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I Make $30K/Month From the Most Boring Website on the Internet

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Oct 28, 2026

Jake built a simple, boring website called Excel Exercises. The main goal of the site? Help people learn Excel… that’s it! In this episode, we’ll dive into how this website makes $30K/month, how he built and grew it with very little effort, and his advice for people looking for dead-simple app ideas in 2026.

Simple apps making millions: https://clickhubspot.com/guvq

Say hi to Jake: https://x.com/shimota_tweets
Check out Excel Exercises: https://excelexercises.com/

🔔 Follow the Second Channel: @StarterStoryBuild
🏁 We're hiring: starterstory.com/jobs

This video is an educational case study of this founder’s experience. It is not financial advice and does not guarantee any income or results. Every business is different and your results may vary.

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I built a web app called ExcelExercises com

It's currently making 30 000 to 35 000 a month

I want you to meet Jake

He built this really simple website

that literally does just one thing

He started it as a side project

working on it on nights and weekends

weekends but today that simple website makes over 30 000 a month

And the craziest part to me honestly

is just how simple this website is

I woke up one day and had a notification

that someone had paid me 50

I looked at the site and I was like

this has to be a mistake

So I invited Jake onto the channel

to break everything down for us

And in this episode we're gonna dive into

this dead simple website that today

makes over 30 000 a month

how he grew it to where it's at today

and his advice for anyone looking

for their own simple website idea just like his

Trust me this is one you're not gonna wanna miss

Let's dive in

I'm Gus and this is Starter Story

All right Jake welcome to Starter Story man

Super excited to have you on the channel

Could you share with us who you are

what you built and what's your story

Yeah my name's Jake

I built a web app called ExcelExercises com

It's currently making 30 000 to 35 000 a month

I built it five or six years ago

and it was sort of a side project

that I would work on nights and weekends

weekends because I always had a full time job

or was in grad school or something like that

But I quit my job two years ago

went full time on it

and I've grown it about 5X since then

Cool man yeah I'm super excited

to talk about Excel Exercises

I learned about this through

our Starter Story case study database

and we got connected after that

But for people who are not familiar with it

could you just explain what Excel Exercises is

in a few sentences and who some of your users are

Yeah it teaches Excel functions and keyboard shortcuts

through hands on exercises and simulations

rather than through videos

So really used by anyone who's trying to learn Excel

A lot of times that's precipitated

by some sort of career change

like someone graduating college

and looking for their first job

or someone changing jobs

or even someone who got a new job

and may have exaggerated their abilities a little bit

and wanting to cover their bases now

So yeah I really see it all

That's funny because I feel like

maybe not as much anymore

but when I was coming out of college or whatever

one of the lines in my resume was good at Excel basically

Proficient yeah

Proficient yeah proficient at Excel

Always not true

Yeah almost never

Yeah but you know

Excel Exercises would have been good for me back then

Let's talk about just some of the numbers

around the business

Could you pull up your Stripe dashboard

or whatever you use

show off the revenue so the audience

can see that this thing's legit

Yeah so it's a freemium business model

where I offer a few free lessons up front

front and then have a hard paywall after that

So I find that the free lessons are necessary

because a lot of people haven't used something like this

and don't really understand what it is

So I need to give them a sample

so they can see how it's different

before I ask them to pay

So past four weeks

done about a little over 30 000 in revenue

I've had about 50 000 visitors on the website

during that time

Of those about 2 500 are active paying subscribers

right now

And it's all automated

so I can go on vacation and it kind of runs itself

So it's been pretty nice

Man I just love how simple Jake's website is

To me it's honestly proof

that you do not need a complicated idea

in order to be successful

If you are interested in other similar

simple app ideas just like Jake's

at the link in the description

we have a database to hundreds of successful app ideas

that are almost too simple to believe

Inside you're gonna find a ton of data

data on stuff like revenue profits growth tactics

all the stuff that you need to validate your idea

and start building

So if you want this it's 100 for free

Just download it at the link in the description below

All right let's get back to the story

Okay I think what I love about this

is it feels so simple right

You're just essentially teaching people how to use Excel

It's a perfectly named website excelexercises com

But how did you get here

What's your background

How do you get to the point where you build

this really simple website

that now does around 30 000 a month

month Yeah so I studied finance in college

but after graduating I was just really curious

about apps and how they were made

and how they got onto the App Store from start to finish

finish So I had never had any exposure to anything tech related

So I just sat in my parents basement for a long time

and watched YouTube videos and taught myself to code

and kind of figured out how apps were made

And I started making my own like a mobile app

