560: $250k Selling Spreadsheets on Etsy in Under 2 Years

0:01She sold over 250 grand worth of digital products. What's up, what's up, Nick Loper here. Welcome to the Side Hustle Show, because your nine to five may make you a living, but your five to nine makes you alive. As you guys know, I love a business that you can get paid over and over again from work you do once. Blogging checks that box, online courses checks that box, YouTube checks that box, and the business model that we're exploring today definitely does as well. So my guest has sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of spreadsheets, spreadsheets on the internet. If the idea of strangers giving you money for Excel files gets you fired up like it does for me, stick around in this one to learn what products to create and how to set them up for sales success.

0:46Emily McDermott, welcome to The Side Hustle Show. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. You bet you can find Emily at itsemilymcdermott.com. If you're new to the show, thank you for tuning in. Welcome. The Side Hustle show has been my labor of love for almost 10 years now. I like to say it's the business podcast, you can actually apply, meaning it's light on the theory and heavy on the tried and true tactics. There are hundreds of episodes and ideas and stories in the archives. But if you go to hustle that show and answer a few short multiple choice questions, I would like to build you a custom curated playlist that you can add to your device, learn what works and you start making more money.

1:26Once again, that's at hustle.show for your personalized playlist. Emily, I want to start off. So you were selling printables on Etsy. That was kind of the business model everybody was talking about. And then there was a slight pivot to that strategy to this spreadsheet model that really started to have things take off for you. Is that correct? Yeah, absolutely. So I first started off selling printables on an Etsy shop because that's kind of what everyone was doing. And that's what I was familiar with. And what I kept hearing about everywhere is that one way to quickly monetize an online business is by selling printable PDF files.

2:03I was really, really serious about working for myself and making a full-time income on my own. So I wanted to see how I could expand my income kind of without guessing at it. I wanted a surefire way to make this new online business of mine work. So I discovered a tool called eRank that I saw some other Etsy gurus talking about online. And on eRank, I learned about something called a long tail keyword. And a long tail keyword is essentially a product name or something that someone is searching for on Etsy that has a high degree of demand from buyers and a low degree of competition from other sellers.

2:48So in this process, I discovered that budget spreadsheets, Google Sheets templates, Excel templates, all of the above, were getting a lot of demand, but there wasn't a lot of competition. There wasn't a lot of other sellers serving that demand. Even in like late 2020, early 2021, that seems from the outside looking in, that seems like it would be late to the game, but you're saying, oh, there's still room to play in even at that stage. Absolutely. Yeah. The other thing was, is that the sellers that were there selling Google Sheets templates, Excel templates, they weren't targeting my target audience, which was young women in their 20s looking to manage their finances on their own.

3:29No one was really targeting them either. All of the spreadsheets were kind of greens and blues. And I kind of came out with something that I personally want to use, which was something pink and orange and full of fun colors and fun graphs. So I like to think that I was able to target a gap in the market that wasn't being served very well. I started with a$5 spreadsheet and I knew I was on to something big because within the first 24 hours, I'd made my first sale. And I thought, wow, keyword research is really, really important. Who would have thought, you know, go where the demand already is. No, I love this from a lot of different angles.

4:08Number one, you know, doing that research saying like, oh, people are searching for this. It seems to be underserved. But also, yeah, there's already some level of existing competition, but I could spin it slightly different to target a slightly different audience just in the presentation of the product itself. And this gets my gears turning because I got half a dozen spreadsheets that I use on a daily or monthly basis. Like, shoot, should I package these templates? You know, I'm probably not the target customer for this stuff. It's like, I love making Excel spreadsheets. Google, you know, it's kind of a fun, nerdy thing.

4:39and making sure the formulas and everything else work. Even if you need them, maybe you don't. But it's just like the idea that somebody would go out and buy that instead of making it for themselves. Really, really cool. So eRank, is it a Chrome plugin, a separate standalone piece of software that you use to do this initial research? Yeah, so it's just a website, eRank.com. It's pretty low cost. I think it's$7.99 a month or something like that. It's very easy to use. What I did when I started was I just typed in kind of generic words that covered my niche, which was budgeting. Typed in the word budget and saw what comes up because it kind of spits out a list of recommendations for you.

5:22And you can sort that list of ideas by how much competition it has or how much demand a particular keyword has. Is there a sweet spot that you're looking for in terms of the search volume? I don't know if they give you specific metrics. Oh, it gets searched a thousand times a month or, you know, a competition level below a certain metric. E-rank does kind of color code things. So if it's green, if demand or competition is green, that means it's you're good to go. And if it's red, it means it's really highly competitive or absolutely no one is searching for it. So I usually use those metrics. But I will say that in my experience, if you do see a keyword that is under 2000 for competition, that is a very generally a very easy keyword to rank for.

6:13Just in my experience of playing around with targeting different keywords and making products for it. This would be the primary keyword you're going to put in the title of the product that you're going to create. Exactly, exactly. And so this would also be the keyword that you're going to want to put in the very beginning of your product title on Etsy. That's very important. And you should also be duplicating that keyword in your product tags on Etsy, as well as in your product description. But very important to make sure that long tail keyword that you're targeting is the very beginning of your product title.

6:48Is it a thing to create a separate listing for different variations of that keyword. Like if somebody is looking for, you know, Google Sheets budget template and somebody is looking for Excel budget template spreadsheet, they're looking essentially for the same thing. But would you create, you know, two separate listings in that case? Personally, I do. I have always created separate listings for those things because I always like to imagine that I'm targeting a customer who is ready to buy. I'm targeting people that are not just shopping around or browsing, but people that are ready to make a purchase.

7:27And generally, those people know what they want. And they know if they have a Google account and want to use Google Sheets, or they know if they've paid for Excel, for example, and have that on their computer and want an Excel template. So for that reason, I recommend keeping them separate and just making it an easier purchasing decision for the buyer. Yeah, I'm sorry. I guess I probably could have come up with a better example there. So that makes total sense, right? Like, I'm going to give you, I'm going to give this to you in your preferred software of choice. But if it's like, you know, budget template versus budget planner versus budget spreadsheet or something, you know, does it make sense to kind of target each of those exact match keywords as an individual product?

8:12I don't think that I would. I never have. Usually, I would actually use E-rank to find out which one of those keywords kind of is the best in terms of competition and demand. So for example, I can tell you that the word budget planner would be very, very high competition and very difficult to rank for. but the word budget spreadsheet would have a little bit less competition. So I'd be much more likely to use a term like that or to target a term like that. Sorry. In my product. Okay. I'm staring at my podcast sponsor tracking spreadsheet right now. It's got the episode number, the air date, you know, a brief note about what the episode is about, you know, sponsor number one, sponsor number two.

9:00It just gets me excited about all these different potential templates that could be created, could be sold here. And somebody bought this thing within a day of putting it up. I think that goes to show you the power of tapping into these pre-existing marketplaces on the show in the past. We've called them buy buttons. Marketplaces go where the cash is already flowing. And Etsy is definitely one of these places where it's flowing. So you get that first sale. What happens after that? I realized, wow, I'm onto something here in this keyword research thing is really working. So I continued to use it to identify other spreadsheets within my niche and that would serve my target audience.

9:41So for example, I made a debt payoff calculator. I had a monthly budget spreadsheet, a budget by paycheck spreadsheet, and all of these terms were long tail keywords And they were picking up traction really quickly on Etsy, which was excellent. But where my business really took off into six-figure territory was when I decided to bundle a variety of these products into one higher-priced product that gave the customer an overall discount. So they were saving money. But because I had to find my target audience, I knew what they wanted. I had a good idea of what they wanted. And I knew they'd be a person who was looking to make a monthly budget.

10:24They were looking to pay off their debt and they were probably looking to organize their bills. And if I could just take all of those existing templates, plop them all together into one Google Sheets file, sell it for a higher price, which at the time was around$20 a file, that is where my business really took off. Okay. People kind of recognize the value of, well, I'm probably going to want all five or six of these different things individually. So I'll just get the higher priced things. You increased your average customer value in that point. Exactly. And I think a lot of times people get intimidated and they think, well, I could never sell a spreadsheet.

