Case study: Excel AI bot makes projected $164,850 profit in 12 months

Statistics:

• Website: FormulaBot.com
• Launched On: 28th of August, 2022
• Estimated Total Revenue: $192,760
• Estimated Total Profit: $164,850
• Monthly Website Traffic: 379,000
• Estimated Revenue Last Month (August): $18,677
• Estimated Profit Last Month (August): $16,249

Description:

Founded by David Bressler in late of August 2022, FormulaBot (formerly known as excelformulabot.com) is an AI platform that provides users with Excel formulas based on text instructions in seconds, and also analyzes their data.

David was able to monetize this market gap by integrating the OpenAI API and providing the total addressable market of 750 million Excel users with a user-friendly all-in-one platform. Since its launch, FormulaBot has been able to establish itself as a leader in the AI excel bot niche, and amassed over 650,000 freemium users and 10,900 paid users.

Business Model:

This AI business runs on a subscription pricing model, whilst also offering a freemium version that allows users to unlock 5 formulas generations and 10 data analyzer messages per month. The paid subscription package allows for unlimited generations for each usage and costs $6.99 per month or $75 yearly.

According to their Acquire.com listing, FormulaBot has been able to generate a total of $24,000 in revenue and $21,000 in profit for the month May. This gave them an impressive profit margin of 87.5%. David attributes the healthy margins on the fact that the formulas require very little text and ChatGPT tokens, and also because he grew his business organically with little overheads.

Extrapolating the metrics provided on the Acquire.com listing as well as on his personal twitter, it is estimated that David has been able to generate a total of $192,000 in revenue with $164,000 in profit to date. He also listed FormulaBot for sale earlier in May with an asking price of $800K.

Growth Strategy:

FormulaBot used a combination of referral and organic traffic to become a market leader in their field. Their initial launch strategy consisted of David sharing his tool on Reddit, which got over 10,000 upvotes and was able to drive over 81,000 visitors to his website. This validated the demand for his MVP, and from there he went on to build the entire software. The second launch strategy consisted of listing the new project on Product Hunt, which allowed David to get his first significant batch of paying customers.

From there, the primary growth strategy has revolved around SEO as FormulaBot currently drives half of their entire website visitors from this organic traffic channel. It ranks top spots for key terms such as “Excel formula generator”, “Excel AI”, and Excel formula maker” which is driving most of their clicks. David mentioned on his twitter that the initial keyword-rich domain name (excelformulabot.com) has definitely helped jumpstart the success with SEO traffic.

Secondary strategies that have helped FormulaBot capture visitors has been from referral traffic. The two biggest referral sources are review posts done independently by Influencer Marketing Hub and Caracol (Colombia’s main news broadcaster). Together these two platforms get 15 million website visitors per month. Other referral traffic has come from viral user-generated-content reviewing their tool like this TikTok video by Jordanueva, which drove over 200,000 views.

Conversion Strategy:

FormulaBot has been able to significantly reduce the buying friction by including a section on their landing page which allows users to realize how much money they can save by signing up for their paid tool.

Tech Stack:

• Bubble
• Sendinblue (now "Brevo")
• Stripe
• OpenAI

Key Takeaways:

Solving a real market problem and validating the demand for it before entirely building the product is key. If your business helps users make or save more money, make sure to include a section on the landing page whereby those statistics are clearly communicated as this will help you improve conversion rates.

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