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I created a web application called excel-exercises.com. Now he brings in 'd like to introduce you to Jake. He created a very simple site that does literally one thing. He started it as a side project, working evenings and weekends, but today this simple site brings in over $30,000 a month. And the craziest part for me, honestly, is how simple this site is One day I woke up and saw a notification that someone had paid me $50. I looked at the website and thought, "This is some kind of mistake." So I invited Jake to the channel to lay everything out for us. In this episode, we'll break down this incredibly simple site that's now making over $30,000 a month, how it
grew to where it is today, and what advice he has for those looking for their own simple site idea like his. Trust me, you won't want to miss this. Let's begin. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. So Jake, welcome to Starter Story, dude. I'm very glad to see you on the channel. Can you tell us who you are, what you've created, and what your story is? Yes, my name is Jake. I created a web application called excel-exercises.com. Now he brings in $30,000 to $35,000 a month. I created it five or six years ago, and it was kind of a side project that I worked on in the evenings and on weekends, because I always
had a full-time job, a master's degree, or something like that. But two years ago I quit, focused entirely on this, and since then it has grown about fivefold. Cool, dude. I'm really excited to talk about Excel Exercises. I learned about this from our Starter Story case database, and we got in touch with you after that. But for those who are not familiar with the project, could you explain in a few sentences what Excel Exercises is and who your users are? Yes, it teaches Excel functions and hotkeys through hands-on exercises and simulations, not through videos. So it is used by anyone trying to learn Excel. Often this is due to a career change: for example,
someone graduating from college and looking for their first job, someone changing jobs, or even someone who has taken on a new position has slightly overestimated their skills and now wants to play it safe. So yes, I really see everything here. It's funny because I think maybe it's not that big of a deal anymore, but when I was graduating from college or something, one of the lines on my resume was " good at Excel," basically. Experienced, yes. Excel user. Almost never true. Yes, almost never. Yes, but you know, Excel exercises would have been useful for me then.
Let's talk about some of the numbers behind this business. Could you open your Stripe dashboard or whatever you're using there? Show the revenue so the audience can see that this is the real deal. Yes, this is a freemium business model, where I offer a few free lessons at the beginning, and then impose a strict paid subscription. I see that free lessons are necessary because many people have not used anything like this and do not fully understand what it is. So I need to give them a try so they can see the difference before I ask them to pay. So, over the last 4 weeks, the income was just over $30,000. During this time, I had about 50,000 visitors to the site. Of these, about
2,500 are currently active paid subscribers. And it's all automated, so I can, you know, go on vacation and it works by itself. So it's quite convenient. Dude, I just love how simple Jake's site is. To me, this is real proof that you don't have to have a complicated idea to be successful. If you're interested in other similar simple app ideas like Jake's, we have a database of hundreds of successful app ideas that are almost too simple to believe, linked in the description. Inside, you'll find a ton of data like revenue, profits, growth tactics-everything you need to validate your idea and start developing. So, if you want to get it, it's 100% free. Just
download from the link in the description below. Okay, back to the story. Okay, what I like about this is that it all seems so simple, right? You're essentially just teaching people how to use Excel. This is the perfect name for the site, excel-exercises.com. But how did you come to this? What is your experience? How did you come to create this very simple website that now brings in about $30,000 a month? Yes, I studied finance in college, but after graduating I was really interested in learning about apps, how they are created, and how they get to the App Store from start to finish. So, I never had anything to do with technology. So I just sat in my
parents' basement for a long time, watching YouTube videos, learning to program, and trying to understand how apps are built. And I started creating my own, for example, a mobile application. I started making an iPhone app just for fun. That's another story, but yeah, I would just come home from work, sit down at the computer right away, and figure out how to do things on the internet. Those were the days when we watched videos on YouTube, probably went on Stack Overflow or something. Yes, now, of course, it's all just through ChatGPT and coding.
Okay, so you just experimented a little. How did you find this idea? What is the history of Excel Exercises? Yes, at that time I worked in the financial sector. There was a period in my life when I wore a suit and went to the office every day. And every new employee at this company had to undergo online Excel training. It was a long compilation of videos about Excel, and it was as " fun" and interesting as it sounds. So I kept getting distracted, losing focus, and falling asleep during these videos. I felt like I remembered almost nothing. So I thought: there must be a better way to learn Excel. I don't know which one. Later, I took a Duolingo class, and it dawned on me: Duolingo, but for Excel. And then I decided I had to do it. So, this was my first web project
. At first I built it very slowly, and it was always just on the internet. I didn't have a separate development environment and production environment. Everything was just there, on the internet. I did n't tell anyone about it. I did n't promote it at all . It was very far from ready, but one day I woke up and saw a notification that someone had paid me $50. I looked at the website. I thought it was a mistake because he looks scary. He is truly terrible. It looks like Russian hackers are trying to steal your identity. A few more sales came in over the next few weeks, and that was the confirmation needed. You know, it was like they believed in the idea and the concept so much that they were willing to pay for it, regardless of the execution at the time
I like it. You know, it's like you didn't originally plan on turning this into something that would make as much money as it does now, but you got some validation. Let's talk a little about creation. I know you've already started talking about this a little bit, but tell me about the development timeline. How long did it take to get a working version, and what else can you tell us about the creation process? Well, it took months to get the first working version. I had no idea what I was doing. I just went to YouTube, Stack Overflow, and various forums, copied and pasted snippets of code, and then tweaked them to make everything work.
One of the main challenges early on was creating tables that looked and felt like a real spreadsheet. If people see a spreadsheet that looks like Excel but doesn't work like Excel or Google Sheets, they start to get annoyed and confused. So I had to learn how to make it look and work like a real spreadsheet. By the way, what technology stack or tools did you use to create or are you currently using to run Excel Exercises? I try to simplify everything as much as possible. Most of my code is just HTML, CSS, and plain JavaScript that I copied from Stack Overflow six years ago. And now I'm adding what Claude writes, although I don't even know what exactly he writes. But yeah
, I built this on GCP, so my bill is usually less than $100 a month. Google Analytics is free. SendGrid is an email marketing service, it's my only regular expense, $35 per month. And then there are Stripe fees. It seems to be a certain percentage plus a few cents per transaction. Steeply. A fairly easy and quite profitable project. I think it's just incredible. Okay, let's talk about the development history. So now you have 30k a month, as you mentioned, and you're hardly. Let's talk about the early days, from zero to 10k a month. How did you launch this project? So, how did you start getting results, besides those first few sales? So, from zero to 10k: When I first started, I think I posted on Reddit a few times, but the real growth came
through SEO. And it looked like I was just spewing out a bunch of words onto as many pages as possible for a very long time. So, I had blog posts about various Excel functions, but what really made the site grow was something unexpected: I just wrote a bunch of text on my landing page. I wrote, I think, about 1,500-2,000 words about it, like, "Okay, this is what it is. This is how you will learn Excel. That's why it's better than watching videos." And that's what helped me get indexed and get into search engines. This brought me the most traffic, and it was also the traffic with the highest level of intent. It was quite unexpected, a lot of online marketers were saying, "Hey, this is wrong.
You shouldn't have so much text on the home page." But I kept it because I realized, "This is where all my sales come from." And then, from 10 to 30 thousand, I started using paid advertising. This was the biggest turning point in terms of growth and also in the way I view business, because when all your traffic is free and organic, and your operating costs are very low, then every new subscription is pure profit. So you don't need to worry too much about it. Now that you're getting into the world of paid marketing and paid user acquisition, you need to think about how much it cost to acquire this new customer and how much I'm likely to earn. Also, from 10k to 30k, the growth accelerated as I started getting more deals with universities and
corporations. I think people would call it product- driven growth, when someone tries my training, they really like it, they go to work and say to their boss, "Hey, we should get the whole team involved in this." And then the boss turns to me and says, "Hey, can I sign about 50 people?" Yes, that's very smart. I can definitely imagine that. I can already think of other jobs I've had where this kind of training was necessary, and yes, that's exactly what I would do or suggest to my boss. Many people who watch Starter Story are looking for simple ideas, something like Excel exercises. Not that it's easy, but just a simple concept, right? For those watching this looking for ideas, simple ideas, what advice or steps would you advise them to take?
