I Make $30K/Month From the Most Boring Website on the Internet
Starter Story's Gus talks with Jake Shimota, who built Excel Exercises, a simple site teaching Excel through hands-on practice that makes $30,000 to $35,000 a month, about how he built, grew and priced it.
The gist
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Jake got the idea from dull video-based Excel training at a finance job, and a stranger paid $50 before he'd promoted the ugly site.
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It uses a few free lessons then a hard paywall, bringing about $30,000 from 50,000 visitors in four weeks, with roughly 2,500 paying subscribers.
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SEO, mainly 1,500 to 2,000 words on his landing page, drove early growth; paid ads and corporate deals took him from $10K to $30K monthly.
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Jake advises solving a problem you know intimately and shipping early: if the first version doesn't embarrass you, you waited too long.
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Jake says Stripe's single LTV hid that monthly subscribers barely turned a profit, so he doubled the monthly price and kept annual the same.
Jake Shimota recommends it
"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... So I exported all my payments into a spreadsheet, separated them out by monthly and annual, and I found that my annual custom..."
▶ Play at 11:19What they recommend · 1 pick
Unit economics segmentation
Finance & investing
"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... So I exported all my paym..."
Made by someone on this episode
Excel Exercises
· Jake Shimota's
— A web app that teaches Microsoft Excel functions and keyboard short...
Also mentioned
4:10
Codex
· "That was kind of the old days of watching YouTube videos, probably going on like Stack Overflow or..."
4:52
Duolingo
· "Later on, I was doing a Duolingo lesson, and then I was like, Duolingo but for Excel. And then I was like,..."
6:08
Google Sheets
· "If people see a table that looks kind of like Excel but doesn't behave like Excel or like Google Sheets or..."
6:22
Stack Overflow
· "Most of my code is just like HTML and CSS and plain vanilla JavaScript that I copied off of Stack Overflow..."
6:38
Google Analytics
· "Google Analytics is free."
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