potions

Potions is a marketing automation tool that helps businesses create great newsletters fast. We currently have a waitlist of over 100 businesses, but you can DM me for early access :)

https://withpotions.com/

Founder/CEO

Aimply Briefs

Aimply Briefs was an AI-powered newsletter that was unique to every reader. Using just a text description of what you were interested in, we would scour the internet to find articles related to your interests, summarize them, and write an email just for you. 

We grew the project from 0 to 25k daily active users in about 3 months. While this was impressive, the unit economics of the product were ultimately unsuccessful and we decided to shut this product down and pivot into Potions (withpotions.com).

Attentive

Technical lead for product recommendations and winback machine learning & AI products. Started the machine learning team with 1 other data scientist. 

Products I built droves millions in revenue for the business and 10s of millions for clients.

Senior Software Engineer

Working on a newly formed data engineering team to build out analytics and machine learning solutions for Attentive's growing customer base.

Software Engineer II

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Responsibilities:
* Build new features, automation, infrastructure, and operational tools for AWS Greengrass. 
* Coded in several languages, primarily Java and Ruby. 
* 24/7 on-call duties and troubleshooting customer problems.

Achievements: 
* Delivered continuous integration, configuration, and deployment management software including service and AWS infrastructure deployment pipelines, continuous API testing with canaries and integration tests, and device end to end tests using internal frameworks written in Ruby and Javascript. These tools enabled AWS Greengrass to launch in 7 new regions, more than doubling the number of regions the product was present in before I came on the team.
* Designed a new billing service for AWS Greengrass. Challenges stemmed from designing around double-billing problems, fault tolerance, scaling to large IoT traffic loads, and choosing appropriate infrastructure
* Designed a hot migration strategy for AWS Greengrass’s legacy billing system. Migration had to handle thousands of TPS, fault tolerance, and challenging security requirements with no downtime.
* Influenced team culture by writing design and coding standards, training new team members in containerization technologies, PKI, and operations fundamentals.
* Built out major portions of the AWS Greengrass console using AngularJS, Java and Spring MVC for a new Greengrass "connectors" feature.

Software Development Engineer

The Ohio State University

Responsibilities: Create deep learning and machine learning models for the classification of melanoma lesions into benign / malignant categories. Manage AWS EC2 and S3 infrastructure for running models and saving them. Part time.
Achievements: Created custom convolutional neural network model to classify melanoma lesions using Tensorflow. Handled image preprocessing using and data augmentation Tensorflow. Created a user friendly system of tools to train Tensorflow models, save their parameters and rerun them in a cost-efficient manner using a combination of ruby, python scripts EC2 and S3.

Research Assistant

Amazon

Responsibilities: Build an internal website used to manage and onboard 3rd party devices for the Amazon Dash Replenishment Services (DRS) team. DRS is a service that enables ordering through Amazon using 3rd party IOT devices such as printers. 
Achievements: Designed and created a single page application (SPA) with React JS, HTML5, CSS3 and Ruby on Rails from scratch. Utilized jRuby to take advantage of existing Java services within Amazon's Service Oriented Architecture.

Software Development Intern

Martini Media Group

Responsibilities: Worked part time with one other programmer to repair, build and deploy front end and back end features on an app in the beta-stages called "Connect Care" for use by habilitation technicians using Ruby on Rails and Jquery. Part time.
Achievements:  Nearly doubled test coverage on application. Added to and completely refactored the core time tracking feature hab-techs used to log their hours with patients. Fixed demo and production servers to use RSA encryption for HIPPA compliance.

Freelancer for Martini Media Group

Responsibilities: Create end to end tools for the tax business team using Java, Spring MVC and jRuby on Rails and jQuery.  
Achievements:  Wrote an internal API to test why tax invoices were unable to generate using a prediction algorithm to pinpoint the closest applicable tax using Java and Spring. Created internal API's in Java and Spring to safely access confidential information from internal NoSQL databases. Built a jRuby on Rails app to test the creation and accuracy of tax invoices for any transaction on Amazon.

