How Excel Exercises grows

Wrote roughly 1,500-2,000 words of text on the landing page covering what the product is, how you'll learn Excel with it, and why it beats watching videos. This got the site indexed and ranking. He kept it despite online marketers saying a homepage shouldn't have that much text, because it was where his sales came from.

Stripe shows one blended LTV across all subscriptions, products, prices, discounts and bundles. Despite a ~3:1 average LTV:CAC, growth lagged, so he exported all payments to a spreadsheet and split them by monthly vs annual. Annual customers were very profitable; monthly customers barely turned a profit with a 4-5 month payback.

Freemium model: a few free lessons up front, then a hard paywall. The free lessons exist because many visitors have never used an interactive exercise product and need a sample to see how it differs before being asked to pay.

After finding monthly subscribers had a 4-5 month payback and thin profit while annual subscribers were very profitable, he doubled the monthly price and left the annual price as it was (actual prices not stated).

Inspired by boring corporate Excel video training and Duolingo ('Duolingo, but for Excel'). Lessons are in-browser exercises in tables built to look and behave like a real spreadsheet, with instant hints on mistakes (e.g. missing quotes in SUMIF criteria), lots of repetition, and some downloadable-data projects. Landing copy pitches it as better than watching videos.

Built the site directly on the public internet with no separate dev/production environment, told no one and did no promotion. The site looked ugly and 'scary', yet a stranger paid $50 and a few more sales trickled in over the next couple of weeks, which he took as validation. He advises getting it into people's hands as soon as possible: 'If you're not embarrassed by the first iteration, then you've waited too long.'

Wrote many pages of text ('vomiting a bunch of words onto as many pages as I could for a really, really long time'), including blog articles about different Excel functions.

After reaching ~$10K/month on free organic traffic, started paid advertising (platforms and spend not stated). This forced a shift to thinking in unit economics: how much it costs to acquire a customer vs. how much they will likely pay.

Individual users try the training, like it, and tell their boss the whole team should use it; the boss then contacts him to sign up a group (e.g. ~50 people). He also got university deals the same way.

Users earn points for completing exercises and advance through lessons; the dashboard shows a couple of leaderboards.

Posted on Reddit a couple of times in the early days; no detail on subreddits or content.