A (0:00)

What if I told you you could build a team of AI assistants? A competitive researcher, a content strategist, someone who can analyze your data like a world class analyst. And they all live inside of your email inbox. Not a chat box, not another app. You have to switch to just specialists, world class experts sitting inside of your inbox waiting for you to give them work. You forward them an email, they do that job and then they actually give you all of that work back in another email. They actually answer your email and reply to it. That is not hypothetical. That is a feature called Mailman is one of the most powerful features that no one is talking about. And by the end of this 10 minute video, you will have set up two world class AI assistants that you can use in your own email inbox and be introduced to to the incredible world of mail Manus. All of that and more on this episode of Marketing against the Grain.

B (1:04)

Before we get into today's show, here's a quick word from HubSpot. Cutting your sales cycle in half sounds pretty incredible, but that's exactly what Sandler training did with HubSpot. They used Breeze, HubSpot's AI tools to tailor every customer interaction without losing their personal touch. And the results were pretty incredible. Click through rates jumped 25%, qualified leads quadrupled, and people spent three times longer on their landing pages. Go to HubSpot.com to see how Breez can help your business grow.

A (1:50)

Okay, so here's how this works. We've covered manuscript in a bunch of videos recently. And what Manus does is it gives you a custom email, one for each job that you want done. So here's how it works. Manus gives you a custom email address, one for each job you want done. And this is really cool. So you see, if you go into my Manus, so far I have three set up. I have one for deal flow, which means if someone's looking for investment, I can forward on that email and my Manus agent does a bunch of research on that company and then send me something back. I have one set up for competitive analysis and content repurposing. And in this video I'm going to show you how to set up these two for yourself. One that will actually do competitive analysis. When someone sends you, hey, like look what this competitor is doing, maybe send you an article, a press release. This agent can actually do all of that analysis and send you back a reply or a content repurposing. We all subscribe to newsletters and these kind of content sources. You can forward those to your content assistant that lives in your inbox and it will give you back a bunch of content that you can create for social. Now you might be thinking, surely OpenAI or Google has something like this. And the crazy thing is they don't. And it's really worth understanding why because it makes you realize how early you are. If you are subscribed to Marketing against the Green, you are really in the top echelon of thinkers about AI. And I went through every single AI platform, right? OpenAI has a Gmail connector. It lets ChatGPT read your emails inside the chat window, but you're really still in chat. You're going back and forth in prompt, it's read only integration. You can forward your emails to chatgpt and then you have it go off and do a bunch of work. But really it's not the same as having a bespoke email address for your agent. Google has been rolling features into Google Gemini. They have AI overviews, they have suggested replies, they have helped me write. All of that is super cool, but it's AI bolted onto an inbox. It's not a team of agents that allow you to delegate work right there in your inbox, not through a chat worker, Claude, which is really my go to LLM for work right now. It has Cowork that's really cool for five level tasks. If anyone has seen the video we did in Cowork, you can set up a bunch of automations and connectors and do work in there. But but there's no email based delegation and so the three conglomerates, OpenAI, Google and Claude do not allow you to have a custom inbox for your agents. So Manus really is the only AI platform where you can build multiple AI specialists, give them their own email address and they can do all of that work through your inbox and reply to any requests you have. One of our teams, Mindstream just dropped the most practical guide to AI agents I've seen for 2026. This is the exact frameworks you need to actually build human and AI partnerships that get real work done. Get it right now. Click the link in the description. Now let's get back to the show. So if you're working in marketing and you have a CEO and stakeholders who really are keeping abreast of the market, they're keeping up to date on what's happening, you are probably going to get forwarded a lot of things that says hey, look what our competitor did, look what they just launched. Look at this news article about them and you're Busily sending that to your product marketing team and your competitive analysis team and takes a bunch of time. Well, one of the things you can do with Manus is you can just have a quick prompt. Now these are like quite basic. Have not perfected them just yet because I'm also at the beginnings of setting up these different agents. But this one here, I give it a bespoke email address for this workflow and then I say analyze the following content about my competitors. So you can extract key product announcement, pricing changes, messaging shifts and you position. And so basically this here you can tailor to whatever your competitive analysis template is and whatever your team does compared to our current position. And you summarize it all in a one page brief with a section on recommended actions for the marketing team and then you output it as a PDF because then you can send it back. And so that's a email address that that agent now has. And so I can go here. This was just a fun one. It's not a competitor of ours, but it was a launch last week, airtable launched a super agent. And so this is Kieran Flanagan who's like super interested in this. He forwards me an email. I forward it to my Manus agent. You can see all I did here was forward the different articles on that launch. And then Manus replies and says, hey, I've received your task and I'm working on that task. So you can know that it's actually picked it up, it started to work on it and it gives me back an email. So you can do this all through the email. You don't need