Hi! It’s been almost a year since I last sent this newsletter. That was a post about my main newsletter, Workspaces, turning 5. It just turned 6 last week.
Why the hiatus? Life.
I’ve been busy balancing life with a newborn and new house, new role at beehiiv that occupies more of my time than my wife particularly likes, and trying to turn Workspaces into a legitimate business (at least from a monetization standpoint).
Which leads perfectly into today’s post about needing to clear time and headspace.
Let’s dive in.
-Ryan (@rjgilbert)
I sold one of my newsletters last year.
It was (and still is) called H1 Gallery — a small side project I started alongside Workspaces. The idea was simple: curate and showcase the best marketing headlines from around the internet.
Everyone was sharing beautifully designed websites but that is only a small reason for a product’s eventual success or failure.
When I launched it, I honestly didn’t expect much. It was a tweet thrown together in 10 minutes when I decided it was finally ready to see the world.
But the response completely surprised me.
The launch tweet took off, people were excited about the concept, and it was clear pretty quickly that there was real interest behind it. It felt like one of those ideas that just clicked.
Day 1 saw CMOs of $2 billion companies signing up. People that I had no prior connection with.
For a moment I thought that this could actually become something big. Even bigger than Workspaces itself.
And that made the next part a bit harder to admit.
I simply didn’t have the time to do it justice.
Running Workspaces is already a massive time commitment. Weekly interviews, editing, publishing, sponsorships, trying to redesign the website — it all adds up fast. And as it continues to grow, so does the amount of attention it requires.
H1 Gallery slowly became the “I’ll get to it later” project.
And “later” usually meant rushed issues, inconsistency, or not showing up in your inboxes at all that week.
This quickly began to bother me as I strongly believe that consistency is what makes these projects work. In the 6+ years of publishing Workspaces, I have only “missed” one weekend and it was due to me wrapping up the legal side of re-acquiring it to spin it back out as a solo project.
So I had a decision to make…
Keep it on the back burner hoping to give it the full attention it deserved someday.
Or pass it off to someone that could truly turn it into something great.
I chose to sell it. But not to just anyone.
If we scrolled down just a tiny bit more on the launch tweet we would see this as the first reply:
Corey is a great marketer, working with a great team, with countless side projects under his belt.
So I sent him a quick DM in October, 2025:
Not only was Corey a great marketer, but he was also someone who saw H1 Gallery on literally day 1, believed in it, and was excited to see what I would do with it.
That made the decision a lot easier.
Not because I didn’t care about the project — but because I knew it could actually get the attention it deserved from someone actually much better positioned to even talk about these things in the first place.
We wrapped up the deal a couple of weeks later and Corey & team immediately began publishing every single Friday.
Consistency.
But almost immediately after selling it, I felt a new sense of clarity and focus.
Instead of splitting time and energy between two projects, everything could now point in one direction with a much larger end goal.
Since then, every ounce of effort has gone into Workspaces where I am now closing $xx,xxx ad deals and thinking about things outside of just email for the project (👀).
I’m now all-in on Workspaces (and beehiiv).
You can do a lot of things… but you can’t do all of them well at the same time.
And that’s okay.
Almost everyone is growing their newsletters through paid acquisition these days — specifically Meta ads. That doesn’t really interest me. Mainly because I’ve never done it and have grown Workspaces organically to 20,000 subscribers.
However, growth has slowed a tiny bit and it was time to get creative.
Next week I’m going to talk about an alternative to true paid acquisition: giveaways.
Stick around.