The Debrief: A Business Newsletter

Welcome to The Debrief. This week we interviewed Sujal, a newsletter operator who writes about the digital economy and entrepreneurship. If you didn’t catch it, feel free to check it out here before diving into this edition.

In this mid-week newsletter, we are going to investigate what we covered in our interview and breakdown the key takeaways and share some actionable advice for you to work on in your business venture.

Each debrief is designed to give you something to work on each week based off the advice given by our featured entrepreneur.

Let’s get into it!

The Sujal Kumar Letter

Key takeaways:

1. There are so many ways to grow your audience and there is no right or wrong way to do it. The best way is to experiment and see what works for you and your business. For Sujal, he found that sharing his content with like-minded people to be the best for organic growth and he was able to gain over 2,000 subscribers from one outreach message alone.

    

2. Earning money as a writer is notoriously difficult but writing a newsletter can make this easier since you can implement ads to help cover the costs of hosting. If you host your newsletter with beehiiv, their ad network links you with business and your posts can start earning money with a relatively small following.

3. Working on a side hustle is tough if you do not enjoy what you’re doing. So, pick something that interests you or can keep you engaged so you don’t burn out. If you find it boring to work on your side hustle, you will soon find excuses to not work on it at all.

My thoughts:

Ok, so this isn’t the first time I’ve covered a newsletter writer in my debrief and although there may be some obvious bias, it’s definitely worth covering again. Why? Well, you can write a newsletter on pretty much anything and you can build your audience with relative ease with all different types of newsletters. However, for this debrief, I’m going to focus on Sujal’s newsletter with the specific niche of business and entrepreneurship.

Entry requirements for a business-related newsletter are only really limited by your own interests and knowledge. If you have a passion for what goes on in the business world, you’ll definitely not have a shortage of things to talk about. Setting up a newsletter is super easy and building an audience of people willing to read about what you have to say is no feat either.

Time requirements for a newsletter can vary depending on what you’re covering in your newsletters, the number of times you publish them, and the length of the newsletter itself. If you choose to write one newsletter a week, you can build a template and fill in the blanks and have something ready to go in under an hour. However, you’re writing a thesis every day (not advised), you’ll be writing non-stop until the day you die. If you’re just starting out, it’s best to start small and build gradually as you adapt to fit your niche.

There’s always going to be a demand for business related publications, so you’ll always find someone interested in what you publish. The tough part is keeping everyone engaged and coming back for more each week. Business publications are amongst the most popular, so you’ll be competing with thousands of other newsletter writers but don’t let this stop you from starting. If you have an idea or a topic which you think is different, give it a go and see what happens. The beauty of a newsletter is you can share readers with other newsletter operators. It costs your readers nothing to subscribe to you.

Scalability is something which Sujal has done really well, he’s found an audience that want to read his content and he’s allowed his readers to help him grow along the way. Once you figure out the best way to get your newsletter in front of people, you can scale it almost infinitely. Keep putting your work out there and you’ll find that more and more people will flock to your publication. With ads alone at 20k subscribers, you can expect to earn a few thousand dollars a month (at least).

Overall, I believe that anyone can start a newsletter and if you’re consistent, you can build it to a profitable side hustle with a relatively low time sink. Pick something you’re interested, make it as specific as you can possibly do, build a template, and write on a consistent schedule. It’s not against the realms of possibility to write a newsletter as a full-time job and quit the rat race!

Do you agree with me? I’d love to know your thoughts, just reply to this email!

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👇️ Now it’s your turn to answer a question:

If you’d like to read last week’s debrief, covering an interview with Emily, a virtual assistant who escaped the rat race and turned her side hustle into a full-time business. Check it out here.

Thank you all,

See you on Sunday! 👋