Speaker 1I built a web app called xlexercises.com. It's currently making $30,000 to $35,000 a month. I want you to meet Jake.
Speaker 2He built this really simple website that literally does just one thing. He started it as a side project, working on it on nights and weekends. But today, that simple website makes over $30,000 a month. And the craziest part to me, honestly, is just how simple this website is.
Speaker 1I woke up one day and had a notification that someone had paid me $50. I looked at the site. I was like, this has to be a mistake.
Speaker 2So I invited Jake onto the channel to break everything down for us. And in this episode, we're going to dive into this dead simple website that today makes over $30,000 a month, how he grew it to where it's at today, and his advice for anyone looking for their own simple website idea just like his. Trust me, this is one you're not going to want to miss. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. All right, Jake, welcome to Starter Story, man. Super excited to have you on the channel. Could you share with us who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1Yeah. My name is Jake. I built it five or six years ago, and it was sort of a side project that I would work on nights and weekends because I always had a full-time job or was in grad school or something like that. But I quit my job two years ago, went full-time on it, and I've grown it about 5x since then.
Speaker 2Cool, man. I'm super excited to talk about xlexercises. I learned about this through our Starter Story case study database, and we got connected after that. But for people who are not familiar with it, could you just. Could you just explain what Excel Exercises is in a few sentences and who some of your
Speaker 1users are? Yeah. It teaches Excel functions and keyboard shortcuts through hands-on exercises and simulations rather than through videos. So really used by anyone who's trying to learn Excel. A lot of times that's precipitated by some sort of career change, like someone graduating college and looking for their first job, or someone changing jobs, or even someone who got a new job and may have exaggerated their abilities a little bit and wanting to cover their bases now. So yeah, I really see. I really see it all. That's funny because I feel like
Speaker 2maybe not as much anymore, but when I was coming out of college or whatever, one of the lines in my resume was good at Excel, basically. Proficient. Yeah. Proficient. Yeah. Proficient at Excel. Always not true. Yeah. Almost never. Yeah. So, you know, xlexercises would have been good for me back then. Let's talk about just some of the numbers around the business. Could you pull up your Stripe dashboard or whatever you use, show off the revenue so the audience can see that this thing's legit?
Speaker 1Yeah. So it's a freemium business model where I offer a few free lessons upfront and then have a hard paywall after that. So I find that the free lessons are necessary because a lot of people haven't used something like this and don't really understand what it is. So I need to give them a sample so they can see how it's different before I ask them to pay. So past four weeks, I've done about a little over $30,000 in revenue. I've had about 50,000 visitors on the website during that time. Of those, about 2,500 are active paying subscribers right now. And it's all automated. So I can, you know, go on vacation and it kind of runs itself. So it's been pretty nice.
Speaker 2Man, I just love how simple Jake's website is. To me, it's honestly proof that you do not need a complicated idea in order to be successful. If you are interested in other similar, simple app ideas, just like Jake's, at the link in the description, we have a database to hundreds of successful app ideas that are almost too simple to believe. Inside, you're going to find a ton of data on stuff like revenue, profits, growth tactics, all the stuff that you need to validate your idea and start building. So if you want this, it's 100% for free. Just download it at the link in the description below. All right, let's get back to the story. Okay. I think what I love about this is it feels so simple, right? You're just essentially teaching people how to use Excel. It's a perfectly named website, excelexercises.com. But how did you get here? What's your background? How do you get to the point where you build this really simple website that now does around $30,000 a month? Yeah.
Speaker 1So I studied finance in college, but after graduating, I was just really curious about apps and how they were made and how they got onto the app store from start to finish. So I had never had any exposure to anything tech related. So I just sat in my parents' basement for a long time and watched YouTube videos. And I was like, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do this. And I taught myself to code and kind of figured out how apps were made. And I started making my own mobile app, started making an iPhone app just for fun. That's a different story. But yeah, I would just come home from work and go straight to my computer and figure out how to make things online. That was kind of the old days
Speaker 2of watching YouTube videos, probably going on like Stack Overflow or something like that. Yeah, no, obviously it's all just slot and codecs. Okay. So you're kind of tinkering around. How do you find this idea? What's the genesis of Excel exercises? Yeah.
