New Relic traded a free Data Nerd shirt for product installs

New Relic promoted a free Data Nerd shirt on its homepage, available only to people who created an account and deployed its agent. An automatic email after sign-up pushed users to install, and offer page visitors who did not convert saw retargeting ads. Printfection, a swag vendor, says qualified leads, meaning agent installs, rose 30% as a result.

By Race to Scale Desk, edited by Lila Odinaev. Published 24 Oct 2026. How we work

What they ran

New Relic, founded in 2008, sells application performance management tools. According to Printfection's case study on New Relic, the homepage offered a free Data Nerd shirt to anyone who created an account and deployed the New Relic agent. New sign-ups got an automatic email pushing them to install the product. Offer page visitors who did not convert saw display ads for the shirt. Separately, a founder interview on scaling faster describes aiming to impress users within 60 to 180 seconds of signup.

What happened

Printfection says qualified leads, defined as people who installed the agent, rose 30% as a result of the shirt campaign. No other outcome figure for the campaign appears in the sources.

What the account does not show

The 30% figure comes from Printfection, a swag vendor, in its own case study. The sources give no baseline, no timeframe, no user counts and no New Relic confirmation of the figure. They also do not say when the shirt offer ran. The founder interview mentions a big Rails hosting partner that brought the product to 400 customers on day one. New Relic's About page now describes a broader observability platform used by companies from the Fortune 100 to startups.

Questions

How did New Relic use free t-shirts to drive product installs?

It offered a free Data Nerd shirt only to people who created an account and deployed the New Relic agent. A follow-up email after sign-up pushed users to install the product.

Did the New Relic shirt campaign increase leads?

Printfection says qualified leads, meaning agent installs, rose 30% as a result of the campaign. That figure comes from the swag vendor, not from New Relic.

Was swag the main driver of New Relic's early growth?

The founder interview mentions a big Rails hosting partner that brought the product to 400 customers on day one. It also describes a self-serve first minute meant to impress users within 60 to 180 seconds of signup.