Choose a niche with buyers and sponsors (e.g. AI for accountants, indie game dev, homebrewing).
In Make, schedule a scenario that reads 20–50 RSS feeds and subreddits daily and appends new items to a Google Sheet.
Add an AI step that scores each item for relevance and writes a 2-sentence summary.
Weekly, sort by score, pick the top 8–10, and have AI draft the issue from a fixed template.
Edit for voice, add one original insight, publish on beehiiv.
Grow with beehiiv's recommendation network, a referral program and posts in the communities you curate from.
At ~1,000+ engaged subscribers, sell direct sponsorships or join beehiiv's Ad Network (paid plans).

What's automated vs. the human 5%

🤖 The machine does

Source monitoring and link collection
Relevance scoring and summaries
Draft issue assembly and scheduling

🧑 You still do

Final curation and one original take per issue
Growth and community participation
Selling and vetting sponsors

Overview

Curation newsletters are an ideal AI machine: the hard part (reading everything) is automated, and the valuable part (taste) takes you 30–60 minutes a week.

Costs

$0 to start. beehiiv’s Free plan covers up to 2,500 subscribers with unlimited sends; its Ad Network requires a paid plan.

Realistic income

Niche B2B newsletters often charge sponsors somewhere around $20–$50 per 1,000 subscribers per placement, depending on open rates and audience value. A 3,000-subscriber niche list sending weekly might reasonably earn a few hundred to ~$1k/month; reaching that size usually takes months.

Risks

Growth is the real work. Automation won’t get you subscribers.
Copyright — summarize and link; don’t republish full articles.
Generic AI voice kills open rates. Keep a human edit.

*Income figures are illustrative ranges based on public pricing and typical outcomes reported by practitioners, not guarantees. Most new online businesses earn little or nothing at first. Not financial, legal or tax advice.