David Bressler Renamed Excel Formula Bot to Better Analyst

What He Found on Parental Leave

In 2022, David Bressler was on parental leave for his second child and tried OpenAI's experimental playground. He had been analyzing digital marketing data, so he naturally typed in Excel questions and gradually asked for complex formulas too. A person describes the work they want in a sentence and the AI turns it into a formula. A way to handle an everyday tool far more easily had appeared right in front of him.

Bressler had studied business and was not a programmer building web applications. He did work with SQL and R for data analysis and had built websites with WordPress. The development tool he chose was Bubble, which assembles screens and processing rules visually. The logical thinking he had built while working with Excel and databases helped him learn Bubble.

The First Version That Built One Formula

The first screen of Excel Formula Bot, released in July 2022, was simple. There was an input box for the request and an output box showing the formula, and pressing the generate button called an external AI service. It could be used right away without signup or payment. Referring to YouTube and community material, he first made the single task of generating formulas into a product.

The convenience the product offered could be explained with a short example. In a usage note published at the time, the request "remove the last four characters from a string" became the formula =LEFT(A1,LEN(A1)-4). Users could describe the result they wanted without knowing how to combine LEFT and LEN. It was a service that narrowed the distance between what someone wanted to do at work and Excel syntax.

Word of Mouth from Reddit to TikTok

Bressler posted on Reddit's Excel community looking for people to try the product. A user who saw the response suggested he share it in other communities, and he posted the product to "Internet Is Beautiful." Afterward, when large TikTok creators introduced the product, smaller accounts followed. A story that started among Excel users spread as it moved into short demo videos.

As visitors grew, AI usage costs grew with them. According to Bressler's account, OpenAI bills reached about $5,000 within the first few weeks. In a service opened without usage limits, costs accrued every time a user requested a formula. He opened a sponsorship page, collected thousands of dollars from hundreds of people, and in the meantime prepared a subscription service.

From Free Use to Subscription

In September 2022 he launched a service with login and payment. It was still unknown whether people who had used it free would actually pay, but the first purchase happened within five minutes of release. The approach was to let people use it fully first, then introduce login, request limits, and a paid subscription in turn. For people already using it repeatedly, there was now a reason to keep using it even by subscribing.

The pricing plan he described in a March 2023 interview limited free users to five formula requests a month and gave unlimited use for $6.99 a month. Bressler explained that the free allowance was enough for most users and that the small number who used Excel heavily became paying customers. The monthly recurring revenue he disclosed then was over $14,000. The usage gap between people who occasionally needed one formula and people who got help all through their work became the basis of the revenue model.

Competition and Managing Users

The environment that made launching easy was open to competitors too. In a 2023 interview Bressler said about thirty people had built Excel AI sites following his idea. Formula accuracy, an early competitive edge, also became hard to differentiate as language models advanced. Improvements to outside models raised product performance while they could also weaken the reason to use a separate tool.

He also paid attention to how people used the product after signing up. He set up different emails and guidance messages based on what questions users asked, how often they visited, and whether they were free or paying customers. He distinguished people who signed up with a company email as well. Even within the same product, purposes and skill levels differed, and he reflected that difference in customer guidance.

Customer Conversations and Product Expansion

He found the direction for expanding the product in conversations with users. For over a year Bressler opened consultation time to both free and paying customers and heard about their real work processes and use cases three to five times a week. It was a chance to understand what remained before and after requesting a single formula.

He also made a way into the spreadsheet where users worked. The Excel add-in supported not only formula generation and explanation but also text classification, information extraction, and sentiment analysis. Beyond getting an answer from the website and carrying it over, there was now a path to call the AI from the Excel screen they were working in.

Formula Bot expanded into a tool that creates tables and charts and analyzes data when you upload a file and ask questions. It added connections to Google Sheets, Google Analytics, and similar data, along with a feature classifying the sentiment of customer reviews. Calculating numbers and organizing written material came into the same product. The work he had done as a marketing analyst carried over into the product's scope.

Outsourced Development and a Redesigned Interface

He also added hands for development. When monthly recurring revenue reached about $5,000, Bressler asked Zeroic, a Bubble development shop, for help. In a 2025 interview he explained that he works with two outside developers, and that when he builds the basic data processing flow they improve performance and security. He kept the organization small while buying other people's time for specialized development work.

After features grew, he reorganized the screen. Bressler said he removed about 30 percent of buttons and sections and gathered several features into a single conversation window, improving conversion by 45 percent. It was a change that reduced the burden of users hunting for where a feature was.

Growth Plateau and Search Traffic

The early word of mouth did not continue either. When visitor growth stalled from mid-2023 to late 2024, he began spending more time on search exposure and advertising in 2025. Free tools that convert PDF to Excel or generate SQL became major search entry points. It was a setup where visitors solved a task they needed finished right away and were introduced to broader analysis features.

In a May 2025 interview Bressler said he reached $500,000 in annual recurring revenue in 2024. At the time the subscription cost $15 to $35 a month, and nearly all revenue came from subscriptions. As the product that started with formula generation took on more analysis work, its price rose too.

Bressler ran the business without outside investment and pursued a scale that fit his life. In 2025 he explained that he split his time half and half between product development and marketing. It was an operating style of sharing development with outside experts and spending his own time gathering customers. He said he is satisfied to keep the business going with good income and a calm life.

Becoming Better Analyst

As of September 2026 the service uses the name Better Analyst. The official guidance explains the rename by saying the product's scope has grown from connecting data to organizing, analyzing, building dashboards and reports, and automating repeated work. Existing accounts and work were kept as they were. The product took on more work than the name first given to it could contain.

The expanded product includes features to register company-approved metric definitions and relationships between data, and to repeat the same analysis on a set schedule. For example, it builds a report reflecting the definition of revenue the company uses and refreshes it with new data the next week. By carrying the customer's business standards and repeat schedule, a tool for getting one line of formula grew into a workspace for continuing everyday analysis.