Hi! It’s been awhile since I last sent this newsletter. That was a post about selling one of my newsletters, H1 Gallery.
Since then I’ve been busy growing my main project, Workspaces.
Which leads perfectly into today’s post about a unique growth lever that I recently pulled: giveaways.
Let’s dive in.
-Ryan (@rjgilbert)
P.S. I have a massive Workspaces redesign (actually… much more than a redesign) launching very soon. Here’s a sneak peak.
Most newsletter growth advice ends in the same place: buy meta ads.
Spend $1,000, get some subscribers, do the math on your cost-per-acquisition, rinse and repeat.
I hate this approach.
You're renting growth. The second you stop paying Meta, it stops.
So I tried something different.
Instead of paying to acquire subscribers, I got a brand to pay me.
Hundreds of new subscribers. Negative cost.
Here's exactly how it worked.
The setup
Workspaces profiles people's desk setups. Every week, a new guest. Every week, a new workspace.
So the single most on-brand prize I could possibly give my readers is… a standing desk.
That's where Autonomous came in. They make desks and chairs. People who read a newsletter about desk setups are — shockingly — in the market for desks.
After two emails (that’s it!) Autonomous agreed to my plan and I quickly stood up (pun intended) a simple giveaway: enter by subscribing to the overall Workspaces newsletter, two entrants win an Autonomous desk.
Check out the live page here.
The part that breaks people's brains
Here's the deal I actually structured:
Autonomous provided the desk. (My prize cost: $0.)
Autonomous paid to sponsor the newsletter. (They paid me… thousands of dollars)
The giveaway drove hundreds of new subscribers.
Read that again.
The brand supplied the prize. The brand paid me. And I walked away with subscribers.
The math
Let's compare it to the playbook everyone else runs.
Meta ads: roughly $2–5 to acquire a single newsletter subscriber. Want 500? That's $1,000–2,500 out of your pocket. When the budget runs dry, so does the growth.
The giveaway:
Prize cost: $0
Ad spend: $0
Sponsorship revenue: positive
New subscribers: 600
My cost-per-subscriber wasn't $2. It was negative. I got paid to grow.
"But giveaway subscribers are junk"
This is the part that most people get wrong.
Run a generic iPad or cash giveaway and yeah — you'll attract sweepstakes hunters who bail the second the winner's drawn. Vanity numbers that tank your open and click rate.
But the prize was a standing desk. In a newsletter about standing desks.
The only person who enters to win an Autonomous desk is someone who actually wants a better workspace. Which is exactly who I want reading.
The prize did the filtering for me.
These stats were from 6 weeks after the giveaway ran.
Why this worked
I'm not going to pretend this is a free lunch you can copy by tomorrow.
A few things had to be true first:
The prize had to genuinely fit. A desk on a desk-setup newsletter is a layup. A desk on a finance newsletter is junk subs and a confused audience.
I had to be worth sponsoring. Autonomous didn't pay me out of charity. They paid because the newsletter reaches their exact customer. That took 6+ years to build and 20,000+ subscribers.
I had to deliver for the brand, not just cash the check. The giveaway put their product in front of the right people. This only works because it works for both sides.
Same story as always: the tactic took one conversation. The leverage to pull it off took years.
The playbook
If you want to flip paid acquisition into a lever that pays you:
Find the prize your audience already wants. Not a generic gift card — the thing so on-brand that only your ideal subscriber has to eneter.
Find the brand that makes it. Ideally one that also wants to reach your readers.
Structure one deal, two ways: they provide the prize and sponsor the newsletter.
Deliver for them. This only repeats if the brand wins too.
Do this successfully and "paid acquisition" stops being a line item and starts being a revenue line.
I refused to pay Meta to rent subscribers.
Autonomous paid me to keep mine.
I'll take that trade every time.