🔴 40,000 engineering leaders trust his taste

Precision over popularity.

Suraj Kapoor launched his newsletter a decade ago as a side project within his day job. Today, it’s an independent media property with over 40,000 subscribers, generating a six-figure revenue, and asking no more than 20 hours of his time per week.

In this episode:

— Natalia Pérez-González, Assistant Editor

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Suraj Kapoor hasn’t tweeted since March 2023. His newsletter’s LinkedIn page features fewer than 10 posts this year, and he’s posted even less on his personal account. Even with a bare-minimum social presence and no personal brand, he’s built a six-figure-revenue newsletter with over 40,000 subscribers.

Each week, Suraj reads through a large volume of articles, distills them down to their core message, and selects seven unsponsored links for his audience to read; he’s a gatekeeper, protecting their time from the content overwhelm. He adds no hot takes or personal commentary — just pure objective value in an increasingly noisy industry. In total, producing his newsletter takes around 20 hours a week.

He launched Pointer in 2014 as a side project at a venture capital firm, where he was built internal products as his core job. It was aimed at helping the portfolio’s engineering leaders improve skills like leadership and workflow — often young co-founders in need of this type of guidance and without the time to read many articles. The first iteration of this initiative involved Suraj pairing them with veteran CTOs, which didn't scale; sharing a curated selection of blog posts from working engineers did.

From the beginning, Suraj designed Pointer to exist independently of his persona, and deliberately modeled it editorially after The Economist's anonymous bylines.

The newsletter had built trust independent of his visibility, but dependent on his unique curatorial skill. So when Suraj left the firm in 2017, Pointer went dark for months. Subscribers flooded his personal email demanding its return, and he negotiated to take it with him.

The first three years, when the newsletter existed within the VC firm, yielded just 1,000 subscribers. From 2018 to 2022, operating independently, Suraj grew from 1,000 to 20,000 through pure word-of-mouth. In 2022, when he left his last full-time job, he gave himself six months to turn the newsletter into a proper business generating enough revenue for him to live on.

He’d first attempted monetization with a furniture company sponsorship in 2019, but it yielded mixed results. "I was so excited someone wanted to pay me for this,” Suraj told us, but it didn't align with his audience. A few developer tools companies offered more direct subscriber value, but his integration approach wasn’t sound. The ads felt separate from the newsletter rather than woven into the experience. After a lukewarm performance, he shelved monetization entirely.

Suraj had just moved to Los Angeles in 2022, and his cost of living went up, so he needed to make a decision: treat this seriously or let it remain a hobby forever.

The timeline created urgency. This time, he redesigned the sponsorship experience entirely. Instead of separate ad blocks, he integrated sponsor content throughout the newsletter, modeling it after Axios. Premium pricing filtered for quality partners — mostly SaaS companies flush with venture capital and desperate to reach engineering leaders. Within that six-month window, Pointer was covering his rent, and he realized he'd badly underestimated its potential.

For nearly eight years, Suraj had operated entirely solo, figuring out everything from content curation to sponsorship pricing on his own. "I did this in a big silo," he told us. "I can run this newsletter from anywhere in the world as long as I have an internet connection."

Once he committed to going all in, he realized he needed to learn from others doing similar work. He started reaching out to other newsletter creators, scheduling calls and joining groups where operators shared what was working. One creator in particular became a trusted collaborator, sharing everything from growth strategies to revenue numbers and workflow optimizations.

That exchange unlocked insights he never would have discovered operating alone — new approaches to pricing, audience development, and operational efficiency that transformed how he ran the business. He began running Meta ads to drive growth.

The business now runs with obsessive precision. Suraj spends around an hour daily scanning content, favoring personal blogs over corporate marketing. Behind the scenes, he built a custom Airtable system that integrates his email service provider, sponsorship CRM, and QuickBooks, logging every link ever shared so he can analyze performance by topic, position, and timeframe (see more on this under Steal this Tactic).

Suraj’s refined taste, custom analytics systems, and deep audience relationships — none of it happened overnight — has compounded through patient accumulation of irreplaceable skills and trust. After ten years of consistent curation, he’s built a deep moat; a business not easily replicated by competitors.

A few things that stuck with me as I listened through this week’s conversation:

Connect with Suraj on LinkedIn.
Subscribe to Pointer here.

Aggregation newsletters are deceptively simple — find good links and share them, right? It’s a matter of taste. Suraj's decade-long journey with Pointer illustrates the sophisticated systems and strategic thinking required to build a sustainable curation business that commands premium sponsorship rates.

Pointer succeeded because it solved an actual problem for a defined group: engineering leaders across one VC's portfolio companies needed to learn how to be better managers, but didn’t have the time. The newsletter emerged as a scalable solution to replace one-on-one consultations with CTOs.

This specificity became Pointer's competitive edge. When Suraj left the VC firm, they couldn't continue the newsletter because it was too tied to his personal taste and judgment. The curation skill isn't easily replicated; it requires a deep understanding of the audience's daily challenges and is tuned over constant repetitions.

The core skill in aggregation is in both finding articles and identifying the single valuable insight each piece contains.

His TL;DRs either pull the perfect quote that captures this insight or distill it in his own words. The goal isn't neutrality for its own sake, but preserving the author's intent while tailoring it to the audience's needs. This positions him as a trusted intermediary, not a commentator.

Suraj's neutral, institutional approach enabled B2B sponsorship at premium rates ($1,500+ for 20K subscribers per issue). These companies face expensive customer acquisition costs and struggle to reach engineering leaders, making Pointer's engaged professional audience worth the premium.

Alternative paths require different positioning. Personal brand-driven newsletters — like former Spotlight guest Casey Lewis's Gen-Z trends newsletter After School — can charge subscriptions but need stronger individual recognition. Broader audiences typically monetize through affiliates or courses. The key is matching your positioning to your revenue model from day one.

Most newsletter creators rely on basic open rates and click tracking to understand their audience. Suraj built a system that categorizes every link by topic (leadership, architecture, scaling) and tracks performance by newsletter position, creating a database of audience preferences over time.

"I can see how this link that's in position six has performed against other links in position six, and what kind of an article it was," he explains. His Airtable-based system connects to his ESP, QuickBooks, and CRM through APIs, automatically tracking both content and business performance.

This data reveals patterns invisible to standard analytics: