Andrew Kamphey — Better Sheets, Turning Spreadsheet Experience into Education and Tools

Andrew Kamphey created Better Sheets, which teaches how to use Google Sheets through videos and sells templates and automation tools alongside them. Started as a side project in April 2020, the business was introduced in an Indie Bites interview released on September 21, 2023 as having surpassed $200,000 in cumulative revenue since launch. That figure covers roughly three years of sales and should be distinguished from annual revenue or annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Turning work experience into eight videos

Before founding Better Sheets, Kamphey built customer management systems and work tools with Google Sheets at startups. Better Sheets began from the sheet-design experience he accumulated during that work. When development of another project took longer than expected, he decided that this time he would launch something within 24 hours.

The first product was eight videos made in one day. Four were released for free and the other four were offered as paid content; he built a landing page with Carrd and took payments with Gumroad. He used Loom to create the videos, so he started with sales before developing a separate education platform.

Sales did not follow immediately after launch. The first buyer appeared within a few days, but after about two weeks sales still stood at one, and the April 2020 total was 13 sales totaling $390. However, the first buyer sent spreadsheets from before and after watching the lessons and expressed satisfaction; seeing that reaction, Kamphey kept adding videos.

Products That Solve Real Work, Not Just Explain Functions

The customers he targeted were small business owners who already used spreadsheets for work but lacked the time to find better ways of doing things. Kamphey believed that even abundant free explanations of functions are difficult to use if users do not know which function to look for. Better Sheets therefore focused on showing how to combine multiple features to build sheets for real work, rather than on the syntax of individual functions.

The curriculum included building progress bars, designing dashboards, managing data, and introductions to scripting. It also offered videos that improved design and usability by modifying actual sheets. Atomic Sheets, provided alongside it, worked by bringing needed components into existing sheets rather than using a complete template wholesale.

The related tool OnlySheets grew out of an inconvenience Andrew Kamphey himself experienced while selling spreadsheets. To grant access only to buyers, he had to add email addresses one by one after receiving a sale notification, so he automated the task with Apps Script. He then made the feature that had made his own sales workflow easier available to other spreadsheet sellers.

He also linked content expansion to customer inquiries. When a member asked a question, he turned the answer into a video and added it as material other members could also view. In an official introduction in March 2023, he mentioned about 3,000 members and more than 300 videos, explaining that member questions were important material for deciding course topics.

Later, he added more tools that let people finish tasks without listening to an explanation. According to a follow-up interview, in 2023 he released six Google Sheets add-ons and also developed a URL generator for PDF export, a formula generator, and SheetShot, which creates images of sheets. The business's scope had broadened from educational content to templates and work tools.

How AppSumo and Lifetime Access Built Revenue

The turning point for sales was AppSumo. Kamphey was selected for the 'Sumo-ling Spotlight' beta program, for which about 700 people applied, and received help from AppSumo in refining the sales copy and introductory text. On the first day of the AppSumo sale, 60 sales were made, bringing buyers much faster than when he started on his own site.

This sales channel remained significant afterward. In figures disclosed in 2022, AppSumo accounted for about 85 percent of total revenue and about 96 percent of membership revenue. For Kamphey, the AppSumo fee was not only a payment-processing cost but also a cost of advertising the product to customers looking to buy business tools.

The flagship product was a lifetime access pass that could continue to be used after a one-time payment, and the price sold on AppSumo rose from an initial $19 to $49 and then to $69 in 2022. At the time, about 80 percent of total revenue came from lifetime memberships and 2 percent from monthly memberships. The remainder was 16 percent from sales of individual information products and software and 2 percent from workshops and consulting. The revenue structure was therefore closer to a business selling educational materials and software bundles as one-time purchases than to a monthly subscription SaaS.

The disclosed gross revenue was the sum of listed selling prices before marketplace fees were deducted. Kamphey explained that in most cases he received about 70 percent of AppSumo sales proceeds. From $100,000 in cumulative gross revenue over the first two years, after roughly accounting for fees, development costs, marketing costs, and taxes, he estimated his take-home amount at less than $50,000; this was his rough calculation, not a precise accounting.

Investing in the platform after sales are proven

Only after the product began selling did Andrew Kamphey seriously improve the membership site. He learned Ruby on Rails and built it himself, but found it difficult to complete it to the level he wanted, so he used money earned from sales to collaborate part-time with a developer for about three months. The new site, launched in April 2022, brought scattered videos and products together in one place and offered tag search and learning progress tracking.

The new site also created another opportunity for promotion. It launched on Product Hunt on April 29, 2022, and became the number one product that day; according to Kamphey, the results were hundreds of signups and about $1,000 in sales over five days. That spring, he turned Better Sheets from a side project into his full-time work.

In 2023, he sought to increase search traffic in order to rely less on launch events or one-off exposure. He created pages for individual functions, added transcript text and descriptions to videos, and linked related functions and lessons to one another. He worked to improve search optimization alongside making it easier for existing customers to find materials, including by publishing transcripts requested by members.

The gap between visitor growth and sales growth

However, more search visitors did not immediately translate into more sales. In a follow-up interview in 2024, Kamphey said that search metrics had improved for about a year, but that in the process there was no new revenue from Google Search. He later lowered the price and, instead of adding more articles, built tools that directly solved the problems people were searching for, and those tools began to lead to actual purchases, he explained.

The business scale disclosed in the same 2024 interview was about $5,000 in monthly revenue across multiple income streams. Lifetime access to the video and tool library remained the main product, and although the income streams had diversified, the pace of monthly revenue growth was slower than expected, he said. This monthly revenue also includes one-time sales and the like, so it is distinct from MRR, or recurring subscription revenue.

What Kamphey wanted was a business where he could choose when and how he worked and run it without having to be online at the same time as customers. But as he took on more consulting to earn more stable income, he again accepted having to fit his schedule and time around clients. In running Better Sheets, the remaining choice was not only whether to create more products, but how to balance how freely he worked with how reliably he earned.