From Silicon Valley to a Portfolio Career: How Dexter Zhuang Built a Sustainable Business Using Content

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The creator economy is booming, growing at 10-20% per year. But is it actually sustainable? For many, turning content into a full-time business seems like the dream—but the reality is much tougher than it looks.

I recently had a chance to connect with Dexter Zhuang, a product manager turned entrepreneur, to dive into what it really takes to make content work as a business.

I’ve been looking up to Dexter for a while. Initially, I reached out for personal reasons. I discovered his content through LinkedIn, where he wrote about his experience quitting his job as a product manager at Dropbox to travel the world in his 20s.

Fast forward a couple years later, and he now has a portfolio career as a fractional product leader, career coach, and founder of The Portfolio Path, an education platform where he teaches others how to start portfolio career.

Who is Dexter Zhuang?

Dexter is a Silicon Valley product manager turned entrepreneur. Once, he chased the traditional markers of success—a high-paying tech job, career growth, and financial security. After tripling his income in five years and working at companies like Dropbox, he found himself burned out and unfulfilled. Seeking a new path, he quit his job, traveled to 20 countries, and later moved to Singapore to work for Xendit, a fintech unicorn.

Now, Dexter has a portfolio career, diversifying his income through consulting, content creation, and online programs. His work helps ambitious professionals align their careers with their values. His newsletter, The Portfolio Path (formerly Money Abroad), shares insights on financial independence, working abroad, and building a sustainable business—reaching over 7,000+ subscribers.

Key takeaways from our conversation

Takeaway 1. Making content the business is very different from creating content for a business.

  • Brand deals & sponsorships are unreliable → They can be difficult to manage and require constant negotiations.
  • The alternative? → Think of content as a tool for marketing, not the business itself (use content as the top of the sales funnel for products or services).

Takeaway 2: You shouldn’t expect to monetize right away, and it’s okay to cycle between phases of growth and monetization.

Dexter approached his business in 3-phases:

  • Year 1 → Growth: Build an audience & traction.
  • Year 2 → Monetization: Validate revenue streams.
  • Year 3 → Growth again: Scale now that monetization is in place.

Takeaway 3: The easiest way to get started in the creator economy is to start creating your own content.

  • Just start creating → Overcome the fear of putting yourself out there.
  • Pick a platform and create content that you actually enjoy → Sustainability comes from working on something you like and can continue to talk about.
  • Network with other creators → People are happy to help those who reach out with genuine curiosity.

Where do you think the creator economy is headed in the next 5-10 years?

I’m in short optimistic that people are continually going to be creating more and more content online, whether it’s individuals or businesses, because that’s starting to be proven out that content is one of the best forms of getting attention and discovery.

From an acquisition channel kind of standpoint for businesses, even B2B nowadays, there’s a lot of headwinds for other marketing channels, like paid ads or SEO. Being able to work with authentic people or brands that kind of stand for the things that you believe in either as a company or as an individual make a lot of sense. I can see people who are creating content have a lot of opportunities over the next five to ten years.

With that said, I think the flip side of that is that there’s also a ton of supply. Whenever I think about any market, there’s supply and demand. There’s demand from the businesses for partnering with people creating content. And then there’s also a ton of supply of people creating content. And there’s going to be more and more because younger people just seem to want to create more content, and it’s kind of become its own career path so there’s a lot of people wanting to get into the game. I think it’s going to be more competitive and you have to think about how you differentiate yourself.

What are your favorite and least favorite aspects of creating content?

I’d say my favorite part of creating content is building relationships with people who read or connect with the content. For example, us being able to connect, that’s a result of being able to put my stories out there. That’s really, really cool. And I love being able to meet people who are going through similar stages of life or where I can help people through the content. So building real authentic relationships is by far my favorite part.

The least favorite part—I think it’s the way that content’s creation has kind of taken a life of its own. Economically, it’s really, really hard to make it a viable career path or business if you’re doing solely content creation. However, it’s become so popular and put on a pedestal in terms of famous content creators making a career out of it, and I think it’s actually really, really hard to do well.

There’s definitely opportunities for content to play a role in your business, and I think most businesses in the future will have some variation of content in their business. To make content the business makes it a really hard business to run, because then you have to deal with all the brand sponsorships and partners and affiliates and all that kind of stuff. And I don’t find that to be super enjoyable.