Speaker 1So I was working in finance at the time. There was a point in my life where I'd put on a suit and go into the office every day. And every new employee at this firm had to take this online Excel training. That was this really long collection of videos about Excel. And that was about as fun and interesting as it sounds. So I would kind of zone out and lose focus and fall asleep during these videos. I felt like I wasn't retaining a lot of it. So I was like, there should be a better way to learn Excel. I don't know what that is. Later on, I was doing like a Duolingo lesson. And then I was like, Duolingo, but for Excel. And then I was like, I should make this. So this was my first web project. I started building it out really slowly at first. And it was always just like on the internet. I didn't have a separate development and production environment. It was all just out there. I hadn't told anybody about it. I hadn't promoted it at all. It was really far from being ready. But I woke up one day and had a notification that someone had paid me $50. And I looked at the site. I was like, this has to be a mistake because it looks scary. It's really ugly. It looks like Russian hackers are going to steal your identity. Over the next couple of weeks, a few more sales trickled in like that. And that was the validation that I needed. You know, it was like they believed in the idea and the concept so much that they were willing to pay for it despite the execution at the time.
Speaker 2I love that. You know, you kind of didn't exactly have like that intention of initially turning it into something that was going to make as much money as it makes now. But you kind of got that validation. Let's talk a little bit about the build. I know you started talking about that a little bit, but walk me through the build timeline. How long did it take you to kind of get a good working version and anything else about how you built this?
Speaker 1Yeah, well, the first working version took months. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just going on and stack overflow and these different forums and like copying and pasting code snippets and tweaking it so that it worked. One of the big challenges up front was building tables that look and feel like a real spreadsheet. So people see a table that looks kind of like Excel, but doesn't behave like Excel or like Google Sheets or whatever. Then they get sort of frustrated and confused. So I had to learn how to make it look and act like a real spreadsheet.
Speaker 2Yeah. On that topic, what's the tech stack or tools that you use to build this or that you currently use to run Excel exercises?
Speaker 1So I keep it really simple. Most of my code is just like HTML and CSS and plain vanilla JavaScript that I copied off of stack overflow six years ago. And now whatever Claude writes in, I don't know what Claude's writing, but yeah, so I built it on GCP. So my bill is less than a hundred bucks a month. Usually Google analytics is free. Send grid, it's email marketing software. That's my only like regular recurring expense. That's 35 bucks a month. And then Stripe fees. I think that's like some percentage and some number of cents per month. Cool. Pretty light, pretty profitable. I think that's pretty awesome.
Speaker 2Okay. Let's talk about just the growth story, you know, so now you're at 30 K per month, you mentioned, and you kind of don't really work on it all that much or actively. I'm assuming that was a little bit different in the early days. Let's talk a little bit about the early days that zero, maybe to 10 K per month. How'd you get this off the ground? Yeah. How did you start getting traction beyond those initial, you know, sales that trickled in?
Speaker 1So from zero to 10 K, when I was getting this started, I think I posted on Reddit a couple times, but real growth came from SEO. And what this looked like was just me vomiting a bunch of words onto as many pages as I could for a really, really long time. So, I had these blog articles about different Excel functions, but what really grew the site was sort of counterintuitive, but I basically wrote a whole bunch of text on my landing page. I wrote, I think like 1500 to 2000 words about like, okay, here's what this is. Here's how you're going to learn Excel. Here's why it's better than watching videos. And so that is what got me indexed and got me picked up by the search engines. And so that got me the most traffic. And it was also the highest intent traffic. So kind of counterintuitive, a lot of like the online marketing gurus were saying like, Hey, this is wrong. You shouldn't have this much text on your homepage, but I kept it. Cause I was like, this is where all my sales are coming from. And then from 10 K to 30 K, I started paid advertising. So that was the biggest turning point in terms of growth, but also in terms of how I think about the business, because when all your traffic is free and organic and you have really low operating costs, then every new subscription is like, you know, pure profit margin. So you don't really have to think about it that hard. Now, when you get into a world with paid marketing and paid user acquisition, you kind of have to think about how much did it cost me to acquire this? And I think that's kind of the biggest turning point in my life. How much did it cost me to acquire this new customer? How much am I probably going to make also from 10 to 30, something that accelerated growth is that I started getting more university and corporate deals. I think people would call it like a product led growth motion where someone tries my training. They like it a lot. They go to work and they tell their boss like, Hey, we should get everyone on the team to do this. And then the boss reaches out to me and says, Hey, can I sign up like 50 people?
