From 4 hours to 4 minutes: Curating a newsletter with AWS Claude 3 and GPT-4 with under $0.19 a day (Part 1)

I’ve decided to build my own newsletter: TechTok is an aggregator of daily tech news, summarised, curated and delivered to you via ‘stories’ and a weekly newsletter. I created it to solve my own problem of feeling overwhelmed by so many daily ‘game changers’ in AI and tech, it’s been hard to keep up!

This article explains how I went from spending hours on tedious newsletter tasks to focusing on what matters most: selecting the best, most relevant content.

There are many reasons to have a newsletter

If you want to build an audience, explore an expertise, use it as a sales tool or just investigate another channel. Emails are great, 4.26 billion people have them.

Before I started I looked into Substack and Beehiiv, and they do have a ‘great’ no-code tool that powers a lot of popular newsletters - the problem for me was just not the right ‘feature freedom’ I was looking for.

I wanted to explore different experiments for engaging an audience and TechTok has its own ‘storified’ version of the daily tech news, using users engagement to select and curate a weekly newsletter.

Pain before the gains

In the first 3 days, I realised… how can I, a single person, scale a newsletter and collect daily news without it taking every minute of my days? And most importantly how can I spend time on the things that matter? For me is choosing the best and most relevant articles and NOT selecting images, copying and pasting things, or writing (crazy!) - I’ve had to automate and leverage AI tools to avoid that.

I started by choosing the main sources of tech news I use to keep myself up to date:

• Trending repositories from GitHub,
• Tech news from TechCrunch and The Verge
• Reddit’s r/technology and r/programming subreddits
• Hacker News
• Blog posts from engineering teams from “Big Tech”
• and Product Hunt

Next step was to MEASURE! Keeping track of how long it took for me to curate articles and automated ONE thing a day.

🤩 The result is: the process went from taking 4 hours to 4 minutes. But how?

See part two for the details of all 5 steps for automating a tech newsletter!