Navigating the Digital Frontier: Inside Sujal's Digital Economy Newsletter

My name is Sujal Kumar, I am a 20-year college student based in New Delhi, India. I run The Sujal Kumar Letter where I talk about the Digital Economy and the Future of Work. The newsletter currently has around 22,000 subscribers and 8.5k people read an issue every week!

The main inspiration to start my newsletter was reading Dan Koe's book - The Art of Focus. I felt compelled to enter the digital economy and become a creator so that I could make a living online and be truly free to do whatever I want.

I always wanted my own business but wasn't sure how to get started. I always figured I'd need capital and connections to start a business but once the truths about where the future of work is headed clicked for me, it became obvious that creating a digital presence backed by a newsletter was the no-brainer move.

I had a bunch of things work out for me in the beginning. One of my earliest issues was about US-China relations (the newsletter was a lot different back then) and I spun the newsletter around the concept of "Thucydides Trap". I found out that this term was coined by a paper published by Harvard's Belfer Center. I decided to DM everybody I could find on LinkedIn associated to Belfer Center and ask them to review or comment on my current draft for the issue. This caused a professor at Belfer Center to repost my issue when it was released which resulted in me gaining my first 2,000 subscribers virtually overnight!

I also had a few YouTube videos do well and even had my posts top the chart on some of the biggest Skool communities! Random, I know. The point is, I did a bunch of everything.

Scaling my newsletter to 10k and beyond, I mostly used campus marketing and a trick that I stole from the founders of Morning Brew where people would go around different campuses giving short speeches about my newsletter and then pass around a sign-up sheet where people who were interested in signing up for the newsletter could write down their emails.

Nowadays, my growth comes from a mix of everything. Semi-viral X posts, I'm interviewing a member of parliament soon so hopefully that will do well for my YouTube, campus marketing and just a general flywheel effect where readers end up sharing issues that they like on social media.

I monetise using beehiiv's ad network and Boosts. I wanted to use Passionfroot's Ad Network as well but unfortunately Stripe has gone invite-only for Indian businesses so for now I'll have to stick with beehiiv's ad network!

People create newsletters because they are interested in or enjoy the process of writing. Unfortunately, to have a profitable newsletter and even a successful personal brand in general, writing good content is only 20% of the game. The rest is figuring how to get eyes on your content.

There's no point writing into the void (besides practice), only by writing to at least a minimal audience do you start to gather data that tells you what works and what doesn't.

Figure out which growth strategy works for you. I tried everything from writing on X and LinkedIn, cold DMing people to connect with them to potentially get them to repost my content, YouTube videos, and Campus marketing.

Don't believe a lot of what you hear online, every single strategy works (trust me, I've tried most of them), it's just a case of staying in the game long enough to figure out which works best for you.

Keep enjoying the process, decrease your content frequency if it starts feeling like a chore. Seriously, this might be the most important point of all. If you don't keep enjoyment as one of your key metrics, you'll burnout and quit.

Follow people who are doing this well and look out for how they do it, people like Ciaran, Dan Koe, Dickie Bush, Justin Welsh, etc.

As a final thought, I'd once again like to emphasise that this entire process is supposed to be fun. The goal is work that doesn't feel like work. Isn't that why we're all doing this? Never forget that.

My newsletter - https://sujalkumar.beehiiv.com/

Twitter - https://x.com/15sujalkumar

YouTube - https://youtube.com/@15sujalkumar