Andrey Azimov turned Google Sheets into websites with Sheet2Site and sold it in 2021

Turning Spreadsheets Into Websites

Sheet2Site, built by Andrey Azimov, turns information in Google Sheets into a website. Users enter titles, descriptions, images, and links in a sheet, pick a template, and create a site. When they need to change the content, they edit the spreadsheet they already know. The starting point of the product was reducing the burden of learning a separate admin screen and editing web pages.

In March 2018 Azimov left the software company Railsware to try making a living from his own products. The goal was to reach $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue within a year. For him, living in Bali at the time, that amount was the threshold for covering rent, food, and other basic living costs while continuing to build. He named the challenge the Hardcore Year and decided to publish his progress.

He had already earned money from small products before leaving his job. DarkModeList, a collection of apps with dark mode support, brought in $100, while PushToDeploy, which deployed a website with a physical button, failed to gather the preorders needed to build it, so he refunded them and lost about $77. This was a period of picking problems he could implement while knowing basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and PHP.

The idea for Sheet2Site came while he was running DarkModeList. He had to keep managing app names, images, and links, and handling a SQL database was a burden for Azimov. So he put the information in Google Sheets and connected it to a website. Sheet2Site was the product that generalized a way that worked on his own site so that others could use it.

First Launch and Paid Plans

He built the first prototype in PHP over a few nights, and about half the code came from DarkModeList. But even after he polished and showed the screens, people did not understand how to use it. He watched ten people use it in a coworking space and fixed his explanations, aiming for a state where people could build a site without someone helping them from the side.

When he first shared it on Twitter, Indie Hackers, and BetaList, the reaction that it was a good idea did not match actual use. Discouraged, he left the product alone for a month, and when he came back he delayed the launch over minor design fixes. He ended the delay by giving up more than thirty tasks that were still open before the official release.

On March 21, 2018, Sheet2Site was released on Product Hunt and Hacker News. On Product Hunt it took first place for the day and third for the week, and on Hacker News questions followed about how spreadsheets connect to websites. The comments covered everything from how it differed from competing products to domain connection and pricing, all framed around actual use.

The initial basis for charging was connecting a domain the customer owned. The pricing Azimov announced on Hacker News the day of launch was $5 a month to connect one domain and $10 a month for unlimited connections. By giving customers a website they could run on their own address, he created a payment point between simply trying the product and actually running a service.

During launch he forgot the payment button and added PayPal later. Even so, the first ten days produced 16 sales, and Sheet2Site revenue for March 2018 was $237. That amount included annual payments, and the monthly recurring revenue he calculated separately was $119.

Early operations involved a lot of manual work. Azimov handled domain connections himself and answered questions in chat, and in his first-month retrospective he said he had talked with more than a hundred people and that nearly every sale went through such conversations. Solving the parts where users got stuck was itself the sales activity.

Version 2.0 for Existing Customers and $1,000 MRR

Still, that level of income could not support him. When he left his job his savings were enough for about three months, and he cut spending with cheap rooms and street food. While subscription revenue grew, he also built Mac apps sold as one-time purchases to secure cash. The need to cover immediate living costs was part of why he released several products.

In December 2018, Azimov decided to focus on Sheet2Site again. When he asked existing customers what their biggest problem was, the answer was that one general-purpose template made it hard to build very different sites. Over roughly the next four months he focused on improving the existing product.

The direction was to split use cases more concretely. He added templates with clear purposes such as product lists, job boards, event listings, and maps, and strengthened search, filtering, detail pages, and subpages. Customers could start from a framework closer to the site they wanted to build.

He also reworked the landing page. He added a demo video, documentation, customer testimonials, and real examples, and removed the free plan. Sheet2Site 2.0, reworked this way, was released on Product Hunt on March 23, 2019 and again took first place for the day.

In May 2019 he announced that he had passed his target of $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue. It was 14 months after leaving his job. Of the seven products he had at the time, only Sheet2Site and DarkModeList were subscription-based.

The Marketplace Channel and 2020 Growth

In August 2019 he widened distribution through Google's add-on marketplace. After releasing the add-on on August 1, he gathered 200 users in three weeks, and he said half of incoming traffic came from his own site and the other half came naturally from the marketplace. Putting the product where spreadsheet users look for tools had an effect.

In 2020 he adjusted pricing and promotion again. He removed the monthly plan to focus on long-term customers and allowed free use for COVID-19-related websites. The Sheet2Site logo shown on free sites helped promotion, and Azimov said the rise in people starting new online projects at home was also a growth factor.

On April 2, 2020, the monthly revenue Azimov himself reported to Indie Hackers was about $10,000. Because this coincided with a pricing change that removed the monthly plan, that revenue should not be treated as steady monthly recurring revenue of the same size.

The costs he disclosed in the same post were $24 for Heroku and $1,242 for Gumroad and Paddle fees, for a total of $1,266. On that basis Azimov presented a margin of about 87 percent. There is no basis to read this as a net profit rate that also reflects the founder's own labor and taxes, but it does confirm that revenue was large relative to the cash costs he disclosed.

While running the service, Azimov's job was not limited to development. In his official introduction at the time he said he alone handled front-end and server development, design, customer support, sales, marketing, and content and video production. Behind the simplicity customers enjoyed was a structure where one person was responsible for both the software and the running of the service.

A Customer Case and the Acquisition

The reason people pay for this tool also shows up in a real customer's work. In May 2020 the developer Benny Chan shared his experience building AffTable, a collection of affiliate programs for software services, with Sheet2Site. He was able to build it himself but chose the tool to save production time, and he said he spent about a week on data collection and another two or three days on organizing and building the site. It could be a paid tool that saves time even for someone who can write code.

The same account also records limits. In the environment at the time, editing long text inside a cell was difficult, and complex formulas or importing a lot of external data could make the work cumbersome. This experience shows both the convenience for a site that organizes products, vendors, and links row by row, and the burden of managing complex content with a spreadsheet.

On June 21, 2021, it was announced that Sheet2Site had been acquired by Neil Witten. It was about three years after the first release, and the official announcement did not disclose the deal amount. The new owner emphasized the product's value in reducing the burden of development and server management while turning spreadsheets into websites. He also said existing customer subscriptions and pricing would be kept after the acquisition.

The choice worth noting in Sheet2Site's growth is the point when Azimov turned back to existing customers. He checked what the people already paying wanted to build, then improved templates, features, and explanations for those uses. A tool solving a small inconvenience between a familiar spreadsheet and a website grew through that process into a business that generated revenue and could be handed to another operator.