started making an iPhone app just for fun

That's a different story but yeah

I would just come home from work

and go straight to my computer

and figure out how to make things online

That was kind of the old days of watching YouTube videos

probably going on like Stack Overflow

or something like that

Yeah no obviously it's all just thought and codecs

Okay so you're kind of tinkering around

How do you find this idea

What's the genesis of Excel exercises

Yeah so I was working in finance at the time

There was a point in my life where I'd put on a suit

suit and go into the office every day

And every new employee at this firm

had to take this online Excel training

That was this really long collection of videos about Excel

And that was about as fun and interesting as it sounds

So I would kind of zone out and like lose focus

and fall asleep during these videos

I felt like I wasn't retaining a lot of it

So I was like there should be a better way to learn Excel

I don't know what that is

Later on I was doing like a Duolingo lesson

And then I was like Duolingo but for Excel

And then I was like I should make this

So this was my first web project

I started building it out really slowly at first

And it was always just like on the internet

I didn't have a separate development

and production environment

It was all just out there

I hadn't told anybody about it

I hadn't promoted it at all

It was really far from being ready

But I woke up one day and had a notification

that someone had paid me 50

And I looked at the site and I was like

this has to be a mistake because it looks scary

It's really ugly

It looks like Russian hackers

are gonna steal your identity

Over the next couple of weeks

a few more sales trickled in like that

And that was the validation that I needed

You know it was like they believed in the idea

and the concept so much that they were willing

to pay for it despite the execution at the time

I love that

You know you kind of didn't exactly have

like that intention of initially turning it

into something that was gonna make as much money

as it makes now but you kind of got that validation

Let's talk a little bit about the build

I know you started talking about that a little bit

but walk me through the build timeline

How long did it take you to kind of get

a good working version and anything else

about how you built this

Yeah well the first working version took months

I had no idea what I was doing

I was just going on YouTube and Stack Overflow

and these different forums and like copying

copying and pasting code snippets and tweaking it so that it worked

One of the big challenges up front was building tables

that look and feel like a real spreadsheet

So people see a table that looks kind of like Excel

but doesn't behave like Excel or like Google Sheets

or whatever then they get sort of frustrated and confused

So I had to learn how to make it look

and act like a real spreadsheet

On that topic what's the tech stack or tools

tools that you use to build this or that you currently use

to run Excel exercises

So I keep it really simple

Most of my code is just like HTML and CSS

and plain vanilla JavaScript that I copied

off of Stack Overflow six years ago

And now whatever Claude writes in

I don't know what Claude's writing

But yeah so I built it on GCP

So my bill is less than a hundred bucks a month usually

Google Analytics is free

SendGrid it's email marketing software

That's my only like regular recurring expense

That's 35 bucks a month

month And then Stripe Fees I think that's like some percentage

and some number of cents per month

Cool pretty light pretty profitable

I think that's pretty awesome

Okay let's talk about just the growth story

So now you're at 30K per month you mentioned

You kind of don't really work on it all that much

or actively

I'm assuming that was a little bit different

in the early days

Let's talk a little bit about the early days

at zero maybe to 10K per month

How'd you get this off the ground

Yeah how did you start getting traction

beyond those initial sales that trickled in

So from zero to 10K when I was getting this started

I think I posted on Reddit a couple times

but real growth came from SEO

And what this looked like was just me vomiting

a bunch of words onto as many pages as I could

for a really really long time

So I had these blog articles

about different Excel functions

but what really grew the site was sort of counterintuitive

but I basically wrote a whole bunch of text

on my landing page

I wrote I think like 1 500 to 2 000 words

about like okay here's what this is

Here's how you're gonna learn Excel

Here's why it's better than watching videos

And so that is what got me indexed

and got me picked up by the search engines

And so that got me the most traffic

and it was also the highest intent traffic

So kind of counterintuitive

a lot of like the online marketing gurus were saying like

hey this is wrong

You shouldn't have this much text on your homepage

but I kept it because I was like

this is where all my sales are coming from

And then from 10K to 30K I started paid advertising

So that was the biggest turning point in terms of growth

but also in terms of how I think about the business

because when all your traffic is free and organic

and you have really low operating costs

then every new subscription is like you know

pure profit margin

So you don't really have to think about it that hard

Now when you get into a world with paid marketing

and paid user acquisition

you kind of have to think about how much did it cost me

to acquire this new customer

How much am I probably gonna make

Also from 10 to 30 something that accelerated growth

was that I started getting more university

and corporate deals

I think people would call it like a product led growth

