An Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day | Hacker News Reader

An Excel TikToker manifested her way to making six figures a day

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70 pointsJugurtha38 comments

The HN crowd not her target audience. We all have been in offices where people are not able to use what most of us would consider basic functions of Excel.

I know even in my group once I learned vloolup I was considered the excel wizard. What I knew was that I was far from an actual Wizard. There is so much more.

Either way there are millions of people that her courses are ideal for. Good for her.

the thing that might be more interesting for HN users is that she basically has no presence on Twitter or Facebook. Instagram and TikTok seem to be king for monetizing anything. Twitter and Facebook have horrible organic reach and make it hard to grow without paying.

TikTok is especially good because they'll promote your video based on quality and account size really isn't a factor, that's how this person went from 0 to 1,000,000 followers in a year. Something to keep in mind for your own business

I’m not sure how monetization is being used here, but the intro to the interview says that Instagram and TikTok are used for advertisement.

In the podcast (I think the transcript is taken from there) it’s mentioned that most (95%) of the money is generated from course sales that happen on the thinkific website: https://miss-excel.thinkific.com/collections

"You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0nbkaYsR94c

Pivot tables are the real tools of an excel wizard ;)

Makes me kind of sad that OLAP cubes are going out of style. Pivot tables are incredibly powerful tools that a layman can use without much difficulty. One of my previous jobs made it pretty easy to get a cube into Excel pivot tables and the amount of statistical analysis that could be done over a few minutes of dragging things around in the pivot table was just staggering.

“An Excel TikToker” and “Microsoft Excel influencer”. These are the most unexpected sentences I’ve read in a long time.

So shes selling over 330 courses a day, which cost around 300 dollars on average? Those are absolutely amazing numbers. I imagine its hard to find that many people that are willing to pay this much?

not sure about the quality of the course but in theory if it saves you a few hours over the rest of your career or lets you get a better job it was a good investment. I've paid for programming related courses that paid for themselves 100X in terms of higher income and just being more productive

plus I'd imagine the target audience gets an annual education budget they have to spend anyway

If you haven't worked on a business team, it's hard to fully describe the utility or importance of Excel. I think the best analogy for programmers is, imagine Vim if all the commands were easily discoverable through a GUI, and if everybody on your team and all the teams you work with also used it.

Approximately any third-year (audit|financial|supply chain|actuarial) analyst will be able to fly around a workbook too quickly for an observer to follow along, and a lot of them will have custom commands and utilities set up. And those power users are using exactly the same tool as the person who point-and-clicks on every cell and button, so they can look over their shoulder and say, "You can just jump to the upstream cell with Ctrl+[" or "Have you tried using INDEX/MATCH for that?"

I haven't touched a Windows machine for two years or been in an Excel-first role for five, but the muscle memory for the Windows-specific keystroke sequences for all the common commands is still there.

The interview is quite interesting, and she definitely comes off as a very smart and articulate person.

Then, out of curiosity, I decided to click on that TikTok link on her website. I really am baffled how somebody can make 6 figures a day by promoting their courses via lip-synced 10 seconds video pointing out the most obvious “tricks” that exist. What is the appeal of having someone lip-sync and dance over a tutorial? Am I really so out of touch with the general public?

> Am I really so out of touch with the general public?

Well, for starters, you did just post a comment on "Hacker News."

I get the appeal of making that joke; but that proves what? Because I am posting here can I also not get my other news from Facebook memes or something?

Oof

Yes. The vast majority of the population has no idea how excel works, or have ever had any kind of training in it. I've personally worked with people that would do the formulas by a hand calculator and type the results into the cell.

She makes her classes very accessible and the videos just make it easy to engage with; Excel courses usually don't try to do this.

It’s not the usefulness of having Excel tutorials I am questioning, but their form.

Is there really an appeal to having your tutorial (or at least its ad) being someone dancing and lip-syncing over totally unrelated music with the tips being overlaid as text boxes? Is this the “final form” of the tutorial format? I personally don’t find this “accessible” at all, it’s un-engaging/distracting at best and cringe inducing at worst; and I am baffled as to how someone would find this better than a well written book/guide or even a well made screencast type tutorial.

I agree with you. It’s hard to imagine that this is good for learning. If you look at the course preview video it’s not as bad, still very gimmicky and ‘engaging’ though. Maybe this has to do with age - people who grew up with social media might perceive this differently.

The answer, still, is yes. But that was clear, based on the revenue numbers that prompted your question.

It might be more productive to ask "how" you (and I) became so "out of touch" (relatively), and if it's such a bad thing.

You are absolutely correct, and I was trying to imply the “how” in my post. I’m in my thirties, grew up on computers and “social media” (from forums/IRC to Facebook et al.) and never considered myself to be that out of touch. If I had to guess the target audience for these kind of “lessons”, I’d say that they are people in the 25-35 range… not teens. I would have never thought that a 25-35 year old viewer would find any appeal in that kind of format, and that having those TikTok clips as promotional material would work on them.

Foremost, this makes me wonder how education is going to be like in 20+ years when current schoolchildren become teachers and teachers’ teachers. Are all students going to be “home schooled” (online) in periods of 30 seconds to 2 minutes by some teacher lip syncing and dancing to the latest pop hit?

I am amazed that there are so many people willing to pay $297 for one course and $997 for a bundle!

I suspect Excel et al. are the absolutely perfect topic to target people at the intersection of 'affluent' and 'overwhelmed'.

What other ways could there be to fleece middle managers...

If I understand the article correctly, these are one-time charges for lifetime access to the videos she produces.

I'm obviously not the target market, but I really appreciate people that don't gate repeated access to content with monthly subscriptions.

There are a lot of places that offer an education budget of a few hundred dollars. This kind of thing would fit perfectly into that.

> Are you making six figures every day?

> No, not every day.

The design and marketing angle is fantastic: https://www.instagram.com/miss.excel/

Very clearly targeting young aspirational women.

That's really good. I like that she's talking about all the hard work she has done, but doesn't hide her own surprise. She struck gold, but was also exactly the right kind of person to exploit that.

I think I randomly saw some of her video on IG Reels, and they are interesting (even tho they cover the basics of excel).

Great for her!

I imagine the TikTok market must be the perfect demographic

What's the marketing platform for 51 y/o with a wife, 2 kids and 3 dogs?

Reddit, probably.

Does it help if you are good looking?

In general that helps with everything.

Incredible.

Feel bad for the people buying these courses without realizing that people like us are working every day to optimize away their jobs.

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