I Turned My Spreadsheet Knowledge Into A $200K Business
This is a follow up story for Better Sheets. If you're interested in reading how they got started, published over 4 years ago, check it out here.
Hello again! Remind us who you are and what business you started.
I’m Andrew, I run BetterSheets which now is a comprehensive platform for not only getting better at Google Sheets but overall making your Google Sheets experience better.
I started it as a side project in April 2020. And now 3 years later it’s surpassed $200,000 in revenue.
Tell us about what you’ve been up to. Has the business been growing?
While the first two years were about building a library of content and marketing Better Sheets via AppSumo’s marketplace, I’ve found a bigger and deeper place for Better Sheets in the past year.
Better Sheet's total revenue in the first two years was just under $100k. And now in the last 12 months, the third year, it’s added another $98k. Thus breaking through the $200k milestone for total revenue.
I go through some details here in this Twitter thread on April 4th.
TL;DR
⏳ Better Sheets is full-time/focus/energy
🛠️ Creating Tools, not just tutorials
👨💻 Building a better platform for Google Sheet education
📢 Amplified external content
Since going full fulltime on it at the end of Spring 2022, I have expanded the Better Sheets universe. Launched a brand new site in April 2022 was the best thing for my members. It’s allowed members a central place to keep track of their progress through the videos/courses and has become a massive platform for learning sheet formulas.
Try not to optimize too early. And try not to stick contractors on a problem that I mon’t even understand.
I created a section of the site to highlight videos by the formulas featured in them. So you can search for and find any Google Sheet formula. Then you’ll find the syntax, blog links, and youtube links, and Members get access to the tutorials featuring those formulas. Even Google’s documentation on Google Sheet formulas is harder to use than this.
Also, I created 4 free Google Sheet add-ons. Added courses to another platform: Udemy. And expanded my content on YouTube.
Even though the revenue has been going up and up, I’ve put out more free resources in the past year than ever before.
Go to Free.Bettersheets for the list of free templates, and free Google Sheets tools available.
What have been your biggest challenges in the last year?
I had a revelation that SEO should be important to the longevity and sustainability of Better Sheets. Without proper SEO and a consistent flow of people finding Better Sheets during their Google Sheets education journey, it would be a complete failure within 2-3 years. That might sound dire but it’s reality.
A business that can’t continue to operate without the founder, is no business at all. It’s a job. And I’d like to take a vacation at some point (in my life). Instead of relying on PR, launches, and singular events, I had to figure out more consistent channels.
What have been your biggest lessons learned in the last year?
My biggest mistake was doing Ads first. I tried for so long to run FB ads consistently profitable and couldn’t. I wish, looking back, that I had invested in myself. Nearly every investment I put into my education has reaped 10x or more rewards.
I’m glad I’ve also learned the lesson that VAs and contractors are great tools to scale, not necessarily to figure out if a traffic channel works. I invested in a writer to try to see if SEO would work. We got very far but didn’t see results within 3 months. Let them go, and then focused on SEO myself, and 3 months after that have seen massive rewards.
The strategy I’ve developed is to just keep on a consistent content publishing schedule and have lots of very specific pages for Google Sheets Formulas.
And to make sure that page titles, and descriptions are good. There is much more I can do, but doing that has gained me a great foothold. My next steps are to get backlinks and do better internal linking. But just the formulas and the tutorials alone mean I have 800 pages.
Tutorial transcripts make for easy text on the screen and good SEO. And linking to every formula featured in a video tutorial makes for easy internal linking. I’m also adding more tags and categories so members have an easier time finding the videos they want when they want them.
Anything I do for SEO is also better for members. It was members who asked for transcripts. I had them but never thought of publishing them for users. Now I have.
I’m rewriting my descriptions to be more descriptive, on over 300 tutorials. Linking to them appropriately via blog posts. Getting backlinks for those posts, and making more, better tools that people want to link to and use.
The biggest lessons I have learned this year might be to get something working myself, and then scale. Try not to optimize too early. And try not to stick contractors on a problem that I mon’t even understand.