11:05I'm not good enough at it. Or I could never sell a$20,$30,$40 spreadsheet because I just don't have the advanced skills. But it's really not about the advanced level of your skills. It's about solving a pain point that a customer is experiencing. And it's also about offering them a complete transformation. Because at the end of the day, that's what people are buying with any digital product is a transformation. They want to go from point A to point B. And I can also almost guarantee you that they don't want to look at something all that complicated either. they want to see an easy solution that they can easily use too.

11:44Yeah, exactly. Were you a part of that customer avatar? Were you able to speak that language? Because like, well, I'm building this for myself first in a way. And so I kind of know what people are going to be into, what's going to resonate with them. Yes, actually. I really decided that my target audience was going to be someone like myself at the time, which was a woman in her mid-20s who had student loans to pay off and wanted to get on top of their finances. And that really helped me. Basically, what I did was I made a product that I wanted to use every day and that I actually do use every day to this day.

12:23Because if it's something, A, that you want to use and that you actually use and that actually excites you and it's helpful for you, there's an excellent chance that your target audience is going to feel the same way it's and it's not necessarily that your target audience has to be someone like you but it's certainly helpful when they at least share characteristics with you because there's really no one that you can speak to or market to better than people that you're familiar with or share traits with and i'm seeing so i'm at a pretty aero budget is the etsy shop and i see we do still have some printables up for sale here, kind of in the$2 to$5 range for those, whereas the spreadsheets are kind of in that$5 to$20 range.

13:10And so just because it's higher perceived value, it's customizable for the customer at the other end versus just being a static PDF, all of a sudden, I can command higher rates for that. Exactly. And I think another part of the reason that you're able to charge more for a spreadsheet is because of the amount of time that it saves people. So So instead of going to a printable file, for example, and writing in phone bill every month, month after month after month, you're printing off a paper and you're writing down phone bill and electricity bill and all of these things over and over and it's time consuming.

13:45But with a spreadsheet, you can say, hey, in five minutes, you can have your budget made and all you have to do is go to file, make a copy and just make a new copy of exactly that every month. You're saving a ton of time, which I think is really the biggest thing that drives the premium price. Were you an Excel nerd, like geeking out with macros and formulas and pivot tables and everything else? Or it's just like, I don't know, to what degree you need an advanced understanding of spreadsheets to be able to do this. That's the funny thing. So I took, I think, one course on Excel in university. Okay.

14:24And then five years after that, I was using Excel in a really, really basic manner, occasionally every few months in my job in my nine to five. But I really didn't know anything about Excel or Google Sheets. I actually never used Google Sheets before. okay i kind of self-taught myself off of things like youtube videos just playing around with it but it was really fun to me because i was well i mean i am kind of a nerd so things like this are really fun to me but i was thinking about like how can i make this something i want to use like how can i make this something that will make me manage my money better and it was it was exciting and I wanted to do it, but by no means is it complicated at all.

15:12Yeah, I think that's helpful. And I'm looking at some of these, at least the cover images of these, you know, they got, you know, they look nice. They've got, you know, some fancy pie charts and other ground. You see where your money is going type of things for these budget planners. But then, yeah, it just kind of gets your gears spinning on what other niches. And I guess maybe I got to go get myself a copy of e-rank so I can get our license to Eregs. I start playing around with what else might be in demand. So I'll do the same thing for YouTube with TubeBuddy, you know, punch in different keyword variations until it, you know, see whatever the highest number I can get.

15:46Cause it gives you kind of a balance of the search volume and the perceived competitiveness of that keyword too. And it kind of gives you a score at the end of the day. It's fun to optimize that and play around with that. You're heavy into budgeting, but like if you had to start another shop, is there a niche or other niches that you think would be interesting or ripe for replication here? Any kind of niche that targets online business owners, actually, or entrepreneurs, because there's a lot of people that are looking for quick, easy ways to plan out a new business, things like that. I'm surprised there's not more people targeting moms on Etsy, because so much of the viewership there is female.

