The Creator Spotlight Podcast

Today's guest is Haya Kaylani, creator of a curation-style newsletter called The Deep Dive. What does she curate? YouTube video essays, five of them every Wednesday. She’s built an audience of 92k TikTok followers and 13.5k newsletter subscribers in just 15 months — pure organic growth, with almost all of her newsletter subscribers coming over from TikTok. In this issue, we discuss: • 🎨 Curating, gatekeeping, and gatecreating • 📺️ Why writing about YouTube is a huge opportunity • 📢 Applying lessons from a career in PR to indie creator work • 🤳 Building a newsletter audience by building a TikTok audience 00:00 What is The Deep Dive 02:30 Being a curator 06:23 What is a video essay? 14:26 Going viral on TikTok 19:04 Why start a newsletter? 24:21 Why we need curators and gate-creators 28:22 The stats - How to grow subscribers 33:32 Haya’s premium newsletter, The Rabbit Hole 37:27 Monetisation and referrals 41:47 Advice for creators and lessons learned Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ. #podcast #creatoreconomy #newsletter

Today's guest is PJ Milani, a high school animation teacher recently turned social media star. He’s known for his “visual metaphors” — single-panel illustrations featuring lessons about life and creativity. Across his socials he has over 200k followers, his newsletter has 16k subscribers, and he teaches a perennially sold-out cohort course about visual thinking on Maven. In this issue, we discuss: • 🌱 Organic growth • 🔜 Trusting the process, every day • 🎨 What it means to live a creative life • 🤝 Working in community with other creators 00:00 Who is PJ Milani 01:25 Why PJ started creating — Getting on social media 09:04 How to gain 200k followers 14:48 Relationship between writing and drawing 19:39 Which social media platform is best — Twitter vs Instagram vs LinkedIn 23:57 How to convert social media followers into newsletter subs? 30:56 How PJ monetises his content 42:23 The long term plan Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ.

Ryan Broderick is the creator of Garbage Day, “A newsletter about having fun online.” He’s among the most popular journalists-turned-newsletter-creators out there. It’s clear by the numbers (68k subscribers, 3k of whom pay for premium content), praise from other creators, and the nearly 200 press clippings on his About page.

In this episode we discuss:

Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ.

Jared Dashevsky runs Healthcare Huddle, a twice-weekly newsletter for physicians and other healthcare professionals. In just over four years, he’s built an audience of 30,000. He’s also built a team of 13, dismantled that team and been acquired. But today, Jared is once again a solo creator.

In this episode, we discuss:

Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ.

Arielle Nissenblatt knows podcasts. She writes a weekly newsletter about podcasts, hosts a podcast version of that newsletter, co-hosts another weekly podcast and a daily podcast. She runs a Discord community for podcasters. On top of all that, she works full-time as a community marketing manager at Descript.

In this episode, we discuss:

Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ.

Ryan Sneddon runs Naptown Scoop, a local newsletter serving Annapolis, Maryland. In three-and-a-half years, he’s built an audience of over 18,000 (nearly half the town’s population), and last year the business generated around $200,000 in revenue.

In this episode, we discuss:

Ali built an audience of over 7,000 subscribers before he even sent the first issue of his newsletter, AI for Work. He would only end up sending 13 issues before (at approximately 30,000 subscribers) he went looking for advice on how to monetize and ending up selling the whole thing instead. We spent an hour discussing: • 🧲 How he built an ingenious, highly successful lead magnet • 👀 Emailing every new subscriber to build relationships • 💰️ Experimenting with monetization • 🤖 Using TikTok to grow his email list (without making his own videos) • 📰 His plans to start a local news newsletter Intro music produced by J. & Doug Organ.

Andrew Huang is lifelong musician and a pioneer in the Creator Economy. He made his first dollar online auctioning off songwriting commissions on eBay two decades ago and has since became a celebrated YouTuber with 2.36 million followers, produced commercial commissions for international brands, and published a book.

Make Your Own Rules: Stories and Hard-Earned Advice from a Creator in the Digital Age came out in February 2024. We spoke with Andrew shortly after about:

Casey has been writing the youth consumer trends newsletter After School for three years, the culmination of nearly two decades writing and editing content about and for teens in her own online publications and in Teen Vogue and New York Magazine. On the occasion of Casey leaving her day job to work full time on a newsletter — for the second time in her career — we spoke about: • 💵 Building and selling her first newsletter business (2016–2019) • 📭 Writing her newsletter to 0 subscribers for the first month • ✌️ Leaving a full-time job to commit to her newsletter business (again) • 📈 Her premium subscriber model with a 5% conversion rate • 👩‍🎨 Monetizing a curation-style newsletter Read our feature on Casey (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/p/casey-lewis-after-school) and subscribe to our newsletter (https://www.creatorspotlight.com/subscribe) for more behind-the-scenes stories from the creator economy.

Eric, alongside Slava Rubin (host of the Smart Humans podcast), co-founded Vincent in 2019 as an aggregator platform for alternative investment opportunities. It's evolved into a media company with three newsletters and a podcast, still focused on alternative investments. Adam joined the team a couple of years ago as a researcher and writer. We spoke about: • 🏋️ Building a solid core audience over four years • 📰 Deciding not to put names on the newsletter byline • 👎 Knowing what not to write about • 💰 Generating revenue through partnerships and trust • 😌 Not worrying too much about competitors