"I decided to run a little experiment with as little work as I could muster," "while he was working on that, I was getting Curated set up."

One take-away for me is that https://curated.co/ exists. Looks really useful. But with a price of $995/year it's not usable for an experiment. I assume the author either got a special deal or trial period.

No special deal, but you don't pay until you send out your first issue.