What do you struggle with the most today? How have you tried to solve that so far?

I would say that my journey with Money Abroad has really broken down into yearly stages.

In my first year, when I was starting Money Abroad, it was really just about growth. Can I get traction in the first place with the newsletter, with content? Is this something that I can build interest and trust around? After I was able to validate that hypothesis and say, “I could do these things,” then the second year was really focused on monetizing.

The biggest challenge for last year was, “can I build products or services or partnerships that help me build this into something more sustainable and long term?” And so this last year was really proving out that hypothesis and then saying, “yes, I can do that.”

And now, year three is about going back to growth. Now it’s like, “okay, now that I have a sales process and a set of products and services that I feel strongly about, and positive about, can I go back to growing them?”

I see there being a back and forth over time from growth, to building monetizable products and services, and back to growth.

Maybe in the future there will be a challenge with operations as well with scaling, but I haven’t hit a super big kind of obstacle around that yet. I’ve been pretty good about managing operations by hiring either part-time staff or using AI to automate and fortunately we live at a time where AI automation makes scaling a whole lot easier.

What have you seen content creators struggle with?

I would say content creation is fun, and it’s quick to get started doing some of it. But then if you want to make it into something more long-term and sustainable, you really have to think about what role does content actually play in your business.

You have to think about what topics are you excited enough about to continue to publish content sustainably, ideally indefinitely. It’s like things you can talk about for ten plus years—that kind of timeframe.

What advice do you have for someone looking to break into the creator economy?

I think it really depends on your goal. If right now, you’re just exploring and curious about the industry and tools and opportunities, then I would suggest just start creating content, and then just experiment, see where it goes.

Pick a channel that you feel excited about. Start building relationships. Start sharing your learnings, your stories. It’s all worthwhile.

I think a lot of people have fear around how they’re going to be perceived if they share these kind of stories or pieces of content, but I truly believe that everyone has something worthwhile to share, and everyone has something that you can teach or something that they can add that’s unique because we’re all unique people.

So I would say start there, just start taking small actions. And then if you like this kind of stuff and you enjoy what you’re seeing in the industry then you can start exploring potential roles, maybe helping other businesses kind of like what Ines Lee did with Ali Abdaal. Or maybe you can consider more of the entrepreneurial path or the side hustle path like how do you build something of your own around it.

⁠⁠Is there anything you’ve invested in to help with your own content creation?

I don’t really use too many tools for content specifically. I use Beehiiv for emails and then when I’m writing content, I write in Notion and then import it into a scheduling tool called Typefully to schedule on LinkedIn and Threads.

That’s pretty much about it. I wouldn’t say tools are super important to get started. It’s more about you actually getting started.

Oh and I suppose I use Claude right now to help me with improving my content—editing it, giving feedback, and helping generate some ideas as well. So I do use AI quite a bit now in my content, but I don’t think you need to at the start because you’re still figuring out your own voice and style and such.

Is there anyone I could reach out to in order to learn more about the creator economy?

For people to reach out to, I would honestly just reach out to your favorite creators. Look at the people that you’re following and similar to what you did with me, reach out and then have a conversation.

Usually, I find people are really happy to have a conversation with someone who is genuinely interested in their work, and I think that’ll be a great way to get started with building some relationships with other people building content or education-type businesses.

Where can people go to learn more about you?

Final thoughts & what I learned

I’m super grateful to Dexter for being generous with his time and sharing his insights with me.

It’s clear that Dexter’s product management background influenced his approach to building a business. Going back to his journey, Dexter started by validating his hypothesis with something cheap (content). Once he gained traction, he invested in scalable products, such as online courses. And after he proved he was able to monetize, he went back to scaling by using content as a growth engine.

Coming from my own background as product manager, I love the idea of de-risking and validating ideas cheaply whenever possible, and I suspect I’ll be emulating Dexter’s playbook over the next few months 🙂

Let me know what you thought about this post in the comments! If you’re interested in starting your own portfolio career, you can follow Dexter’s newsletter here.

Resources mentioned

  • The Portfolio Path: Learn how to start your own portfolio career
  • Beehiiv: Email newsletter platform
  • Notion: All in one workspace for document management
  • Typefully: Social media tool for writing and scheduling social media posts
  • Claude.ai: Privacy-first AI assistant (Anthropic’s version of ChatGPT)