Everybody is selling spreadsheets. Who is buying?
Okay, not literally everybody, but I have recently seen a drastic spike in the number of indie projects that involve compiling data into a spreadsheet (normally Airtable) and then selling full access to the sheet.
Has anyone had significant success with this kind of information product? And how did you find people willing to pay you for your sheet? (You can be as specific or vague as you like!)
I may be one of the "everybody" who is selling spreadsheets. In April I started Better Sheets. I teach people how to have a better experience in Google Sheets. Move faster, be more creative, do better design... all in google sheets.
I wanted to put some of the things I do into practice beyond "here's a video". So I started selling templates, and lists. In addition to selling Better Sheets, I've made around $1k in template/list sales. I know generally who my buyers are. Small Businesses, SEO Agencies, solo coders.
I put out a quite a few sheets first as freebies, to advertise Better Sheets, but then ended up coding more into the sheets. More than I thought is give-away-able.
How I found people to willing to pay: Twitter. And some people who already paid for the access to lessons, will pay for a template which saves them even more time.
but if you weren't asking about templates, rather you might be asking about only lists of stuff in google sheets: Then I put it on gumroad for free and some people give a few bucks. Very similar to "buy me a coffee" concept.
Just last week I put Digital Stocking Stuffers on Product Hunt.
Thanks for sharing! What's interesting to me about your products is that you have a healthy mix of free vs. paid, and there's some fluidity as far as free products becoming paid when you think they provide enough value.
I created spreadtheworld.net a few months ago. It's a spreadsheet of 400+ places where to post your startup.
I almost sold 100 lifetime access already. My typical customers are:
My best acquisition channels are:
I haven't tried any ads or cold emailing yet.
Awesome, thank you for the detail you included. How often are you going to update the table to keep it relevant for your lifetime subscribers?
I update it on a monthly basis, i added almost 50 resources with the last one. I also make some changes whenever I got a suggestion or a request
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A bit less, i started with a $19 price tag, make some discount and even a Black friday giveaway. But that's more than $2k yes :)
(Price will go up when I hit the 100th sales!)
Cc @AndrewKamphey
thx for pointing this out. will comment with some ideas.
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Nice, how do you market the successful lists? Did you have an existing audience in place before you started building them?
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Interesting, I wonder if you could "repackage" the data in a way that would make it more shareable. Basically you could do some of the heavy lifting that shows the value of the data and then share the insights in the communities you mentioned as a form of content marketing. For instance, if you have a database of Product Hunt products, can you create Top 10 lists across categories or highlight trends that emerge? Then namedrop your data set as the key to finding these kinds of insights.
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I'll admit that I have seen some of your controversial posts in this community haha. Everyone has different marketing tactics, but I will point out that getting in front of 10 people who are interested in data-driven startup insights is likely to be more valuable than reaching 100 people who happen upon your profile from unrelated topics. Most Indie Hackers don't need more traffic, they need higher quality traffic.
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Yeah, I think these kinds of spreadsheets are great opportunities to "eat your own dogfood." Use the data you've scraped to reveal actionable opportunities and prove the value, which is a step beyond suggesting use cases.
If you don't have the time to build new projects based on your own data, give other Indie Hackers free access for a set period of time in exchange for them sharing how they benefit from it.
This is sort of how The Hustle markets its Trends subscription. (Not associated or subscribed myself, I just get their ads all the time haha.) Instead of talking about their product, The Hustle highlights successful businesses people have started based on the Trends insights. (Apparently someone started a successful plant ecommerce site like The Sill, a decision based on a Trends report.)
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