Andrew is the founder of BetterSheets a library of tutorials, Templates, and Tools for Google Sheets users
Hey Andrew, Tell us more about what you are working on
I’m Andrew. Yes, it is me, the Google Sheets Wizard behind Better Sheets. Better Sheets is a suite of Tools, Templates, and Tutorials for Google Sheets users.
Better Sheets started as a library of tutorials but now has expanded into Templates and Tools for Google Sheets users. Originally I had been building tools for newsletter writers, and Twitter writers, in Sheets and selling those as sort of products in addition to offering lessons.
In the past year, I’ve greatly augmented Better Sheets, from selling these templates to building tools specifically for Google Sheets users.
I’ve published 6 Google Sheets Add-ons in 2023. And built a suite of tools on BetterSheets.co
- For example, a PDF URL generator
- A Formula Generator
- Even silly things like a Screenshot Image Generator for Spreadsheets called SheetShot
The key difference between Better Sheets and competitors is that I do all three: tools, templates, and tutorials. My competitors might be creating courses, creating templates on Etsy, or creating tools. I do all three.
Tell us More about your background, and how you came up with the idea of BetterSheets
I used to use Excel and learned VBA to make my job easier. Then I moved to L.A. and joined a startup. Where I had to learn Google Scripts. Initially, I started to script in sheets because I wanted to help my coworkers who were doing the same thing over and over and over again. It became my entire job after about 2 months.
Yes, my boss took me outside one night and said “This Google Sheets stuff, you should do more of that. We’ll get someone else to take over the other parts of your job.”
I then ended up automating a TON of the entire suite of things my former job had to do. After a year I got asked to join a different team and keep doing Google Sheets. We ran quarter million dollar influencer campaigns from a Google Sheet I made.
The company ended up using Google Sheets for everything. From licensing content to paying out providers, and even using it to do broadcasting. Yes, I managed to get Google Sheets into every part of the business. Now looking back it seems daunting but at the time I just was running full steam ahead. Googling how to do stuff every day. Learning every single day what to do next.
After 5 years of managing Google Sheets at this startup, I went off on my own. But what did I do? I started a newsletter about the Influencer Marketing industry. And then sold that. And then tried to start building a SaaS. Had a technical cofounder but we just never got it to a sustainable profitable position.
Not all about Google Sheets is it? Not at all. I never thought I’d be a Google Sheets Guru. I still don’t think I am. But people kept mentioning how my Google Sheets planners were totally unique. I could do things in Google Sheets that people could only dream of.
In April 2020, during the height of covid lockdown, I vowed to myself that I’d launch something, anything. And in 24 hours I gave myself a deadline. Launch Something!
The absolutely first idea of Better Sheets was a Dribbble for Google Sheets. I wanted to make a collection of great Google Sheets. But I couldn’t find any.
So then I was like well maybe I can show people how to make great Google Sheets and eventually, there would be enough to showcase. I made 8 tutorial videos in 1 day. Put 4 up for free, and 4 behind a paywall. That was the first version of BetterSheets.
It was launched on a Saturday. Made the first sale on Monday. The 2nd sale took another 2 weeks.
At first, I set it up as a side project. The launch in and of itself was a success. I started it at the time as a one-time payment and to this day there is still a lifetime payment option. It’s just a bit higher price now than when I had only 8 videos total.
How did you get your first customers for BetterSheets?
The launch in the first 24 hours is rather boring. I just made the videos.Put up a Gumroad sales page and a Carrd site. That’s about it. I’m looking back and thinking “Wow did that really take me a whole day?”
I think that because I can make a new carrd site in about 10 minutes now. Yeah, I guess the writing, the hand-wringing, and the general insecurity of not doing this particular thing ever before can take a lot of hours of the day.
These days I open a Google Doc, start writing, and I even launched a Google Doc as a site within the last week. SellingSpreadsheets.com was available and matches the name of the next course I’m making. So I just redirected the domain to the Google Doc that explains the course. The functionality of that took about 3-4 minutes. But yeah the writing has taken weeks and the experience I needed has taken years.
Within the past year, I made a huge change or adjustment. I started making more tools for Google Sheets users.
