# I Turned This Spreadsheet Into a $30K/Month Micro-SaaS

Channel: Starter Story
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8PdJJcEtE0
Duration: 12 min
Language: English
Words: 2935
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/d8PdJJcEtE0

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[0:00] I built a marketing automation app for Shopify, which has made a total of $147,000 since launch. This is Jack. He spent a lot of time building spreadsheets [music] for clients until one day he thought, "What if I just turn this spreadsheet into an app?" Well, that's exactly what he did and just a few months later this spreadsheet turned app [music] makes him $30,000 per month. What's even crazier is that he wasn't technical. He built the whole thing with AI without knowing [music] how to code at all. I asked Jack to come on to the channel to break all this down and in this episode we'll dive

[0:31] into the exact spreadsheet that turned into a 30K MRR SaaS, why the best ideas come from work you are already doing, and exactly what Jack would do if he had to start over again and find a new idea in 2026. All right, let's dive in. I'm Pat Walls and this is Starter Story. All right, Jack, great to have you on the channel. Tell me a little bit about who you are, what you built, and what's

[0:53] your story. My name's Jack and I built a profit analytics and marketing automation app for Shopify called Profit AI, which has made a total of $147,000 since launch in December and is currently at 30K MRR [music] for the app and just under 40K MRR for services. I launched Profit AI in December. It was actually approved by Shopify on Christmas Day and we had no customers for the first couple of weeks, just a handful of brands that I knew that were beta testing the app and getting free access. And yeah, today I'm excited to share more about how I took

[1:20] it from zero to where it is now. That's amazing. You started this business in December. We are recording right now in May and you took this business from zero to tens of thousands of dollars in revenue. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on the channel. So, let's talk about this actual business that you built. Can you explain to me how it works, what's the business model, and then if you could pull up some of your revenue dashboards

[1:40] so we can show that this thing is legit? For sure. So, this is a app for Shopify that users can download to their Shopify store that shows them their profit in seconds. This is normally a process that takes a lot of time. So, if I click through the screenshots here, they pretty much tell the story. You can see your profit in seconds. You can see

[1:56] exactly your ad platform profit dollars. So, on the left-hand side here, we have spend per channel. [music] On the middle, we have uh sales attributed to those channels. And then on the right-hand side, it's profit after all of the costs associated with those sales, including marketing. There's also for enterprise stores, for stores that are spending a lot of money, the ability to forecast and measure the relationship between their ad spend [music] and their revenue from each of their platforms. To launch ads, send email, and build landing pages with AI. This is a bit of a cloud wrapper, cloud plus skills plus connectors through Profit AI. You can

[2:24] generate a profit and loss from all of your costs and your revenues, and you can deploy directly from Slack. So, we have a free plan and we have a paid plan. Paid plan used to be $5,000 a month, but we only had a couple takers that were, you know, businesses that we were already working with. So, we dropped it down to $800 a month. And then the free plan, even though a lot of people talk uh badly about free plans, I want everyone to use the app. So, when you sign up for the free plan, you actually have a 30-day free trial of the paid plan to see all of the app. This is

[2:49] the dashboard here in Shopify. We're churning as many customers as we're bringing [music] in. Basically, you can see we have 43 un- uninstalls and 47 installs. We made $147,000 to date. We have 122 users of the app right now. Most of them are free. I think we have 38 or 39 paying customers right now. Most of our growth came from like word of mouth. We haven't hard launched the marketing yet at all. But soon, we're

[3:10] going to do a big launch. Okay, cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. I mean, you just started the app, so the churn, it's not the most ideal, but still pretty crazy that you got it up to 30, [music] 40K MRR in really just a couple months. So, congratulations on that. It's part of the reason why [music] I wanted to bring you on to show how fast you can do this if you follow this kind of one thing that we're going to talk about in a little bit. But before we do, let's talk about your background. How do you get to this point where you're have a really successful

[3:33] app that you [music] built in like a couple months? In 2016, I launched my first e-commerce brand. We made software and sample packs for music producers. Think like dubstep music producers. The brand grew very quickly, and profitability was never a question. We were [music] extremely high margin because we were a software business. So, yeah, I went from being a broke university student uh to having more money than I knew what to do with very quickly. After a while, I noticed that there was a scene [music] around e-commerce that had grown. There were marketers and agencies and gurus all built around running [music] Facebook ads. And this is how we grew

