Building a $5k/mo lifestyle business by leveraging lifetime deals

After a small exit and a failed SaaS, Andrew Kamphey built a business in 24 hours by focusing on what he knew best: spreadsheets.

Now, Better Sheets is a lifestyle business capable of supporting his family as they travel Southeast Asia.

I caught up with him to learn about his journey — here's what he had to say. 👇

Taking the leap

I used Google Apps Script to automate my job away. I didn’t know it at the time, but five years of using Apps Script was five years of learning how to code.

Better Sheets wasn’t even an idea in my mind at that point. I was just the “Google Sheets Guy” in the office and thought it was a fluke. Some weird dark wizard of spreadsheets in the corner of an entertainment startup where everyone else had regular jobs.

I loved helping people solve their problems, but I also dreamed of indie hacking. In 2018, I quit and went off on my own.

A failure that led to a success

I built a site and newsletter about influencer marketing that I eventually sold for $37k. When I sold them, they had made about $12k in the previous 12 months.

To me, building a SaaS was the dream, and over the next two years, I built a SaaS called Hypeletter. But nothing came of it. We grew it to $200/mo in revenue and got stuck.

It was my cofounder, when I was trying to build that SaaS, who convinced me that what I did with spreadsheets was valuable; not just some fluke.

We were trying to come up with a domain for the SaaS and I put together a quick rating system in Sheets that automatically calculated a score for each domain based on a number of factors, like how long the name was, if the dot com was available, and even if the name had connotations we wanted to have in it. To me, this was a simple sheet. To him, it was incredible.

Finally, in 2020, my SaaS had failed and I was stuck inside. And that's when I fulfilled my dream of truly indie hacking.

Building a lifestyle business

I built a simple video library and monetized it as my full-time income.

In one 24-hour period, I recorded eight videos with Loom. It’s cheap and it hosts the videos for you. To save time, I told myself, “No editing”, and stuck to it. Then, I put four videos up for free, and four behind a paywall via a Gumroad landing page. Gumroad is free until you make money, so it’s great when you don't know if something will work. For the landing page, I used Carrd.

Then, I launched Better Sheets. It made $390 the first month, and then took off with AppSumo.

These days, Better Sheets is a Ruby on Rails site hosted on Heroku. I learned to code from a FreeCodeCamp YouTube video with John from Codemy. Then, I bought a Rails Tutorial from Learn Enough.

Validating a lifestyle business

You usually hear about validation and product-market fit as a pull — people are using your product and pulling it from you. And many times, you see huge revenue numbers or user numbers just barreling on and on.

But, in my case, the validation was literally one customer. One solitary user validated Better Sheets for me. And it was the very first buyer.

I launched on a Saturday and Carlos bought Better Sheets on Monday. He must have come from either Twitter or IH.

Within a couple hours of the first sale, he sent me an email. In it, was a before-and-after screenshot of his dashboard. He literally bought Better Sheets, watched all eight videos and immediately made his dashboard better.

That was all I needed. It told me that it worked.

Revenue streams

Better Sheets is currently doing around $5k a month in revenue.

I sell templates, tools, and tutorials. My income stream is diversified between individual purchases, monthly subscriptions, and lifetime deals. I also diversify my income between payment processors like Stripe and Gumroad, and platforms like Udemy and YouTube.

Here's the breakdown:

• Templates and tools via Gumroad: 12% of revenue

• Subscriptions and consulting via Stripe: 22%

• Lifetime deals via AppSumo: 50%

• AppSumo Marketplace: 4%

• Courses via Udemy: 10%

• Ad Revenue via YouTube: 2%

• Google Sheets add ons: 0% (free)

Leveraging lifetime deals

Inspired by MakerPad’s lifetime pricing, I launched with a lifetime deal (LTD). It seemed like the right thing to do because I didn’t know if I would continue adding more videos, and customers shouldn’t be on the hook to pay monthly if there may not be any updates. Plus, it was peak Covid, and everyone was trying to save as much money as possible. New purchases were made with skepticism and all subscriptions were quickly canceled.

