Eight Loom Videos About Google Sheets: Andrew Kamphey's $200,000 Three Years

In April 2020, Andrew Kamphey recorded eight videos about Google Sheets in roughly 24 hours using Loom, put four of them behind a payment link on Gumroad, and pointed a one-page Carrd site at them. He made his first sale the following Monday. The second one arrived about two weeks later. His first month brought $390.

Three years later, in an interview with Dollarsanity, he put the total at about $200,000, averaging around $5,000 a month with peaks near $10,000 in months like Black Friday. The product is not software. It is a growing library of tutorials, templates and small tools for a spreadsheet program that hundreds of millions of people already have open.

Teaching the boring tool

The premise is deliberately unexciting. Google Sheets is free, universal and, for most people, mystifying past a SUM function. Kamphey's site today lists 637 tutorials, 36-plus courses and 26 tools, and says "Join 9,727 members".

The lesson generalises. A product does not require an unmet market need. It can address a well-known tool that people use badly, where the buyer's alternative is an afternoon of searching forums. Anyone who has spent five years inside a piece of software that colleagues keep asking them about has a version of this in front of them.

It helps that spreadsheets sit next to money. People buying Sheets tutorials are usually trying to build a budget model, a client tracker or a dashboard for a business. That is why a $9 monthly membership and a lifetime deal north of $200 both sell.

The channel that made it work

Kamphey did not have an audience waiting. He had, by his own account, about a dozen customers before the thing that changed the trajectory: AppSumo, the marketplace that sells lifetime deals on software and courses to a large deal-hunting audience.

After that partnership, a case study of the business records the customer base going from roughly 12 to more than 1,000. In the Dollarsanity interview he is blunt about the dependency: "80% of my customers come via AppSumo Marketplace. And I make 85% of my revenue via AppSumo Marketplace."

It is worth flagging that the two published breakdowns of the same roughly $5,000 a month do not match. The case study splits it as 50% AppSumo lifetime deals, 22% Stripe subscriptions and consulting, 12% Gumroad templates, 10% Udemy, 4% AppSumo Marketplace and 2% YouTube ads. The interview describes a far more concentrated 85%. They were published at different points, and the honest reading is: the marketplace is dominant, and the exact share moves.

Either way, this is the interesting strategic choice in the whole story. Instead of spending two years building an audience before selling anything, Kamphey rented one that was already assembled and already in a buying mood. That is a legitimate answer to the first-customer problem, and it is faster than the audience-first route almost every creator is told to take.

What a lifetime deal actually trades

A lifetime deal is a large up-front payment in exchange for permanent access, sold at a discount, usually through a marketplace that takes a cut and keeps the customer relationship. The trade is specific:

• You get: cash now, a burst of customers, reviews, and a distribution partner who does the selling.
• You give up: future recurring revenue from those customers, pricing control, margin, and direct ownership of the relationship.
• You take on: an obligation to keep serving those buyers indefinitely.

For a library of videos and templates, that last liability is unusually cheap. Serving a lifetime customer costs Kamphey close to nothing per person, which is exactly why the model fits an information product better than it fits software with running server costs. The same deal on a SaaS with real infrastructure has ended badly for plenty of founders.

The counterweight is concentration risk. When one marketplace supplies 80% of your customers, a change in its promotion policy, its category mix or its audience is a change in your income. Builtplain's platform dependency audit exists for precisely this situation, and the fix is the boring one: run your own membership at $9 a month, keep an email list you own, and treat the marketplace as an acquisition channel rather than the business.

The path there was not linear

Better Sheets was not a first attempt. The case study records that Kamphey sold an influencer marketing newsletter for $37,000 in 2018, and that a later newsletter, Hypeletter, made roughly $200 a month. Better Sheets started in the strange, empty spring of 2020.

His stated lesson from the early days is the sort of thing that sounds sentimental until you have shipped something to silence: "One happy customer matters: Sometimes, all you need is one person loving your product to know you're on the right track."

One sale on the Monday. The next one a fortnight later. That is what traction looks like from the inside, and it explains why so many people stop before the compounding starts.

How you would run this yourself

1. Pick the tool you already answer questions about. Sheets, Excel, Airtable, Notion, QuickBooks, a CAD package, a booking system.
2. Record eight lessons in a day. Screen recordings, no editing, no set. Give half away.
3. Put the paid half behind the simplest checkout you can find and sell before the library is complete.
4. Add a template to every lesson. The file is what people actually want; the video justifies the price.
5. Take the marketplace deal for the launch. A one-off lifetime offer buys customers, reviews and momentum you cannot buy with ads at this budget.
6. Build the subscription in parallel. Kamphey's $9 a month exists so the business survives the marketplace.
7. Keep adding. Six hundred tutorials is the moat. Nobody catches up to that in a weekend.

The honest limits

Two caveats belong on this story. The first is that the headline number is a three-year total, not a monthly income: about $5,000 a month on average, with lumpy peaks. That is a decent one-person living in many places and not a windfall.

The second is that no source published this run states what Better Sheets earns in 2026, so nothing here should be read as a current figure. The site is still operating, still adding tools, and the member count is public. Everything else about today is unverified.

What holds up is the shape of the thing: a person who knew a common tool well, recorded a day's worth of lessons, sold them through someone else's audience, and then spent years adding to the pile. It is the least glamorous business in this series and one of the easiest to start on a wet Sunday.