I think the first thing to do is find a problem that you have a deep understanding of in order to create a great product. Otherwise, you won't understand the mindset, goals, and how people think about it. For example, I see a lot of people on Twitter saying, "Okay, this guy made a ton of money with a beauty app. So now I'm going to make a beauty app." I don't know if that's what you do, of course, but if you don't understand it, you can't create a cool product. I think step two is just to let people try it as soon as possible. For me, it looked like this: I just put it up online and waited for some random strangers to come along and pay for it, even before I thought it was ready. Today I see many people who develop something for months or even years. They
try to make it perfect. If you're not ashamed of the first version, then you've waited too long. This last piece of advice, in my opinion, may be a bit underrated. You know, I've heard a lot about this from people, many giving very similar advice. Getting it into people's hands is probably the hardest part, especially for developers who like to sit at a computer and, you know, write code or something like that. But communicating with people is probably the most productive thing you can do. I want to see more of how the Excel exercises work, can you show us? Yes, I have this dashboard where all my lessons are displayed. We have several leaderboards. Here's a person who logged in almost every day for a year, pretty crazy. We have realistic projects
where you upload a data file and can follow the instructions to create a cool dashboard. But most of the exercises take place right in the browser, for example, if I use sum if. It walks you through the sum if function, showing you the different inputs you can use. This exercise introduces the range of summation. It says, "Okay, use sum if to calculate the total number of orders where there are more than three units." So, either let's make a mistake. So if I write, for example, " more than three" without quotes, this thing tells me, "Oh, I need to put the criterion in quotes." Well, that's what I do. Then you get points, you move on in the lessons, and that's a lot of repetition, that's how you master Excel in practice. This is a significant
part of the process. Dude, Jake, this is just incredible. I like how simple and easy it is to understand. One of the final questions we ask each Starter Story guest is: "If you could turn to yourself four or five years ago when you were launching this project," or "what advice would you give to anyone just starting out?" I think, especially for those starting out with paid advertising, it's very important to know the detailed unit economics of what you're selling. Stripe gives one LTV metric for all subscriptions over all time, for all products, at all prices, with discounts, bundles, or upsells, simply reducing it to one LTV number. Although in reality, different segments have different lifetime values and different
acquisition costs. So for a long time, I looked at the average LTV and the average cost of acquiring a customer and saw that the ratio was about three to one-exactly what was needed. So I thought, " Okay, this is great." But I wasn't growing as fast as I thought I should have. I dumped all the payments into a spreadsheet, divided them into monthly and annual, and found that my annual customers were really profitable. Monthly clients barely turned a profit, and the payback period was about four to five months. Therefore, I decided to double the price of the monthly subscription, but leave the annual one unchanged. That's when the growth really took off, but it wouldn't have
happened if I hadn't conducted deeper analysis and segmentation. Well, Jake, that's great advice. Thank you for visiting Starter Story. Amazing story, congratulations on your success, dude. Thank you. Well, we just finished talking to Jake. I mean, it couldn't be easier. One of the reasons I wanted to invite him to the channel is because it's just such an easy site to practice Excel on. You come across a paywall-and that's it. You know, of course, a lot has changed in the web application space in the last four or five
years since he created it. But I think the main lesson is what he said in the episode: find a problem you might be facing, try to solve it with a very simple solution, and that could be an opportunity for you. With that in mind, you can find our database of very simple app ideas, just like Jake's, at the link in the description. Follow the link in the description and download it absolutely free. Well, guys. I hope you enjoyed it. Leave comments if you have any questions. Thanks again for watching. See you in the next video. See you later.