Software Developer Internship

Park Bench Digital

Responsibilities: Work on a team of 5 as a full stack developer to create a product called BlueHook that handles the workflow for energy brokers in the Columbus area using Ruby on Rails, AWS for storage, as well as jQuery. Part time.
Achievements: Optimized a core rate selection feature using threading and a new calculation algorithm to improve speed and increase margins on transactions. Wrote PDF generators to create transactions between clients and energy brokers. Wrote client facing tools to streamline the transaction process.

Independent Ruby on Rails Contractor

Lisnr

Responsibilities: Writing mobile applications under the guidance of the primary android developer on Lisnr's team, William Knauer. Part time.
Achievements: Built a verification tool using Android and Java for clients to test Lisnr's core software by pinging high frequency beacons and testing their responses against Lisnr's REST API.

Software Development Engineering Intern

You're here because you're a founder/executive interested in:

1/ Growing your business through B2B marketing + content
2/ Staying top of mind for the 98% of your leads that are not yet ready to buy
3/ Building a separate media arm for your business that you can later use to drive sales

Building https://withpotions.com

We brought the team together for an in-person week and accidentally created a mascot

After talking about our Q4 goals, someone threw up a photo of a cat. 

We were talking GTM motion, but somehow the cat was funnier, truer, and more us than the slide behind it

That image lived on. It showed up in Slack, made its way into Figma mocks, and now it's going to become a part of the Potions brand 

Funny how that works. You gather people in a room to talk about roadmap and funnels, and what sticks is the thing you didn’t plan for.

The point of being in-person isn't just moving faster, it's letting random moments like this one in 

Big thanks to the team for a week full of smart ideas, late nights, and one very charming cat :)

Evan Kozliner 🧪

Founder/CEO @potions | Ex-Amazon | Helping B2B Companies Scale With Newsletter Marketing

How we grew a personalized newsletter to 50,000 subscribers in 3 months 📈

I want to share a growth story that could help anyone building a newsletter or a community.

We launched Aimply Briefs, a personalized AI-powered newsletter that could be about anything you care about. You tell us a bit about yourself, and we build a newsletter just for you, delivered five days a week.

Our growth strategy was simple but powerful: we found LinkedIn and Twitter threads where influencers were offering lead magnets. These posts had hundreds, sometimes thousands of people commenting, eager for more information on a topic.

We used that intent to reach out. After scraping these public lists of interested folks, we sent them personalized cold emails saying we had a newsletter just for them, about that very topic they wanted more of.

Because our newsletter could be customized for any topic, we had endless opportunities to do this. Every thread became a potential list of subscribers. And because they were already interested, the engagement was huge. Some days, we added 1,000 subscribers. When we shut the product down, we had about 50k users and 25k of them were daily active.

This method is part of a larger trend of intent-based marketing. If you find people already showing interest in your topic, reach out with something valuable. It’s a conversation starter, and it can scale fast.

Not many people do this, but it works incredibly well. Intent is out there - you just have to meet it.

Video is of the YC application we did with the prototype (didn't get in - but still interesting!)

I’m a technical pre-seed founder who had to teach himself sales. 

Here’s my GTM tool stack that keeps me building fast.

#1 HeyReach.io - One of the best sales + marketing automation tools I’ve used. With our content engine humming, we’re running signal-based LinkedIn outbound that actually feels personal.

#2 Clay - Clay is our data + CRM backbone. It enriches leads, surfaces buying signals, and pipes everything cleanly into workflows — no data spaghetti.

#3 potions - What good is building sales pipeline if you never nurture them? We dogfood our own newsletter product — turning cold leads into loyal readers with smart content loops.

#4 Instantly.ai + Apollo : The classic 1-2 punch for cold outbound.
 Testing new lead tools as we scale, but this duo still delivers consistency and volume.

#5 Zapier -  People say to switch to n8n, but for now the simplicity of Zapier seemed best to me. 

