Last updated: September 13, 2026
My Gmail said 41,049 unread. The apps that fix that charge $14.99 a month, and the free one, Unroll.me, made the news in 2017 for selling anonymized user email data. So I asked Claude Code to build me a local tool that unsubscribes, sorts, and archives without any server touching my mail. It cleaned 3,000 emails on the first run. The repo is free. This post is the playbook I used, and the reason it works for any problem, not just email.
Everybody asks how to make money. Most of the people answering are lying, because anyone who found a way to make money has no reason to hand it to you. I do not care. I have nothing to lose and 30 viewers.
So here is the whole method in three steps. Find a problem. Build the fix with AI. Sell the fix. Email is the example because it was my problem that week.
Step one: the problem is the product
When you buy something, you never bought the thing. You bought a problem going away. An iPhone's parts cost a fraction of what we all paid, and we all paid it, because the problem was solved and the brand was trusted.
My problem: 41,049 unread. I subscribe to newsletters and forget. On purpose, sometimes.
I co-own two stores, GMMY and YUMM. The only way to study a competitor's email flow is to sign up and let it hit you for months. So my inbox is half research and half rot, and I could not tell which was which.
Google "clean my inbox" and here is what you get. One service at $14.99 a month to look at your email. Another at 25 euros a month for five inboxes.
And Unroll.me, free, the one from the 2017 news story above. Free was the most expensive one.
Data is the priciest thing on the internet right now. Every "leave your email for a free thing" page is a funnel, and Russell Brunson wrote the book on it. I read it and I recommend it.
I did not want my inbox to be somebody else's funnel.
Step two: build the fix
I opened Claude Code and typed something close to this:
I have a bunch of emails. I need you to read them, sort them, unsubscribe, unfollow, and mark them all read.
That is the whole first prompt. From there it was a conversation, the same way you would describe a problem to a person. The finished spec, which I put in the video description so anyone can paste it, asks for:
- A local-only command-line tool. Node and TypeScript. No third-party server ever sees the mail.
- A setup wizard that walks you through making your own Google Cloud project and credentials.
- Multiple Gmail accounts.
- Bulk unsubscribe using the one-click standard, RFC 8058, so the unsubscribe actually lands.
- Mark all old mail as read in one command.
- Archive the noisy senders that have no unsubscribe link at all.
- Smart sort: classify senders into Newsletters, Receipts, Social, Security, Shopping, Junk, and create Gmail filters for each. Claude Code is the classifier. No API key.
- IMAP support so it can grow past Gmail later.
The repo is called Fix Your Inbox. Free, open source, use it, break it, improve it. I ran it on my own account and it cleared 3,000 emails in one pass.
Codex does this job well too. My rough rule, not a study: if a service runs on a computer and someone charges monthly for it, most of the time you can rebuild the part you need in an evening.
Step three: sell it
People make selling sound complicated. Marketing is the ability to sell things to people who did not know they needed them. Anyone who says otherwise is making it sound nicer than it is.
Look at how the $14.99 apps sell. "No more email overwhelm." "No more wasted hours." "Nothing slips through the cracks."
Three promises, and every one of them is about health, wealth, or relationships. Time back is health. Missed invoices is wealth. Missed messages is relationships.
That is the trick. If what you built touches one of those three, people buy it. Two of the three, they buy faster. You do not need a new trick. You need to say which of the three you fixed, in the buyer's words.
The video I did not film
One more thing, because "I do not want my face on camera" is the excuse I hear most. The ad clip in the video, the one with no voice-over, I did not film or animate. I wrote three sentences to Claude, told it to use HyperFrames, and it produced the clip.
HyperFrames is an open-source tool from HeyGen. You describe a scene, it builds an HTML animation, you drop it into the edit. The repo is linked under the video. Three sentences, one finished clip, zero camera.
Why I am telling 30 people this
Over your life you have walked past dozens of problems that someone else later sold a fix for. The toilet seat. Somebody put it there. Simple fix, everyday problem, and people bought it.
The same rule that gets me through a rehab year gets me through a build: find the one thing that is actually wrong, fix that one thing, then the next. Email was the thing that week. Download the repo and it is one less thing for you.
The full walkthrough, the prompt, and the repo link: How a Pro Basketball Player Turned Email Into Income.
Is Fix Your Inbox safe to use with my Gmail?
It runs only on your machine. You create your own Google Cloud project and credentials during setup, and the tool talks to Gmail directly. No third-party server sees your mail. That is the whole reason it exists.
Do I need an API key to run the AI sorting?
No. The classifier runs through Claude Code, so a Claude subscription covers it. There is no separate key and no per-email cost.
Can it handle more than one account?
Yes. Multi-account Gmail is built in, and IMAP support is in the spec so other providers can be added.
What if I cannot code at all?
The prompt is in the video description. Paste it into Claude Code or Codex and let it build. If you can describe the problem in a sentence, you can run this.
Read the next one → Can a pint of Guinness build a website? Yes, in five steps.
Get the receipt → The Y channel. The build, the cost, the receipt. Two a week.
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