[4:01] the business, right? I put a thousand dollars into Facebook ads [music] and it just worked. So, I thought, "Hey, maybe this is something I can contribute to." So, I started consulting for small mom-and-pop shop agencies, then bigger agencies. The ethos is and the idea behind it is that good decision-making comes from information. I built easy-to-access spreadsheets that helped founders and marketing teams make better decisions. Spreadsheets are donkey and data is time-consuming task. So, I asked a developer that I met who built this online marketplace called Nookazon for the game Animal Crossing and he just basically refused. So, yeah, then coding

[4:33] with AI started and then I got stuck in. I spent your hundreds of hours in Codex figuring it out. what Jack is breaking down right now. And I think anyone can come up with SaaS ideas like this by following [music] his approach, which is find the boring repetitive tasks and turn them into simple products. [music] But, here's the thing. I know coming up with ideas is hard. Well, that's exactly why we built [music] the MicroSaaS Ideas Database, where you will find over 100 proven MicroSaaS ideas just like this that are already working. [music] We'll break them all down with real revenue, their pricing, growth tactics, and the

[5:06] cost to start behind each one. If you download this database right now, you'll get to see [music] apps that people actually are willing to pay for. So, if you're ready to build, head to the first link in the description right down there. You can grab it 100% for free. All right, let's get back to the episode. Okay, so, one of the reasons why I wanted to bring you on is that

[5:22] this idea came from just a spreadsheet. You had a spreadsheet that you were using with clients and you had built up and you said, "Okay, maybe I could turn this into an app." So, could you pull up that actual spreadsheet for me and just show me what it looked like so the audience can see? So, this is the P&L page and as you can see, it's a very accessible P&L. Like it's nice and colorful, all the numbers are nice and big and you've got your profit metrics here sort of highlighted and you've you've your best months, you know, conditionally formatted to a deeper green and red when there's

[5:49] something that you should pay attention to. So, this is the P&L. This is where you would log your fixed costs. Takes time [music] to do this and takes attention. Variable costs, the cost of goods sold, you see your LTVs, understand whether you should pay more to acquire a customer or less. This is like a little calculator that I built to better understand the term ROAS, which is quite misunderstood, a little ad analyzer, a scenario planner. But, like, if you see a real scenario planner, the one that, you know, like, [music] Deloitte will produce and charge tens of thousands of dollars to do it. It's

[6:15] complicated and totally inaccessible. Whereas, these [music] trying to make very, very complicated things as simple as possible. Okay. So, looks like a cool spreadsheet, looks somewhat complicated, but how did you go about turning this spreadsheet, specifically, how did you go about turning it into an app? Can you share exactly how you did that? I wish I could show you my cursor chance, but they're [music] gone now. I don't have a a cursor plan anymore, but it's literally downloading the spreadsheet as a CSV, uploading it to cursor, and saying build it. And then identifying all the ways that cursor got it wrong and saying, [music] "We need to

[6:44] fix this. This is the right calculation here." Today, it's so much easier, but that was how I built it initially. This took the best part of 3 and 1/2 months, 4 months, maybe. Yeah, nowadays, you could do it so fast. I actually have a personal story where I have like a personal finance net worth budgeting tracker type thing that I was doing in a spreadsheet for years. I just put it into Claude Code and I built it in basically a day. This is the opportunity right now, which I think is amazing. On that same note, could you just walk me through what that tech stack looks like for you right now? I

[7:13] know you were using cursor back then, but like, what are you using to develop the app and add new features right now? Sure thing. We're using Claude Code, which is, I think, about 200 bucks a month on the max plan. We started using Instantly, but that's for marketing. We're using Framer for the website, but we might switch out and just use a Claude website eventually. Uh we also are using Codex [music] now, but within terminal, not as in, like, the Codex app. That was $200, but then I canceled and then they gave me a 100% discount,

[7:38] so I'm not paying anything right now. And Google Sheets, which is free. Yeah, let's talk about e-commerce tools, e-commerce software. We interviewed someone on the channel about a year ago. You can go find this video. His name was Eric Kos and he was doing something like $200,000 a month and he had somewhat recently started. It was a Shopify plugin. I just caught up with him the other day and he just crossed 1 million a month and that was crazy. I'm like, "Wow, there must be something here in e-commerce SaaS." Like helping e-commerce stores or brands do something with software and I keep having these conversations over and I'm