#6 @Taplio - Great tool for finding LinkedIn posts to engage with. 

#7 Figma - Forever a Figma shill. It's layer of everything we ship. I even use it for ads tbh!

#8 Drippi.ai - Still experimenting with this one. X outbound seems far from priced-in. Optimistic that Drippi will unlock another wave of velocity.

GTM stack

You know that saying about the cobbler’s kids having no shoes?

That was Stat Digital, a marketing agency so focused on driving growth for others that their own marketing kept falling to the bottom of the list.

That’s where Potions came in.

Jacob Statler and his team wanted to launch a newsletter but were staring down a $1,000+/month price tag for freelancers and tools. Not to mention hours of work every week.

Instead, potions handled everything: from sourcing highly relevant content with our custom models to managing newsletter delivery and analytics right in Slack.

The results:

 - Multiple four-figure upsells directly attributed to the newsletter
- 6× increase in subscribers
- 40%+ open rates
- 30 hours saved every week

Potions did it all for less than one-fifth of what Jacob was planning to pay.

Jacob now runs a deeper, more consistent newsletter. He has better ROI, zero stress, and all his insights at his fingertips.

I'm proud to say Jacob is our first case study. I'll be linking out to the full article soon  :)

One of the most ironic parts of my startup journey is that I was pretty bad at sending regular email updates when I got started.

You can build the product, raise the capital, and hire the team, but if you’re not communicating consistently, you’re leaving growth (and even fundraising) on the table.

Most founders underestimate how powerful a simple, well-timed newsletter can be. It’s not just marketing. It’s how you build momentum, stay accountable, and turn your network into a real growth engine.

The founders who consistently share updates, not just launches, build momentum faster.

So here’s a breakdown of the 5 newsletters every startup should send:

 1️⃣ Investor Updates: accountability + support
 2️⃣ Product Updates: momentum + trust
 3️⃣ Friends & Family: long-term nurture
 4️⃣ Thought Leadership: credibility + visibility
 5️⃣ Community Spotlight: belonging + advocacy

💌 Here’s the framework 👇

5 Newsletters Every Startup Should Be Sending

One of the most lasting changes AI is bringing to software is that we’re going to see a lot more large companies built to serve SMBs. 

This goes against the common VC narrative that SMBs are “small fish” and hard to capture, even if the market is huge.

With AI, capturing SMBs at scale becomes realistic and profitable. Support costs are way lower, and outbound sales tools are way smarter, so you can catch many more companies efficiently. Plus, with engineering costs down, you can build a much richer product to support diverse use cases. 

SMB-focused startups are also less aggressively funded, meaning less competition in a big market. 

For years, the dominant thinking was you had to sell enterprise to build a billion-dollar company, but I think AI will flip that on its head. 

Pic is of me presenting at the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator Demo Day earlier this year describing the 10M SMBs who all spend ~10 per week on content marketing.

Halloween is coming up: This is the scariest thing I'm seeing in email right now

The cursed 20-email long sequence coming from your personal email address

It’s not just annoying.

 It’s dangerous.

Here’s why:
❌ It trashes your main domain reputation due to spam complaints 
❌ The prospect gets frustrated with redundant content
❌ When they block you, they block comms from your real email address 

A better play?

1. First, do 3-10 email sequence with *high value content only*. Case studies, referral bonuses, or some free thing (e.g. a coffee). Do not repeat yourself. 
2. *Stop emailing them from your personal email* and drop them into your weekly newsletter (which is on a separate domain)
3. Once you see engagement on the newsletter or drip sequence, then re-engage from your personal email

This maximizes the chance you can reach the prospect because

✅ They haven't blocked your main domain, so you can still reach back out with it later
✅ You're still going to stay top of mind from the newsletter 
✅ The prospect never sees redundant email content from you 

Need help implementing this? I'm a DM away, and I'll help you do it free of charge.

P.s. I know this is cheesy LinkedIn content, I'm just in that kind of mood today

taplio

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