Digital Side Hustle: Insights from the Maker of Curated for Founders

My name is Rahul and I am from New Delhi, India. ​​I am a computer application graduate with over seven years of experience building iOS mobile apps and digital products.

Currently I am building a newsletter named ‘Curated For Founders’ where I publish a curated newsletter twice a week with newly launched SaaS tools, founder success stories, ai resources, marketing strategies, and other learning resources to help founders and business owners grow their business.

I have always been inspired by the idea of being a digital nomad.

When I was in my 2nd year of university I learned about SEO, blogging, and lifestyle businesses which really fascinated me.

After graduation, I worked with several firms as a programmer and gained first hand experience over seven years. Most notably, I learnt the technical side of building digital products and online business.

In 2022, I started working on my side projects, but honestly, I failed to market them properly and make enough sales. Building solo projects alone has taught me several things such as when building an online business, you need more skills than just making a product. There’s a whole other side of the equation which involves knowledge of creating landing pages, funnels, copywriting, branding, social media marketing, sales, and business operations.

With all of this in mind, I realised I needed to read more and learn more, so I started reading more newsletters, blogs, and articles on the web.

From there, I decided I would share my learnings with other founders and that’s where the ‘Curated For Founders’ newsletter was born. I am very inspired by influencers like Dan Koe and Marc Lou and I hope that someday in the coming years I will be able to work on my own projects full time and make more money out of them than I do with my regular job.

I often have to work on my side hustle during the early hours of the morning or late at night when I get the time outside of work.

I log my plans in a project management app so that my goals and tasks are clearly laid out whenever I sit to work on my side hustle. This keeps me super focused.

I try to make sure I work on my side hustle for at least an hour or two a day, particularly in the mornings when my energy levels are highest. This helps me ensure that I dedicate focused and consistent effort towards both my main job and my side hustle without compromising on either.

Currently I am monetising my newsletter with beehiiv ads only, and working towards getting sponsorships outside beehiiv ad network.

Eventually I plan to build other streams of monetisation to scale the ‘Curated For Founders’ brand. But that’s a far-fetched dream as of now and my current focus is to grow my audience.

If you want to start a newsletter, here are my suggestions:

1. You need to find the overlap between ‘what topics interest you the most’ vs the ‘topics you have some knowledge and expertise in’.

2. Once you find the overlap with three-four topics, write four subtopics for each of the main topics from the first step - this could be something you can create your newsletter around.

3. Now you need to refine your content strategy and do some competitor analysis.

4. If your newsletter idea passes step three, I suggest that you publish one to two newsletters every week for a few months. Keep promoting your newsletter in communities wherever your target audience hangs out every day and if you see some traction, you might be off to a good start.

5. Next, you need to work towards refining your strategy to build content consistently, get new subscribers, and build automations & processes to make your workflow more efficient.

I’m active on the following three platforms - Twitter, Linkedin and Product Hunt.

Personal Twitter 

Newsletter Twitter 

Linkedin

Product Hunt

My newsletter is available here and aitrends.fyi where readers can subscribe for regular updates.