I thought I needed to do LTDs, and I thought it would be a disadvantage since my revenue wouldn't be recurring. Turns out, it wasn’t a disadvantage at all. In fact, it quickly became my unfair advantage.

It enabled me to add my product to AppSumo and, after about a month, AppSumo asked for submissions to their “Sumo-ling Spotlight”, which is now the AppSumo Marketplace — a self-hosted marketplace.

Better Sheets was picked from over 700 submissions to be the first spotlight. I ended up going from a dozen customers to over 1,000 in a few months.

AppSumo buyers were the exact target audience for Better Sheets — they used Google Sheets as a keystone in their business operations.

And it didn't freeze my customers' lifetime value like I thought it might. I started providing more value by way of consulting when customers need help, which means higher LTV.

Growing via marketplaces

So my biggest growth came from marketplaces. The marketplaces attract buyers and my job is to build a wonderful product for them to host.

AppSumo was the first and biggest. Udemy now hosts my courses and makes up roughly 10% of my monthly revenue. YouTube could be considered in this 3rd party group too, as I monetize with Ad Revenue.

These three platforms have been the cause of almost all my growth. Despite having a solid following on social media, I don’t do well at promoting there.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it’ll be the same for you. Marketplaces are only great when you sell to the people who buy on those marketplaces.

To grow my subscriptions, the only thing I did was email my list and add it to my pricing page. People choose it if they like that model.

Avoiding SEO FOMO

I've done some SEO as well. I made a formula database, wrote blogs, and made free tools. Some of that traffic converts, but very little, percentage-wise, since so much of the traffic is informational. People get their answers and leave.

I should do more. Every time I go away from SEO for three to six months, it comes roaring back into my life.

The problem is that it always takes months and months to see the changes I made on some random afternoon. I wish there was a way to get results faster. If I had a tighter feedback loop, I might prioritize it more.

As it is, I’m constantly haunted by the 100 improvements I could have made in the last 90 to 180 days.

A shift toward consulting

I created this business not to profit from it monetarily, but to have the control and independence.

I can sometimes get carried away with MRR goals and spreadsheets full of profits and hourly rates. But as long as a business can sustain my lifestyle and those around me, then everything is gravy. Everything else is a cherry on top.

Instead of maximizing for profits, I like to think I’m maximizing for life.

That said, I realized recently that I’ll have a huge bill in the next few years for my son’s education. I need to put away some cash quickly to ease my anxiety over that.

And I'm realizing that I haven't been focusing enough on consulting. Most of my day-to-day efforts go toward making a larger Youtube library and building courses for Udemy. And these are good revenue streams, but consulting can and does regularly overshadow them.

I may try to do a better job of funneling customers into consulting clients moving forward.

Lifestyle business longevity

I’ve run Better Sheets for four years. It pays my bills. And I love it — I love solving the little puzzles people have and automating manual processes away. I want to keep it going for at least another ten years.

I think that enjoying the process is the key to longevity, and I’ve got that. But I need a plan too. What do I need to do now, this week/month/year, to make it a reality in ten years? And to pay for my son’s schooling?

I don’t know.

And knowing I don’t know is actually very helpful.

Parting advice

I think the best advice I can give is this: Just ask.

If you want to know something, ask someone. Indie hackers are very open and willing to pay it forward. You just need to be curious and ask.

We think we’re so unique and then find out years later that others are going through the same experience, anxiety, and imposter syndrome we went through.

Join a meetup. Hackagu in Canggu, Bali has been instrumental in knowing what others like me are going through every week. These types of groups exist anywhere and if they don’t, you can organize them yourself.

In fact, I organized one once. Only one person showed up. And that person became the cofounder of my first SaaS.

One RSVP can change your life.

Follow along

If you'd like to follow along, you can find me on X and YouTube, or check out Better Sheets.