[8:07] seeing this is a good place to be building. You're in this space. You talk to brand owners all day and I'm curious, what other problems need to be solved here? What other spreadsheets are these brand owners using that could be turned into an app? What are good spreadsheet to app type businesses similar to yours? Everyone has a unique use case for [music] where they need data. So, we just closed an agency in Miami that has an office in New York and they're fairly big and it's very exciting. And they have a million and one use cases for [music] where they need the data. The beautiful thing is that now, as long as

[8:38] you have the pipelines, you can just send data by saying, "Hey, Claude, send it here." So, if they have a request, they can just message the Profit AI Slack bot, which is just Claude, send that data into different spreadsheets for the purpose of educating good decision-making. Yeah, no, I think there's something there which is like reporting data and analytics. If you can get better data into the hands of business owners or Shopify brand owners, like there's so many different use cases. We're about to bring someone on the channel who does specifically Klaviyo reporting, like one specific tool in [music] e-commerce and his business is he's doing a million

[9:10] dollars a year just on this very specific reporting. I love the e-commerce tooling space. It's not as like creator tools. You see a lot of like AI tools, AI wrappers. I think e-commerce tooling is like one of the coolest kind of underrated spaces right now. So, I'm hoping to see your app continue to grow. Last question that we ask all founders who come on the Starter Story is, what advice would you have for anyone who wants to make this transition from agency owner or providing services or working with clients or maybe just people even in a full-time job to move from, "Hey, I trade my hours for dollars." to, "Hey, I

[9:44] build software that makes me money while I sleep." What would be your one piece of advice? Yeah, I would [music] say, "Don't aim for laziness." If your goal is, "I want to make lots of money while doing nothing." you're going to get quickly replaced. This market's moving fast and likes fast. My two cents would be is

[10:02] just ask Claude if it can do the thing. And [music] I'm so surprised by things as long as it has connections to everything, how much it can do from just one prompt. Just ask Claude. Just do it and stick at it. Yeah, that's a great advice for anyone watching this. If you have an idea, what Jack is saying is, just go put it into your Claude code terminal and it might

[10:20] just even build it for you right there. So, if you're watching this right now, go put it in. See what happens. All right, Jack, thank you for coming on and sharing everything. Thank you, Ben. All right. Gus, producer of Starter Story. You got a nice haircut there. I'm liking the haircut. What did you think of Profit AI and the Jack's company that

[10:36] he built in the last couple months? Yeah, it's a little out of my scope, so that's the first thing I'll say in in terms of my Shopify and all that stuff. But, I love the idea that he kind of noticed like these tasks he was doing in these like spreadsheets and was able to like think about like how can I make this more efficient or something that someone else might be able to use in a simpler fashion. I think about all the stuff I have in spreadsheets personally, you know, use on a daily basis and just think, "Oh man, there's probably a lot of stuff I can like turn into something

[11:01] that makes my life a little easier." So, that's my first thought. Yeah, there used to be this thing in startup world where it said like, you know, there are a lot of business ideas that are in spreadsheets. And I always thought that was cool, but it was always hard to do because it was hard to build

[11:13] apps, you know, two or three years ago. But, now I think this is like the actual time where a lot of spreadsheets can actually be turned into like profitable apps. Like I'm just thinking about a couple apps that I built recently. Actually, the interface is way better. Yeah, and I think generally like there's a lot of workflows I do every single day that are just like the same thing over and over again. And it's a different world, but it's like adjacent to like the idea of like turning a workflow or something I do every day that's repetitive into something more automated. And I've done that a little

[11:43] bit. I think there's lots of more opportunities [music] there. Okay, so if you're watching this right now, what I would recommend you do is go open Claude code right now. Have it connect to your Google Drive account. Look at the last 20 spreadsheets that have been added to your account. Ask it to build one of that. It'll probably build you an app pretty fast. You can use any of these five coding apps to do this. I think that's super cool. And if you don't have any ideas, you can check out our micro SaaS ideas, including apps that are making tens of thousands of dollars a month right now. Just go to

[12:10] the link in the description. You can download that and you'll find plenty of ideas just like this one. Ideas built by solopreneurs that are crushing it right now. All right, guys. Hope you enjoyed this one. We'll see you in the next one. Peace.

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