Formula Bot · B2C · AI spreadsheet assistant
Repost your tool to r/InternetIsBeautiful after a commenter suggests it
~10,000 upvotes and thousands of users; viral for months, but $5K API bill in days
Mixedcommunitypr-launch
What they did
A couple of days after the r/excel post, a commenter suggested posting on r/InternetIsBeautiful, so he posted it there too. The app was free with no paywall, so every visitor cost OpenAI API money.
What happened
~10,000 upvotes, thousands of comments, thousands of visitors; kept the app viral for months. Being free, it ran up ~$5,000 in OpenAI API costs within days.
- Stage
- launch
- Effort
- One post
“A couple of days after that, someone in the comments section said, "You should post this on the internetisbeautiful subreddit." And so I posted it there. That was like the thing that put the app over the edge and made it go viral for months.”
“It got some 10,000 upvotes, thousands of comments. And I got thousands and thousands of people visiting the site, using the app.”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Formula Bot: Post your free tool in the niche subreddit with just a title and linkTop post of the day, then of the week, in r/excel
- Formula Bot: Add a Stripe donation link to a free tool that went viralRecouped a few thousand dollars of a ~$5,000 API bill
- Formula Bot: Earn from free traffic with Google ads and a one-week sponsorSponsor ad drove lots of clicks; Google ads made a few bucks, not worth it
- Formula Bot: Charge for unlimited use and raise the price from $2.99 to $9~5,000 paying users and ~$26K MRR; ~5% churn
- Formula Bot: Do users' spreadsheet work for free on a call, in exchange for feedbackFounder says it turned a formula tool into a full data analysis product
- Formula Bot: Put the AI inside Excel and Sheets, with each user's language presetKept users against free ChatGPT early on; only ~10% of churn blamed on ChatGPT