In August 2011, Dave Verwer started to write a roundup of news for iOS developers He really enjoyed receiving other curated emails and so he decided that email would be his primary method of distribution. He put together a quick sign up web page, sent out a tweet and had 600 signups in 2 days. At that point he was committed to sending out the first issue!

For the first two years of publishing, the weekly process for producing this newsletter was quite manual. Dave would bookmark potentially interesting content with one tool, use another tool to format the links and commentary into his template, manually upload that to Mailchimp, put together the web version and finally publish it. As the subscriptions grew, this process got increasingly complex and time consuming.

At this point, Dave was making money from sponsorships and it was worth spending some development effort on starting to build a publishing platform to make his life a little easier! By February 2014 we had created what would eventually become Curated, and Dave switched over to using it. It saved him so much time each week and it struck us that it could really help others as well. We turned it into Curated and soft launched in August 2014. Dave and his team continued to run Curated until January of 2017, when they handed the keys to Simple Focus. Simple Focus is a bootstrapped business and shares the same values as Dave, but with a larger team.

Whether you're looking to promote yourself or your company, or if you just want to send some links to your friends for the fun of it, Curated is built for you. Our goal is to get out of your way so that you can concentrate on the content.