$23k/month with Excel formulas, crazy! | Starter Story

The moment Excel FormulaBot launched, the founder posted the idea on Reddit and got his first sale within five minutes. Today, that same solo-operated website—built with no code at all—generates $23,000 a month. The product is almost absurdly simple: you type in a plain English question like "how do I get the average of column A?" and it returns the exact Excel formula using an LLM. A few formulas are free, then it costs $15 a month.

The math behind a tiny slice of a billion-person market

What makes this business work isn't technical sophistication—it's market sizing. The host pulls up the number: over a billion people use Microsoft Excel. A large fraction of them find writing formulas tedious or confusing. Excel FormulaBot doesn't need to convert a meaningful percentage of those users. It just needs a tiny slice. At $15 per month, even a few thousand paying subscribers produce the revenue the business currently sees.

The founder built the entire thing using Bubble, a no-code platform. He wrote zero lines of code. The business today has a solo founder and zero employees. The host describes this as "the ultimate sign of product market fit"—getting a paying customer within minutes of launch, before any marketing budget or growth strategy existed.

The psychology of willingness to pay