motion where someone tries my training

they like it a lot they go to work and they tell their boss

like hey we should get everyone on the team to do this

And then the boss reaches out to me and says

hey can I sign up like 50 people

Yeah that's really smart

I could definitely see that

I already think of like other jobs I've had where

you know some kind of training like this was necessary

And yeah this would have totally been something

that I would have done or would have proposed

to my boss to do

A lot of people who watch Starter Story are looking

for simple ideas kind of like Excel exercises

not that it's easy but just sort of like a simple concept

For someone who's watching this looking for you know

ideas simple ideas what are some pieces of advice

advice or steps you would encourage them to take

So I think the first thing you should do is look

for a problem that you have intimate knowledge about

in order to create a great product

Otherwise you're not gonna understand the mindset

the goals and the way people think about this

Like I see a lot of people on Twitter who go okay

this guy made a lot of money with a looks maxing app

So now I'm gonna make a looks maxing app

I don't know if that's something that you do then sure

But if that's not something that you know about

you're not gonna be able to create a great product

I think step two is to just get it into people's hands

as soon as possible

For me that looked like just having it on the internet

and waiting for some strangers to stumble in

and pay for it way before I thought it was ready

I see a lot of people today who have just been building

for like months on end or years on end

They're trying to make it perfect

If you're not embarrassed by the first iteration

then you've waited too long

That last piece of advice I think could kind of be overlooked

You know I've heard that a lot from a lot of people

who have kind of given very similar advice

Getting it into people's hands feels like probably

the hardest part especially for you know

know builders who like to sit behind their computer

and you know ship code or whatever

But getting it and talking to people

is probably like the most high impact thing you can do

I wanna see more of how Excel exercises work

So could you just show us

Yeah so I have this dashboard where all my lessons show up

We have a couple of leaderboards

This person who's logged in and logged in

almost every day for a year pretty crazy

We have some realistic projects that

where you actually download a data file

and you can follow along to create like a cool dashboard

But most of the exercises are just in the browser

So if I do like a SUMIF

So it walks through like the SUMIF function

different inputs that you might use

This one is introducing the sum range

So it says okay I use SUMIF to calculate

the total amount of orders with more than three units

So or let's make a mistake

So if I say like greater than three without the quotes

this guy kind of tells me

oh you need to put quotes around the criteria

So do that

So then you get points

you can advance through the lessons

lessons and then it's a lot of repetition

and that's how you learn Excel by getting hands on

That's a big part of it

Man Jake that's so cool

I love how simple it is and just like easy to understand

One of the final questions we ask to every guest

that comes to the Star Story is

you know if you were standing on your shoulders

you know four or five years ago when you launched this

or for like all the people watching

who are just getting started

what advice would you give to yourself

I think especially for someone getting started

with paid ads I think knowing the granular unit economics

of what you're selling is really important

Stripe gives you one LTV metric

for all of your subscriptions for all time

for all your products across all prices

with discounts or bundles or upsells

And they just kind of condense that into one LTV number

When in reality your different segments

have different lifetime values

they have different acquisition costs

And so for a long time I was looking at my average LTV

and my average customer acquisition costs

and I saw that the ratio was about three to one

where you want it to be

And so I was like okay that's great

But I wasn't growing as fast as I thought I should be

So I exported all my payments into a spreadsheet

separated them out by monthly and annual

And I found that my annual customers were really profitable

My monthly customers were barely turning a profit

and the payback period was like four or five months

What I ended up doing was doubling my monthly price

and keeping my annual price the same

And that's when growth really took off

but that wouldn't have happened

if I had done that deeper digging and segmentation

Well Jake that's great advice

Thanks so much for coming on Starter Story

Amazing story and congrats on your success man

Thanks

All right just wrapped up with Jake

I mean it doesn't get any simpler than that

One of the reasons I wanted to have him on the channel

it's just this simple website where you practice Excel

you hit a paywall and that's it

Obviously a lot has changed in the web app space

over the last four or five years since he built this

But I think the big lesson is like he said in the episode

identify a problem maybe you experience

try and solve it with a really simple solution

And that will be maybe an opportunity for you

With that in mind

at the link in the description

you can find our database of really simple app ideas

just like Jake's

Click the link in the description

and download that 100 for free

All right guys I hope you enjoyed that one

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No-code Airtable AP...	$20K/mo
Pdf bank statement ...	$40K/mo
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