16:27So that's one that I would target as well, if I were to make a new shop today. Yeah, I've seen some habit trackers. One of the ones that was a top seller a couple of years ago when I was looking, it was like 75 Hard, I think it's called. It's a crazy workout plan where it's like super intense for 75 days and maybe it's longer. I don't know. And so it's like, you know, here's the template to, you know, track all your workouts and your meal planning for this time. I use Personal Capital, which is now Empower to, you know, pull in all different accounts and it gives you like, well, here's your net worth number and you can track it over time.

16:59but we also keep a spreadsheet because it doesn't it doesn't pull in like everything everything it's you know maybe there's something there but yeah targeting a you know a majority female audience here something that would appeal to that and maybe it's a tool that you're already using or tool that you can dress up and improve the one that you're already using to make it look better like we've had habit trackers you know that have used personally that you know i've talked about probably selling those on the site too you know but a spreadsheet makes more sense than a printable because it's like, well, now the customer can go out and customize that.

17:32As a business owner, you worked hard to make that phone ring, but missing a business call, it's like watching money fly right out the window. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. It's the smarter way to run your business communications. Quo is the number one business phone system built for 2025, not 1995. In fact, it's rated the top choice for customer satisfaction with over 3 ,000 reviews on G2. Quo works right from an app on your phone or computer, and it means your team can share one number and collaborate on calls and texts, just like a shared inbox. And here is what is really cool, because if you can't answer the phone, Quo's AI agent can.

18:13It can qualify leads, it can route calls to the right person, and it's going to make sure no customer is ever left hanging. Think of it like having 24-7 support without the 24-7 payroll. More than 90 ,000 businesses are already running on Quo, from solo operators to growing teams. Try it free when you go to quo.com slash side hustle. That's q-u-o dot com slash side hustle. You can even keep your existing number. Quo. No missed calls, no missed customers. Did you know there's a disease running rampant alongside hustlers and new entrepreneurs. It's called superhero syndrome. Symptoms include a feeling like you got to do everything yourself, thinking you're the only one who can do it right, and struggling to let go of certain tasks.

18:58Does that sound familiar to anyone? But the good news is there is a cure. Our sponsor Indeed can help you find the best candidates for the roles you need to fill and find them fast. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs help you stand out and hire fast. With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. It's true. Sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed get 45 % more applications because every superhero needs an amazing sidekick. That's why for my next hire, I'm using Indeed.

19:30There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. Side Hustle Show listeners get a$75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash side hustle show. Just go to Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com slash SideHustleShow. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring. Indeed is all you need. And as far as file delivery, it's like you upload this thing once or is it just like a link to the Google Sheets file? How do you handle the delivery or how does Etsy handle that for you?

20:07With Google Sheets, what I do is I make a PDF file in Canva that kind of says, hey, this is where your download is at. Click this link here to access it. And then I just put a link to the Google Sheets file within that PDF. Okay, so that PDF is what gets delivered automatically and then they get their thing. And do they have to follow the instruction? Like, we'll make a copy to save it to your own drive. How does that part work? To make it easier for customers, what I do is I take the end of the URL. I'd have to look at it to remember the exact end part of the URL that I take off. And what I do is I add in template forward slash preview.

20:50And what that does is when someone clicks on that link, they'll get a screen that just has a big blue button that says access template in the top right corner. And they just click that and they now have their own copy of the Google Sheets template. If that doesn't work for them for some reason, they can always just go to file, make a copy, and that will work the same way. Okay. Yeah, because sometimes I get, you know, share requests for certain files. And it's like, you know, you don't need to request access to it. Just like save a copy to your own drive. But yeah, I was curious about that part.