Originally I created Better Sheets as a library of tutorials, that happen to have some structure. Structured around Courses where you have to watch the videos in a particular order, and Topics where you can watch videos in no particular order.
I had been making tools in sheets that weren’t for Google Sheets users but rather for users of other things. Like Better Letters is a suite of sheets to help run a curated newsletter. 100 Twitter Templates is a sheet to help you tweet.
But starting in 2022 I have built Google Sheet Add-ons, and web-based tools. So far I have 6 Google Sheet Add-ons published to the Google Workspace Marketplace. Ones like Sheet Styles and Tiny Sheets have done well with thousands of downloads. They are all free.
In mid-2022 I started creating web-based tools to help do more things with Sheets like make a /copy url and a PDF Export url.
Also, I have created Formula Generators you can just explain your issue and it will create a formula. Some are specific to REGEXMATCH or Conditional Formatting, but also a general Google Sheets formula generator that you can ask anything.
What Marketing Channels are working for you now?
From early on I knew my focus would be video but I didn’t invest too much time, effort, or energy into video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. That changed in mid-2022 when I realized I needed to focus my energy more towards proper videos. I had been taking video tutorials I did for members and basically just uploading them to YouTube without thinking about the context. And also not thinking about optimizing those views in my business.
Mistakenly, I literally thought the traffic, sales, and customers would just happen if I put videos on YouTube. It takes a deft hand to optimize for that platform. I had to make changes to the edits and the framing of videos to help YouTube users find the videos they needed. And I needed to make sure my site was easily accessible from YouTube. This all was changed from essentially doing nothing to optimizing around mid-2022. It’s never a done deal. It’s not a one-and-done operation. I had to do the same when I got serious about making TikTok videos.
But I did do, was make a YouTube video every day. And then I learned by doing it every single day. And with Tiktok I made 2 TikToks a day for a while. Just in the past month, I got focused again on TikTok and even makeup to 6 a day at times.
Beyond Video Content, For the past 12 months, I’ve been heavily investing my time, energy, and some money into doing SEO. Thinking that it was the best way to create a sustainable flow of traffic in the “Google Sheets” niche. But I’m starting to see that it may not work well for my own personal style of business or my business model.
I think the most effective way, for me, to get customers is to do what I did early on. I made a cool thing, made a tutorial about it, and showed people. I made a newsletter virtual mall to gather 30 newsletters in one site (a Google sheet).
How is your business doing now?
Better Sheet’s total revenue was $200,000 over the first 3 years. I’m in the 4th year now and can say it’s reasonably generating $5k a month. The revenue is spiky around promotions. For example, I did a Black Friday deal and one of the biggest deals was selling consulting. Made $2,000 in less than a week but have to do consulting now for a lot of hours. Which is all fun for me anyway.
And some times AppSumo will run a promotion on my deal, or increase the price, and I’ll have a very good week that makes the whole month good.
The last time I checked there were over 6,000 members. That includes a lot who were free members when I had a free trial so I’ll need to fix up that metric eventually. For now, I’m testing a new business model without a free trial. I give away so much content on blogs, YouTube, and TikTok that it makes a very leaky funnel if I keep giving everything away for free.
And in the past year with the adjustment to making more tools a monthly recurring subscription makes more sense. The lifetime deal is getting higher and higher. I’d rather be a nice entry point for someone anywhere in the world to get better at Google Sheets and have some access to the tools to make their lives better.
One main goal is to make more Sheet Sellers. I hope my new course: Selling Spreadsheets, has a lot of students. I hope it’s my best course yet.
What has been your biggest achievement in business thus far?
This may seem super small but recently I got onto the first page of a key Udemy page for Google Sheets. This is like the culmination of a lot of rumination, a lot of frustration, and a lot of weird work.
Basically, I just didn’t know how to do well on Udemy. Just like with YouTube, I put my videos on YouTube without optimizing them. I put my courses on Udemy and didn’t optimize them. After 8 months of very few sales and very few students, I reached out to Twitter and asked about Udemy experts. Learn of Evan Kimbrall. Watched one of his videos and then started making the changes, adjustments, and augmentations of my courses. Focusing on one course instead of 6.
