Our focus this week is on Bettersheets - a company that provides a series of short video tutorials to help improve your Google Sheets skills. The tagline sums it up:
"everyone uses Google Sheets, now make better sheets".
Bettersheets has gone from $0 in revenue to a forecasted $20k in revenue in 4 months (~1000 sales at ~$20 unit value). The majority of these sales have come from AppSumo. That's a mighty impressive burst of growth for a business that only started after lockdown.
I first came across this business when the founder Andrew Kamphey launched the Newsletter Virtual Mall on Product Hunt last month. It became the #2 product of the day.
What stood out for me was 1) how smart a growth tool this was to help sell his course and 2) how cool a format it was to actually discover interesting newsletters to subscribe to. I'm personally always on the hunt for interesting/niche newsletters and this was an innovative visual way of solving exactly that.
Growth tools seem to be popping up more and more as a cost effective way for indie makers to get their products noticed. Dru from Trends.vc (podcast guest below) recently featured Growth Tools as a trend. His analysis is definitely worth checking out if you're thinking of trying something similar to help accelerate your launch.
Anyway, Kudos to Andrew and Bettersheets - definitely one to watch. The space in general is heating up as low code and no-code makers realise the power of using Google Sheets/Airtable and other simple data models to power relational databases for product development.
The Four Kinds of Side Hustles - Justin Mares
Life Capital - A Deep Dive into the Past, Present, & Future of Income Share Agreements - Erik Torenberg
Options, not Roadmaps - Ryan Singer of Basecamp
Subscriptions Is Perfectly Fine; But Community Can Give You More — Jacob Cohen Donnelly
Core Web Vitals – Wix vs. WordPress, Shopify vs. Shopware – What’s fastest? - Johannes Beus
Persisting Through Failures to Find a Winning Trend with Dru Riley of Trends.vc - Indie Hackers Podcast Episode #173
Tom Osman, Arvid Kahl of Zero to Sold - Makerpad Podcast Episode #33
Shawn North of Vidlive.co discusses how his 1 person, micro SaaS business has found a profitable niche (mostly amongst church organisers who want to embed FB live on their websites!). This business may be relatively small ($4k MRR) but it is COVID anti-fragile in the truest sense of the meaning.
Craig@cdcwatson
@hunterwalk @homebrew Ok replace *preference* with any equity type and the same charade applies. If they pitched you categorically saying they'd never go public or sell, would you invest? Seems like an illogical argument when you invert it.
5:56 PM · Sep 12, 2020
1 Like
🚨Humblebrag alert: I had a good back and forth thread with Hunter Walk - one of the more prominent VCs on Twitter. I basically called out his startup exit argument which was BS in my view. Having raised venture money in the past and learnt about the dark side of it, I felt compelled to speak up here ;)
Andrew Warner@AndrewWarner
This was Nathan’s best. Dochub is a strong business & Nathan had him shop it to buyers on video.
Nathan Latka @NathanLatka
"I'd pay $20m" @TimSchu (buyer) "I value the business at $40m" Chris Devor of @dochubapp "I think this is $50m+ valuation" says @AndrewWarner What happened? Did they do a deal live? Watch: https://t.co/bXVu0ORoAI
9:27 PM · Sep 10, 2020
2 Reposts · 22 Likes
I watched this live Youtube pitch extravaganza. It was kind of wild to see a company like DocHub sharing its numbers publicly as potential acquirers put forward their best offers in realtime. Think SharkTank meets BigBrother 🦈 👁
Jack Butcher@jackbutcher
Sell earlier, build better.
1:17 PM · Sep 16, 2020
6 Reposts · 88 Likes
Short and sweet. Every bootstrapped business could over-index on this one.