Speaker 2Yeah, that's really smart. I could definitely see that. I already think of like other jobs I've had where, you know, some kind of training like this was necessary. And yeah, this would have totally been something that I would have done or would have proposed. A lot of people who watch starter story are looking for simple ideas, kind of like Excel exercises, not that it's easy, but just sort of like a simple concept, right? For someone who's watching this, looking for, you know, ideas, simple ideas, what are some pieces of advice or steps you would encourage them to take?
Speaker 1So I think the first thing you should do is look for a problem that you have intimate knowledge about in order to create a great product. Otherwise you're not going to understand the mindset, the goals, and the way people think about this. Like I see a lot of people on Twitter who go, Oh, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Okay. This guy made a lot of money with a looks maxing app. So now I'm going to make a looks maxing app. I don't know if that's something that you do then sure. But if that's not something that you know about, you're not going to be able to create a great product. I think step two is to just get it into people's hands as soon as possible. For me, that looked like just having it on the internet and waiting for some strangers to stumble in and pay for it way before I thought it was ready. I see a lot of people today who have just been building for like months on end or years on end. They're trying to make it perfect. If you're not embarrassed by the first iteration, then you've waited too long.
Speaker 2This advice I think could kind of be overlooked. You know, I've heard that a lot from a lot of people have kind of given very similar advice. Getting it into people's hands feels like probably the hardest part especially for you know builders who like to sit behind the computer and you know ship code or whatever but getting it talking to people is probably like the most high impact thing you can do i want to see more of how excel exercises work so could you just show us
Speaker 1yeah so i have this dashboard where all my lessons show up we have a couple leaderboards this person who's logged in and logged in almost every day for a year pretty crazy we have we have some realistic projects that where you actually download a data file and you can follow along to create like a cool dashboard but most of the exercises are just in the browser so if i do like a sum if so it walks through like the sum if function different inputs that you might use this one is introducing the sum range so it says okay i use sum if to calculate the total amount of orders with more than three units so or let's make a mistake so if i say like greater than three without the quotes this guy kind of tells me oh you need to put quotes around the criteria so do that so then you get points you can advance through the lessons and then it's a lot of repetition and that's and that's how you learn excel by getting hands-on that's a big part of it
Speaker 2magic that's so so cool i love how simple it is and just like easy to understand one of the final questions we ask to every guest that comes in star story is you know if you were standing on your shoulders you know four or five years ago when you launched this or for like all the people watching who are just getting started what
Speaker 1advice would you give to yourself i think especially for someone getting started with paid ads i think knowing the granular unit economics of what you're selling is really important stripe gives you one ltv metric for all of your subscriptions for all time for all your products across all prices with discounts or bundles or upsells and they just kind of condense that into one ltv number when in reality your different segments have different lifetime values they have different acquisition costs and so for a long time i was looking at my average ltv and my average customer acquisition costs and i saw that the ratio was about three to one where you want it to be and so i was like okay that's great but i wasn't growing as fast as i thought i should be so i exported all my payments into a that my my annual customers were really profitable my monthly customers were were barely turning a profit and the payback period was like four or five months what i ended up doing was doubling my monthly price and keeping my annual price the same and that's when growth really took off but that wouldn't have happened if i had done that deeper digging and segmentation well jake that's
Speaker 2great advice thanks so much for coming on starter story amazing story and congrats on your success man thanks all right just wrapped up with jake i mean it doesn't get any simpler than that one of the reasons i wanted to have him on the channel is because i think he's a great guy and i think it's just like it's just this simple website where you practice excel you hit a paywall and that's it you know obviously a lot has changed in like the web app space over the last four or five years since he built this but it's i think the big lesson is like he said in the episode identify a problem maybe you experience try and solve it with a really simple solution and that will be like maybe an opportunity for you with that in mind at the link in the description you can find our database of really simple app ideas just like jake's click the link in the description and download that one 100 for free all right guys i hope you enjoyed that one leave a comment if you have any thanks again for watching we'll see you in the next one peace
PodcastTranscript AI