His AI Side Project Went Viral and Earns $20K/Month

David Bressler is the founder of Formula Bot, a tool that uses AI to translate text instructions into Excel and Google Sheets formulas 🤖

While the website is free to use, you’re limited to 5 formula requests per month. Power users can get unlimited formula requests for $6.99/month.

According to a recent interview, David launched September 2022 and…

🚀 Pulled in $10.7K revenue the first month 

🤑 Was up to $20,000 a month by May

David came up with the idea while on paternity leave in May 2022.

He started experimenting with AI and asked it a basic Excel formula question. The formula populated correctly within seconds 😍

So he kept going…

As the questions got tougher, in general, I found that ‘out of the box’ accuracy was ~85%.

In most cases, 85% is “good enough,” but not when it comes to data/analytics. This was my opportunity.

Given my background in analytics and Excel specifically, I knew I’d be able to work on the model’s output to build a highly accurate AI model.

Later that day, I Googled to see if there was an AI-based Excel formula generator and fortunately, didn’t find anything! At that moment, I knew I had something special!

He continues…

With the AI industry growing rapidly, I knew I had to build quickly. There was no validation process to see if there would be a product market fit.

I’ve been working in marketing analytics for 12+ years and use Excel daily.

Everyone from data analysts to data scientists to CFOs and CEOs uses Excel.

There are 1 billion people that use Excel, so I knew there would be a big enough market for it.

At worst, I’d build a product for myself and work way faster and smarter than anyone else in spreadsheets!

David built a basic MVP without much functionality besides allowing users to enter instructions and get an Excel formula back.

📈 He shared it on Reddit and the post went viral getting 11K upvotes…

I get the chills just thinking about it because it was such an incredible feeling knowing that all of that hard work wasn’t for nothing.

However, that viral launch resulted in a $4,000+ AI bill as the product was free to use early on 😱

So David quickly built out a full subscription-based website to cover costs.

He built the entire site himself using the no-code platform Bubble.io. This allowed him to avoid outsourcing costs.

Now, about a year into his journey, Formula Bot could well be making $30K in monthly recurring revenue 💰

And it started as a guy playing around with AI, looking for ways to boost his own productivity.

Surprisingly, David hasn’t spent much on marketing, relying heavily on influencer mentions and word of mouth growth fueled by the product’s virality since the early days.

💬 He tweeted last October…

There’s a lot of social influencers that share products freely that are considered “productivity hacks,” especially [those] that have a free component (freemium/free trial).

David’s advice for other entrepreneurs…

It’s OK to be a copycat when it comes to web design. Don’t start from scratch. 

Building a SaaS? Visit a handful of successful SaaS websites to get inspiration on how they designed their site. They’ve probably done a lot of UX testing to get it to where it stands today, so you can capitalize on that and take learnings from a few different websites to build something special for yours.