You can scale almost anything. Either through hiring, outsourcing, automation apps such as Zapier, or programming code.
What’s in the plans for the upcoming year, and the next 5 years?
There are two initiatives I’ll be working on. Beyond marketing, these are internal projects. One is building more tools. And the other is building more educational resources.
Even though I’ve been teaching Google Sheets, and Apps Script for now 3 years, I’ve looking forward to figuring out unique ways to teach this material. Just this past month I’ve created a workbook of sorts that aids in learning the For Loop.
A powerful piece of code that can be used in an infinite number of ways. But it’s quite psychologically challenging to learn. Most people don’t learn it. And it’s a sticking point. It’s literally where I’ve seen many people stuck, and then quit. So I’d love to help those who want to learn more, get through it easier. I made a way to get in “reps” to learn the for loop, without having to type from memory.
I’m a bit embarrassed to say, I got the idea from a kid’s math workbook. Because I was looking at math workbooks for my 2-year-old son to learn math in the next couple of years.
Kids have these workbooks they can do the same thing again and again. Spending time inside math, without the challenging part of figuring it out from memory. I hadn’t seen something like this created for coding, so I made it in Google Sheets.
I’m excited to dive more into learning how to teach. And figuring out more teaching sheet materials in the near future. I think there’s a huge dearth of materials to learn sheets. The dominant mode to learn seems to be via video lectures. But there are so many different learning/teaching styles out there.
What’s the best thing you read in the last year?
In the past month, I sat down and read The Creative Act: A Way of Being by Rick Rubin. While it’s not a business book, it helped me relax about my business. It helped me strategically reconfigure my mindset around creating, instead of “pushing content”. And it helped me figure out if the path I am on is a career choice. It helped me realize that I might be giving up my soul if I pursue some common low-hanging fruit strategies.
And if I were to embark on my creative journey, the business rewards are going to be completely misaligned with the creative process. What I do today might not be taken well today, but maybe tomorrow. There’s a time and a place for everything.
Context means much more than I can imagine. For example, I did an “April Fool’s Joke” this year that I felt really fell flat. In retrospect, I figured out that I did too much ornamentation and needed to focus on what the thing is, and what it might mean to a hardcore few, instead of trying to make it something for everyone.
I released VisiCalc inside of Google Sheets and should have kept to the retro theme. I should have doubled down on my enthusiasm for creating 40-year-old technology with modern software. Instead I “wrapped” it in an April Fool’s Joke. That framing meant it couldn’t “catch on”
Another non-business book that made me think about my overall strategy was “The Bomber Mafia” by Malcolm Gladwell. While the story described two styles of “bombing” and warfare, it helped me understand how people might react to certain business strategies.
One more non-business book that’s helped my business. "The Tools" by Phil Stutz.
It’s like business therapy. The book’s given me a ton of energy and a way forward to help me day to day managing my business psychology.
Another way you can say it is that it’s helped my mindset. One of the tools “Active Love” has helped me respond to or ignore bad comments online. The tool “Jeopardy” helped me start and release a few projects I didn’t think I would have otherwise.
Advice for other entrepreneurs who might be struggling to grow their businesses?
Something I have to keep reminding myself when adding new revenue channels, new initiatives, and new ad campaigns… and I think everyone should have top of their mind: Keep it simple.
Start lean and small. All that sage advice before.
Here’s why: If you want to create a new traffic channel, or a new revenue stream, keeping it small, simple, and lean means you can test faster, test quicker, and see initial results too. Instead of trying to do programmatic SEO from the start, you can easily start writing 1 keyword-optimized blog article every week.
And if that works, write 3 a week. If that works, then write 7 a week. And if that works you can hire 1 person to keep going, while you move on to other things. Such as programmatic SEO. See if SEO works first, then do it programmatically.
The best part of that process is that you get to feel it working before scaling. And in this modern world, you can scale almost anything. Either through hiring, outsourcing, automation apps such as Zapier, or programming code. There are so many options.
Where can we go to learn more?
If you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
Download the report and join our email newsletter packed with business ideas and money-making opportunities, backed by real-life case studies.