to go into the app, but if you want to go into the app and replicates it here, so it actually spins out a task, it starts reading the different articles that I sent it. So I didn't even give it any information. I literally just give it the articles that were forwarded to me. It then extracts it all and builds a competitor brief. But the cool thing is I don't have to go in there because the competitor brief is here. And so it's built me this full kind of PDF that I can impress my stakeholders because I forward the email to Manus and then I can actually forward back the PDF to the folks who actually sent me that and wanted to know more about airtable's launch. And so you start to see the power of this. It's so quick to do over email. And I think that we have been programmed to think chat is the only way to work with agents, but actually there's a lot of different ways that you could work with agents that might be better in some cases than chat. And I think email is definitely one of them. Most people live a large part of their life in their inbox. And so I think this is a way that you can start to integrate AI into people's existing workflows, which is actually the hardest thing with AI. It's not the model capabilities anymore, it's really ux. It's how you integrate AI into a team and a company's workflows. Let me show you one quick other one here. So again you come down here, you go into your mailmanus. This one here is my standard go to. Folks who follow me on substack know that I have a content system and in that content system there's a way that I extract viral talking points from content to give me ideas of content to create. This is a very basic version of a prompt that I would use. Again, I'm perfecting these myself. I've only started setting up my inbox agents over the weekend, but again I give it a inbox address and then I give it this prompt. And what this prompt is going to do is we all are subscribed to lots of newsletters and what it's going to do is it's going to extract some of the core insights from a newsletter. The email that I got and stack rank those by ones that would create great content. And so if you're subscribed to 1015 newsletters, here's what you can actually do. You can create a Gmail filter and that Gmail filter will auto filter them into a folder and when they get filtered into the folder you can actually auto forward them to your mana spot so you can see it forwards it. Here it starts to read. This is from Elena. Elena is a great newsletter called the Growth Scoop. Shout out to Elena. She did a great post recently on the need to become AI native. And what it's done here is it started to extract out core talking points from that newsletter article and talk about what is the core idea. And then it says what is the kind of content type? So spicy. Take Data Nugget Educational. These are my labeling of content and you can go in here and it's created a much more robust version. And so you see here it takes that newsletter and then basically extracts the kind of core idea, the supporting quote for the newsletter and then the kind of content type. Now I can improve on that prompt and have improved in that prompt to kind of extrapolate some of the bullet points that the AI would suggest I create content around. So it's actually kicked off here. So I just forwarded Lanny's newsletter, which is a great newsletter and you can see it's already kicked off the task for me forwarding that email. So it's going to go through and start to categorize these into these talking points. And so the one that I talked about there really would be a game changer which is create Gmail filters, filter certain types of email into a folder and then when it goes into that folder, kick off a auto forward to your bot and then that bot will do that work and email you back. And so if you now think about how you subscribe to newsletters, you can actually subscribe to newsletters as content sources because you could be subscribed to 50 newsletters. You don't really read them, but you're using them to get content ideas. They auto filter into a folder and when they go into that folder, you're able to actually kick off an agent that will bring you back content ideas as those newsletters come in, which is like really cool. All done through your inbox. Okay, so here's why I actually think this matters, right? You've watched this video. Now you can easily go set up these kind of AI agents that live in your inbox. And it's not just a cool productivity hap. For years every company has been trying to figure out the same problem. I have talked about it relentlessly on here. Do you get people to actually use AI in their daily workflow? I can tell you, trying to get people to integrate automation and AI into their daily habits and daily workflows is the hardest thing to do. It is not the capabilities of the models anymore. It's actually how do you integrate it into people's day to day workflows? We've kind of had these chatbots that you have to go to prompt, go to different apps, switch around and actually use. Now you actually have it integrated into your email. And I think that is actually really a great way to use AI for most people. The answer to get AI integrated into the day to day habits is not going to be another chatbot. It's going to be meeting them where they are, where most people are already in their inbox. They spend about two to three hours in their inbox. I wish we didn't, but now we do. Mailmanus is going to make using your inbox into a much more productive tool. It's not just a new model, right? It's really a UX decision. And I think that's what's really important. AI models have real capabilities now. The problem to solve is going to be ux and this is one of the smartest UX decisions. But I've seen one of the models makes recently. The AI that wins is probably going to be pretty smart. I don't know if it needs to be the best model among all of these different benchmarks. It's going to be the one you use every single day. And trying to figure out how you build the right UX experience to integrated into people's workflows is going to be key. So there you have it. Manus Mail a way that you can set up AI agents right now in your inbox to do work for you. Basically forward them an email, get them to do the work and they'll reply back with the outcome. Pretty great way to use AI. If you like this as always, subscribe and we'll see you in the next video.