Within 30 days I was seeing great gains. And then I investigated where the new sales were coming from and found that I ranked on the first page of Google Sheets search on Udemy.
This meant that I was getting in front of the exact people who had the intent of paying for courses on Google Sheets.
My work on Google SEO isn’t going as well, but this little win made a year of work totally worth it.
I’m looking forward to continuing my work on Udemy and hoping to generate five figures a month on Udemy at some point in the future. Hoping for my first 4 figure month sometime in 2024.
What were the worst mistakes you’ve made since launching?
By far the worst mistake is not charging. Sometimes I would get a good idea of how to make a freebie and then give it away for free. Then just sat and hoped to get sales.
That feeling sucks. It pushes a lot of insecurity into my work and my mind. Not charging for something and then getting total apathy from the “market” makes a lot of sense, but it stings so hard.
I’m getting better at validating what I sell by putting some ideas out before they are ready. Choosing the path from “Launch! By Jeff Walker” to get more ideas from immediately accessible people. I am blessed to have the ability to ask lifetime members and get feedback via email.
So my insecurity of making things people don’t want doesn’t have to last long. I can get a simple email out to a couple thousand people and get their replies within a day.
I made a course on creating an MVP app in a spreadsheet. But what most people wanted to know was how to use an API in sheets. So I made a course showcasing all the APIs I used across dozens of tutorials.
And in December 2023 I sent out a new idea about a course on “Selling Spreadsheets”. This one has a hit internally and so I’m spending a lot of time making it really really comprehensive.
No longer do I have to just sit and wonder. I can ask.
What Tech Stack are you currently using?
I didn’t choose Google Sheets. Google Sheets chose me.
- Google Sheets – to do everything
- Google Workspace – to internally organize
- Gmail – to email
- Loom – to record/publish videos
- Gumroad – to sell Tools
- AppSumo Marketplace – to sell LTD
- Descript – to edit videos
- Ruby on Rails – to create BetterSheets.co
What advice would you give to new entrepreneurs?
Something you’re bad at doesn’t have to continue. You can easily become well acquainted with almost any subject within a focused 24-hour period.
A long weekend can take you from knowing nothing to having some substantial knowledge.
A week-long endeavor of trying stuff out can probably take you to probably to the top half of that subject matter.
And a month focused on one thing can sometimes get you to the top 80% of those who do that thing… including professionals.
If you’re a technical person and you’re scared to do marketing because you’re bad at it, pick one marketing subject and do it for 30 days. In some cases like SEO, there are some milestones you can accomplish. Even if you don’t see results in 30 days from SEO, you’ll have a heck of a lot of experiments to see what works.
If you’re a marketer and never coded, learning to code can take as little as an hour to get started typing some code. Some courses can be completed within a weekend. For example, I took a 4-hour freecodecamp YouTube course in Ruby on Rails. It took me 3 days. From Friday to Sunday to complete. Then I invested $50 into RailsTutorial, a pdf course. That took me about a month. But then my learning rails and ruby has been iteratively better. That kind of time, energy, and effort investment only has to happen once to get off the ground.
After a year of puttering around with Ruby on Rails, I ended up committing some code to Heroku in November, and by December I knew exactly what I needed to move forward. Hired someone else to help me do it faster. And was blazing along.
A whole year later I got an entire SaaS up and operation by myself within a week. 5 days to be exact. But it all started with getting through a single 4-hour course on YouTube.
Thanks, Jon Elder, from Codemy.com
Easter Egg: Here’s the 4-hour course I did.
What resources do you recommend for entrepreneurs?
Launch! By Jeff Walker is one of the most underrated business books ever. It helped me do email marketing, create workshops, and ultimately craft compelling courses people actually like.
There is far more signal than noise in books. Online communities I find are very time-intensive for very little signal. Read more books.
Influence by Robert Cialdini is probably the only book you’ll ever need if you’re suffering with Conversion Rate Optimization. I took a course on CXL.com which ultimately is something like $1,500 a year and literally the whole course was a distillation of that book into how people buy things online. Instead of paying for a year’s membership, I reread that book.
Lastly, Where can we learn more about you?
Follow me on TikTok @bettersheets.co
I tweet at @Kamphey
