!

— Todd