Ep. 11: Haya Kaylani, creator of The Deep Dive 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.