21:23And then Excel, you're allowed to just send like the Excel, XX, you know, whatever it is, file extension file through Etsy. Yeah, exactly. So that's easy. You literally just upload the file, the Excel file itself to Etsy. Okay. Super cool. And as customers buy from you, I'm looking at like closing in on 30 ,000 lifetime sales through the Etsy shop, like five-star reviews. People love you selling lots of these things. Are you collecting emails or does Etsy allow you to get customer information so you can, Hey, I came up with the 2023 version of whatever it is that you need, you know, to kind of remarket to the same audience?

22:01People need to use Etsy as a way to build their email list. Because essentially, Etsy is a way to go find where your target audience is already hanging out online. It's a way to find them. And at the end of the day, not everybody is going to buy from you right away. A lot of people will need, or they could need a little more nurturing before they end up making a purchase from you. Maybe they want to hear your expertise on the topic first. So what I like to do is all over my Etsy shop, wherever I can, my shop banner and in my listing descriptions, and also in my product images, I like to remind people, hey, if you go to this URL, you can sign up and get access to my free budget library and join my newsletter.

22:50And I think that's so important because I think I gained 2000 people on my email list from Etsy alone over the last two and a half years. But I mean, that's free, right? Like those were free leads. I wasn't running Facebook ads to them or anything like that, which is fantastic and really awesome. And it's also a way that you can build your business. And then eventually you can sell other things to those people. You could sell coaching services, you could forward them to a Shopify shop, really anything that you want. Yeah, this is the pros and cons of kind of building in somebody else's sandbox.

23:26It's like, yeah, you didn't have to come up with, you didn't have to generate that demand. Like it was just capturing search traffic that already existed. But you know, an algorithm could change or now they're going to make you pay for ads and all that other stuff. So yeah, trying to build up your own audience, your own presence, just as a almost as a safety net or as a hedge against that potential future. And I do see this. So in the shop banner, it says, hey, free resource. library at pretty arrow.com. It also says that in kind of the announcement or shop description, Hey, grab your free budget resource library.

23:59So that makes a lot of sense. And then are you, you, so you're sending, I guess, you know, budgeting, I guess you could kind of breathe some goodwill into this audience of like, well, here's how to save extra money, you know, different budgeting related things. And oh, by the way, if you want to go buy my products, here's the link to do that. Exactly. And the other reason I think this works really well with selling spreadsheets is because I make sure that my freebie is some kind of a really simple Google Sheets template, just so that those customers that are new to Google Sheets or new to buying a Google Sheets template, which I think a lot of people still are, a lot of people maybe still haven't personally bought one, they can test it out and be like, oh, this is really easy.

24:40Imagine how great the paid version is, you know? Right. That makes sense. Yeah. Do you have a sense of this of the sales volume so you're also running this similar product catalog through pretty arrow.com in a sense of this the sales balance or the pie chart between etsy and then your own store right now it is majority etsy but that is because i am in the process i'm actually really excited just a couple of months ago i really dove into what a sales funnel is and how to drive your own traffic to a Shopify store. So I'm still building on that, but I'm very excited about it because it's kind of something that you have a little bit more control over, right?

25:22And if you have more control over it, I mean, this stuff doesn't cost anything to ship, but you do still have to pay Etsy fees on the transaction, which I mean, it's not a huge percentage, but it adds up, I imagine, at the sales volume that you're plugging through there every month. Exactly, yep, exactly. Something else that I just started doing a few months ago too that is pretty exciting is I've added a tripwire product to the people that are signing up for my email list off of Etsy. And this tripwire product is something that I'm selling on my Shopify, but it's been a really cool way to monetize the leads that are coming in off of Etsy.

26:00Okay. So this is an automated thing. So somebody signs up to get the free budget template through that Etsy resource library link, they get a welcome email from you or the thank you page says, hey, you might like this thing, limited time offer type of deal. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It just, it gives them a massive discount on a huge bundle of our budget templates. Very cool. What's the email delivery system that you're using or is it through Shopify? Why? ConvertKit. Okay. You playing around with Etsy ads at all? Is it all organic? Usually it's all organic. Etsy ads are tricky because we can't actually control a lot of the variables like the cost per click.