$23k/month with excel fomulas, crazy! | Starter Story

Excel FormulaBot, a website that does nothing but generate Excel formulas using AI, makes $23,000 a month. The founder built it with a no-code tool called Bubble, posted it on Reddit, and got his first sale five minutes after launch. Today it is run by a solo founder with zero employees.

The central question this episode of Starter Story examines is how such a simple tool can generate that kind of revenue, and the answer hinges on a specific insight about market size and user pain. The core argument is that a narrow, almost trivial product can become a strong business if it solves a widespread, recurring frustration for a massive user base — in this case, the billion-plus people who use Microsoft Excel and often struggle with writing formulas.

The host opens with the headline number — $23,000 a month — and immediately establishes the product's minimalism. Excel FormulaBot lets a user type a natural-language question like "how do I get the average of column A" and returns the exact Excel formula, powered by an LLM. A few formulas are free, and then it costs $15 a month. The business model is straightforward: capture a tiny fraction of Excel's billion users who are willing to pay for a convenience tool.