Excelly-AI

We now tried some viral marketing on TikTok and it seems to work better than other channels like content marketing via Instagram.

This is the profile: https://www.tiktok.com/@excelly_ai

Two of our videos reached 20k views each in the time span of a few days. I bought 12k via $15 ads to try it out, the rest came organically. I would probably not buy ads here anymore because the other video got 20k views all by itself.

Also a cool side effect: The video has no direct "call to action" button or clickable link to website. This way all traffic came via "organic" searches and now if you google "Excelly", our website pops up first.

Any feedback for further improvements?

Hi, we recently implemented two new feature in Excelly-AI:

• You can now upload your *.xlsx files and therefore ask meaningful questions about your very own spreadsheets
• You can now specify the columns of your spreadsheet

Until now, you had to write non-intuitive prompts like "Average of all values in column B, divided by the total of all values in D and E" - who wants that?

Now, you can just write semantically meaningful prompts this way:
"Average salary of all employees in the US above age 30"

With this feature, we want to differentiate ourselves from both the competition and ChatGPT. We also want to make the user experience way more intuitive.

Here's a video of the feature in action (28s video):
https://youtu.be/78-538zmWhw

Any feedback appreciated!

Hi everyone, it's been a while since I last posted.

I am happy to announce that we got our first few customers 🥳 (we got our first customer around two weeks ago)

The conversion rate from free to premium is around 4%, which I think is pretty neat!

The current problem is that the customers came from ads, and the amount I need to spend to acquire one customer is below the life-time value of one sale.
This means that I need to either get way more organic traffic, or get leads for less money.

=> I started content marketing via instagram: https://www.instagram.com/excelly_ai/
I will upload daily Excel and Google Sheets tips here to provide value and grow my audience.

Another good thing to do would probably be viral marketing, but I don't have experience here so far.

I will definitely keep posting updates here!

We tried Reddit Ads and Facebook Ads, each for one week, with nearly the same budget.
This is the result:

Redit Ads: ~200 clicks with a cost per click of 0.15€
Facebook Ads: ~1100 clicks with a cost per click of 0.0359€

This means that Facebook Ads outperformed Reddit Ads by far for us in terms of CPC and total clicks.

The ChatGPT API is finally released!
Here is how you use it in Python: https://imgur.com/a/cw6TZl5

Don't forget to import it via import openai. If you were already using openai, you need to upgrade it to be able to use their new API :) It's as simple as pip install --upgrade openai.

Two great updates for Excelly-AI:

• Many people reported that it's very inconvenient for them to have to use Slack, and they would much rather just have a web interface. We implemented that now :)
• We now implemented the new ChatGPT API by OpenAI (GPT-3.5-turbo), meaning that our formula generation and explanation is now way more powerful!

Since we no longer rely on Slack, and also offer a free version (up to 10 daily formulas), signing up and using Excelly-AI now only takes two minutes.

Here is a quick showcase video: https://youtu.be/rv6M5HjBv04

If you want to check it out, here is the link: https://excelly-ai.io/

We would appreciate any kind of feedback! :)

So far, it seems like our new Reddit Ads campaign has nearly doubled the CTR (Click Through Rate - The percentage of people who saw your ad and clicked on your link).

Last campaign: 0.266%
New campaign: 0.462%

Two main factors for this change:

• We used Google Trends to determine which countries google our keywords the most - in our case "Slack", "Excel" and "Google Sheets". We then targeted the ad towards the countries with the highest cumulative interest in these topics.
• We used a meme as the creative, because we thought memes might fit more into Reddit than just a standard call-to-action. Here is how it looks like: https://imgur.com/a/jBTNbIx

We will keep you fellow indie hackers updated here how it goes for the rest of the 1-week campaign :)

Our last Reddit Ads campaign looked like this:
https://imgur.com/a/EBUOTnr

We now try a new "meme" campaign, which looks like this:
https://imgur.com/a/jBTNbIx

Our intuition was that memes might resonate more with Reddit as a platform than just plain ads with a call to action.

I'm definitely excited to see what works better and will post an update after a week of running the ad :)

Many of you fellow indie hackers already sent us input and recommendations for our landing page, which we highly appreciated and now finally implemented :)

We worked basically 24/7 on Excelly-AI the last few weeks and now have good news:

We finally launched into open beta! 🚀

Here is our website: https://excelly-ai.io/

As we have a Freemium model, you can just click "Add to Slack" and get started right away with a limited amount of formulas per day.

We are very grateful for any kind of general feedback, feature requests or bug reports!

If you enjoy using Excelly-AI, let us know how you will use it and what features you would like to see (via info@excelly-ai.io, our contact form or just right below this post) and we will send you a life-time 25% off coupon! :)

Writing a Slackbot has been easier than I initially anticipated - so far ;)

My short list of key take-aways:

• In my experience, Python is a better choice than Java when it comes to Slackbots. While I am mostly a Java developer, Python turned out to be way easier to start with here - even though I don't like the dynamic typing of Python :(
  The API is just way more intuitive and also the set-up regarding the dependencies is more straight-forward
• Using Flask for the event subscriptions is going well so far, even though the Python docs mostly use Django
• ngrok is really helpful for debugging the event calls from Slack's API locally
• For everything your bot is able to do, you have to register a permission via their OAuth system. I would guess this is similar to the permission system in the Android and iOS

For a demo what the bot can do so far, check out the video on our website: https://excelly-ai.io/