Making $2,000 monthly from a newsletter showcasing desk setups

What is the business and who’s behind it?

Workspaces is a twice weekly newsletter started by Ryan Gilbert, that gives readers a behind the scenes tour of their favourite entrepreneurs, designers, developers’ desk setups.

The goal of the newsletter was to give readers these behind-the-scenes tour of new desk setups as they shifted into this new workstyle.

In Sept 2022, Ryan’s newsletter was acquired by YC startup Loops, and Ryan joined the team as Head of Content to continue publishing Workspaces among other content and marketing initiatives.

How was the business started?

According to Ryan, he started the business in 2020, when the pandemic had people shifting to a WFH environment.

To start the newsletter, Ryan went with Substack for ease of use, and run the entire newsletter out of:

• Twitter DMs - to pitch people to share their workspaces

• GMail - general communication (sending the requirements, getting the content)

• Notion - setting up a simple sponsor calendar

All these cost him $0 to run the whole business for the longest time.

He’s featured more than 167 workspaces (with 70 more in the backlog) and have grown the newsletter to 6,500 subscribers while maintaining a >50% open rate in a span of 2 years.

He mentioned this very important point: