The power of ONE influencer changed my life

Hello, I’m David Bressler, creator of www.excelformulabot.com.

Two months ago, I posted here and on Hacker News about my website.

Collectively, they got one engagement. I think it was probably my mom.

As an indie hacker, I felt compelled to announce it here first instead of going to the community of my target audience.

Frustrated and a day later, I posted on Reddit to the /Excel community looking for some website testers. That post eventually blew up (or at least blew up as much as something can in the Excel community).

After sharing to a couple more subreddits and going back to my ordinary life, I got a chat from a colleague. He sent me a TikTok video of a guy talking about my site.

That was the the tipping point. This guy has 4.5M followers.

Here’s the video: https://www.tiktok.com/@setupspawn/video/7122487317931068718

That TikTok video led to 25+ more TikTok videos, among Twitter posts from productive influencers.

I’ve found that birds of a feather flock together in the influencer world. There’s lots of copying.

My life hasn’t been the same since.

With my site unexpectedly going viral, I was ecstatic but also shitting my pants. The cost of the AI that powers the site cost money.

I quickly racked up several thousand dollars is API costs.

I added a donation link, where I fortunately was able to recoup roughly half of the cost.

I purposely decided not to add a pay wall at the time. I felt that there was a reason as to why the site took off - some random dude make a badass website to help 750M Excel users around the world and he’s offering it for free.

It was one of the best decisions I made. Nearly all of the publications and social posts about my site contained the word “free.” People love free. I strongly believe that had I immediately put up a payday, it would not have gotten the traction it did.

Fast forward a month and a half later, today is my official launch day. I’ve had a whopping 350K users to the site since. I did a soft launch a couple days ago and have already generated $700 in subscriptions - monthly and yearly.

I hope you enjoyed my journey and I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t shoot my shot - so here’s my Product Hunt webpage if you’d like to support my website and receive a 40% promo code.

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/excelformulabot-com

Hopefully I didn’t just post into the darkness again!