Ryan Gilbert — Workspaces, How a Newsletter Showcasing Workspaces Became a Business

Ryan Gilbert's Workspaces is a free newsletter that features the real workspaces of designers, developers, and founders. It provides readers with desk photos and gear information, and grew into a small media business generating revenue through corporate sponsorships and product purchase affiliates. Its later sale to Loops even changed the job of its operator, Gilbert.

A Marketing Major Who Wanted to Enter the Tech Industry

Gilbert majored in marketing but could not get hired at a tech startup and spent about six years in supply chain-related work. He was very interested in the tech industry, but lacked experience and connections, and spent a lot of time watching other people's activities on Twitter. His initial goal in starting Workspaces was less about revenue and more about creating a project he could show and connecting with people in the industry.

The catalyst was the spread of remote work in 2020. Seeing tech company employees post their home workspaces on Twitter, he thought he could collect and feature them regularly. He opened a Substack and asked acquaintances for desk photos, and on April 5, 2020, he published the first issue, featuring Shivkanth Bagavathy, then a Facebook engineer.

The content format consisted of workspace photos, a short profile, the gear being used with purchase links, and a brief interview. Readers could see at a glance which desk and tools a given person used and how they worked. Both the pleasure of browsing photos and the information to reference when setting up a real workspace were contained in a single piece.

A Structure Where Featured Guests Bring in the Next Readers

In the early days, Gilbert found guests himself. He sometimes sent more than 50 direct messages a week asking people to share their workspaces. After a few months, people began to appear who wanted to be featured first, and more workspaces piled up than he could publish.

At the center of growth was a structure in which featured guests reshared content about themselves. Ryan Gilbert posted photos on Twitter, tagging the guests, and emailed them to let them know it had been published and ask them to share it. According to his own account in March 2025, of the 475 Workspaces featured at that point, only four guests did not share the post. Each time someone was featured, the newsletter was exposed to a different person's followers.

Building an audience took time. According to the official timeline, the newsletter launched in April 2020 and reached 1,000 subscribers in May 2021, about 13 months later. By March 2022, it had reached 5,000.

Existing content was also reused repeatedly. The social accounts were run by reposting photos from previously featured Workspaces or grouping several desks together. Leveraging the fact that even old photos could provide ideas for organizing a space, this created touchpoints with readers between new interviews.

How Ryan Gilbert Made $2,000 a Month with 6,000 Subscribers

Product purchase affiliates were a natural fit with the content. Issue 86, published on September 12, 2021, included Amazon links to products featured in Workspaces and a disclosure that a commission was received on purchases. Monetization was attached to the flow of readers wondering about the gear in the photos and looking for purchase information.

Full-scale sponsorship sales began in early 2022. After receiving advertising inquiries, Gilbert asked previous guests for their thoughts on monetization and confirmed a positive response. At the time, there were 3,000-plus subscribers; he initially sold a single ad for $150, then raised it to $250 as booking demand grew.

The metrics disclosed at the time of the sale were about 6,000 subscribers, a 60 percent email open rate, and about $2,000 in monthly revenue. At the time, it published once each on Saturday and Sunday, and the price per ad was $250. Selling eight ads a month generated $2,000, with the core of early revenue being sales of newsletter advertising space.

Even when ads sold well, the operational burden remained. The advertising schedule was booked more than two months out, but some advertisers did not pay until the night before publication. Gilbert was exhausted from continually following up with advertisers and chasing payments, and this burden was also part of why he considered selling.

Loops, Once an Advertiser, Takes the Newsletter and Its Operator Together

Loops initially came in as an advertiser for Workspaces and then acquired the newsletter in 2022. Ryan Gilbert also joined, becoming the company's first employee and Head of Content. For him, then working at Product Hunt, it was a deal in which selling a project and changing careers happened at the same time.

The exact acquisition amount was not disclosed. Gilbert described the sale proceeds as enough to buy a new car rather than a house. He also said he saw both the proceeds and the opportunity to join Loops as important factors.

After the acquisition, external ads and Amazon affiliate links were removed, and a banner saying Loops publishes the newsletter was added. Loops used a publication that had already built an audience for its content marketing, and Gilbert handled email-related guides and customer onboarding in addition to the newsletter. The acquisition included not only the newsletter but also the capabilities of the operator who had grown it.

2024: Bought It Back for $1 and Went Independent Again

In May 2024, Gilbert was laid off from Loops. At that time, the company offered him the chance to buy back the Workspaces brand, email list, and Twitter account for $1, and he accepted. The reacquisition involved contract terms that could not be disclosed, but ownership returned to Gilbert.

After becoming independent, restarting the advertising business was harder than expected. At the time of a September 2024 interview, subscribers had grown to about 14,000, roughly double the number before the sale, and open and click rates remained similar, but ad sales were sluggish. Even without raising the $250 per issue price, ads did not sell as they once had, and Gilbert attributed this to shrinking advertising budgets and increased competition among newsletters.

The scale of operations itself was at a level he could manage alongside other work. In March 2025, Gilbert recorded one week's work time as 230 minutes. He spent the most time running social accounts, followed by transferring interview content to the website. This time included not only producing the newsletter but also distribution and responding to advertisers.

Expanding from a Newsletter to a Workspace Archive

As of October 5, 2026, the official site lists more than 21,000 newsletter subscribers and more than 70,000 social followers. Publication is currently once a week on Saturday, and more than 500 workspace features have accumulated. In July 2026, it expanded into a site that includes a searchable gear directory, product comparisons, and in-depth guides. It has organized content once consumed by email into a resource that can be continually explored.

The advertising offering also shifted from selling individual issues to monthly collaborations. Today, it accepts only one brand per month and sells a package that places that brand across all of that month’s newsletters, the entire site, and social posts. The October 2026 advertiser is Elgato, and previous advertisers include Figma, Oakywood, Autonomous, and others.

There are also cases that combine audience growth with advertising. In the Autonomous collaboration that Gilbert announced in June 2026, the brand offered two height-adjustable desks as prizes and separately paid thousands of dollars in sponsorship money. The event, which required a Workspaces subscription to enter, brought in 600 new subscribers. It was a deal in which readers interested in workspaces and the desk brand’s customer base aligned well.

What stands out about Workspaces is that guest acquisition, content production, and audience growth were connected into a single repeatable process. Guests provided photos and stories and shared their own feature posts, while Gilbert edited and distributed them, building up both an audience and an archive. On top of that came advertising placements, affiliate commerce, and brand collaborations, and eventually an acquirer who wanted both the publication and the operational capability. It is a case in which consistently covering a narrow interest led to an audience, a job, and a sellable business asset.