His Google Sheets Tutorials Made Over $200K

Hello! Can you introduce yourself and tell us about your business?

Hi, my name is Andrew. I'm 39 years old, Male from Florida. Now that the a/s/l is out of the way... I do Google Sheets.

I run BetterSheets.co where I make Tools, Templates, and Tutorials for Google Sheets users. Totally bootstrapped and run by me, alone.

Early on I launched as a tutorials library and have been running it since April 2020. Started as a side project, I just kept adding to it. Now after 3 years of running it, I'm full time on Better Sheets.

Been building more tools lately. Got a bit addicted to making Google Sheet Add-ons. Have made 6 so far, and building tools on my site like SheetShot, OnlySheets, and a Formula database with videos. Even though Google has a ton of help documentation for formulas, they don't have videos. So I both have tutorials of my own and link to YouTube videos as well that I found helpful that feature certain google sheet formulas.

How did you start this business? Take us through the process.

Wanted to launch something, anything. Was in a period where making SaaS products were taking a TON of time and I felt the itch to launch a new product. Figured I'd make a 24 hour project.

Made 8 videos on a Friday, put 4 behind a paywall via Gumroad and launched on Saturday. Made it a lifetime price of $30. Modeled that after MakerPad at the time.

This is a screenshot of the first landing page I launched with in April 2020:

Sold the first membership on Monday. A few days AFTER the launch. Was so excited. Then no more sales for two weeks. A month later I'd be featured on AppSumo Marketplace and have hundreds of sales.

How did you get your first initial customers?

I launched to my own socials at the time, Indiehackers, and a newsletter about Influencer Marketing that I ran. It totally did not jive. Nobody cared about Google Sheets. I didn't make a sale for the first two days.

By far the #1 growth has been being a part of AppSumo marketplace. It wasn't until being featured on AppSumo Marketplace in May that I got a TON of sales. Which was a total stroke of luck. 80+% of my revenue comes from AppSumo.

Quite literally I bought one product off of Appsumo years before and was on their customer email list. They sent out a call for products from Sumolings. I had just launched Better Sheets and submitted it to their Google Form. Thought nothing else of it until I got an email that said was In the final 10. 700+ people had submitted.

Before I could even really understand anything, they also sent me an email about me winning.

The funny thing was that it had someone else's product in a reply in the body of the email. I thought it was a mistake. Told them so, and they were like "no no no.. we want the Google Sheets!" Quite a surprise.

So they featured me on Appsumo, in what at the the time was called "Sumo-ling Spotlight" a product from someone that is a Sumoling.

And since then I've had literally thousands of sales. Over 3,000 lifetime members now. More than 5,000 members total including free members in the past 3+ years.

Since launch, what are your marketing strategies or channels to get new customers?

Here is a list of all the marketing channels I've tried at least once. In no particular order.

1. Content Marketing / Blogging

2. Email Marketing

3. Newsletter Ads

4. PR

5. Podcasts

6. Communities

7. Marketplaces

8. SEO

9. Facebook ads

10. Google Ads

11. Twitter

12. LinkedIn

13. TikTok

14. YouTube

15. Instagram

If someone has a good idea, I’ll try it. Even if it’s not my idea, or even if it's a bad idea. I LOVE bad ideas!

I made the OnlyFans for Google Sheets. Yes it's called OnlySheets.

How does your business make money?

I have a lifetime price that's featured on AppSumo that generates most sales.

I include all tutorials, tools, and templates into the lifetime membership.

In addition I do sell separately the courses via Udemy and tools via Gumroad.

Over the course of the first 3 years the business generated a top line revenue of $200,000 total.

Roughly that's $34k the first year, $68k the 2nd year, and $98k the third year. It's very much not at that same pace now as I've taken a few months to build the business's operations up and try to build some more ambitious tool instead of generating short term revenue. And attempting to streamline the business into memberships.

The revenue is spiky as it’s mainly sold as a lifetime price. I have only added a monthly access price within the past year. Mostly, I sell templates, lifetime memberships to a video library, tools, workshops and consulting.

If revenue does not pick up as I wish, then I'm happy to continue offering consulting, and workshops to bring the revenue back up to what is a healthy sustainable level for a 40 something google sheets wizard.

Take us through a typical day in your life running the business.

It's quite cliche to say that every day is different, so I won't say that. I usually take on one big project per month, or per 30 days. Right now I'm focused on TikTok Videos, producing two per day but am on the end of that "Focus Period" now. I did relaunch OnlySheets a few weeks ago, and am in the middle of building a new course from scratch.

Will probably spend about a total of 30 days outlining the course, running 1 or 2 live workshops and then record the video lessons and publish the course to my members then publicly. During this time I'm also adding to my Ruby on Rails knowledge, and attempting to build some more ambitious tools for Google Sheets users. Those days will probably be like sprints.

Over the last year the Day to day was: I wake up and start work as early as possible and work as much as I can each day in my home office until I can't. This wasn't a system and wasn't that good. But these days I am actually working hard on my own personal health after a health scare. So early mornings are spent in the gym, and the afternoons are spent playing a sport, as often as I can. Every day I read some amount. Everyone I meet usually sees me with a new book every week or two. Depends on the size.

For example this week I'm reading "Mastery" by Robert Greene, and will devote more time to reading so in addition will be diving into a fiction book too: "The Three Body Problem" by Liu Cixin. Comes well recommended from my fellow indie hustlers.

Where can we go to lean more about you and your business?

Here are some links you can go to learn more:

BetterSheets.co 

Andrew’s Twitter Page