In this interview series by Website Planet, I talk to executives from the best digital companies, who share their stories, tips and perspectives on what it really takes to create a successful website and online business.

A deep dive into decades of hands-on experience and technical expertise to learn untold truths and practical advice that will immediately help you build and grow your website.

David Bressler is the founder of Formula Bot (previously Excel Formula Bot), an AI tool that converts text into data analysis, charts, spreadsheets, formulas and more. The tool has reached 900,000 signups since going live in September 2022, and has attracted companies spanning from Fortune 500s to governments as well as small-to-medium sized businesses.

Before founding Formula Bot, he held various roles at Net Conversion, where he progressed from Analytics Lead to Senior Director of Analytics. His career also includes positions at Universal Orlando Resort and &Barr, where he honed his 10+ years experience in web analytics and digital marketing.

To start, tell us briefly about you. What is your current role at your company, and what are the measurable achievements you are most proud of?

I’m the founder of Formula Bot – The single platform to analyze, visualize, transform and enrich your data, and so much more – powered by AI.

The achievements I’m most proud of are…

  1. Reaching 900K total users.
  2. The income from my startup was equivalent to my (at the time) full-time job, allowing me to leave my job and focus 100% of my time on Formula Bot.
  3. As a result of leaving my FT job, I work less hours and travel less, allowing me to spend more time with my family.

What pain point(s) do you solve for your customers? What was the “aha Moment” that led to the idea? Can you share that story with us?

Difficulty in Data Analysis

Users often struggle to interpret complex data sets. Formula Bot’s chat feature allows them to ask questions in natural language and get insightful, easy-to-understand analyses, charts and more.

Time-consuming Manual Tasks

In addition to getting data analysis results faster, Formula Bot can also enhance a user’s data via Enrichments. Enrichments are AI-generated responses that can be appended to a dataset, like sentiment analysis, text classification, data extraction, language translation and more.

⏱️ 80% of a data analyst’s time is spent preparing the data for an analysis.

Formula Bot’s Data Prep can reduce data prep time by 90% by converting natural language into cleaned and organized datasets.

When Formula Bot first launched in 2022, it was simply a text to Excel formula generator. I thought of the idea while I was working at an analytics agency where I became the “Excel guy” for junior analysts that needed assistance with Excel. My office became a revolving door to help analysts with their formulas. I thought there had to be a better way.

I wanted to “scratch my own itch” and that itch happened at the exact time of AI growing in popularity. Additionally, I was just starting paternity leave, so I was able to dedicate time towards building something special.

Over time, the product has evolved into more of an all-in-one AI data analytics platform that has iterated over time based on customer feedback.

What do you think makes your company stand out? What are you most proud of?

There’s only one full-time employee – Me.

I’m not VC-backed. I’ve created a bit of a fly-wheel through product-led growth, but most of the growth has come from word of mouth, as free users are granted with a good amount of usage to test out every feature available.

From your experience, what are the most important things to build a highly successful website and online business? Please explain each in detail.

When building an MVP, the most important aspect to building a successful website is the functionality.

Are you solving the user’s problem?

Later on, focus on design and reducing any friction between the user visiting your website and first experiencing the ‘aha’ moment. Currently, I’m focused on optimizing/reducing the time to experience that moment.

💡 Give users the opportunity to try every feature that’s available, albeit limited usage.

What’s the one key lesson you’ve learned about building a website and business that you wish you knew when you started? What’s the story behind this realization?

I have three lessons!

1. Scratch your own itch more. List out all of the pain points you personally faced in your career and build features to solve those pain points.

2. A/B test your pricing. Oftentimes, especially solopreneurs, will undervalue their software. Conduct split tests on your users to find the optimal price point.

3. Offer a limited time lifetime deal, if you are bootstrapped and need cash early on in your journey.

In your opinion, which aspect of running a website tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?

Marketing!

I see so many entrepreneurs assuming that people will find their product… They won’t, even if it’s the best product in the world, unless you promote it.

With the advent of AI and no-code tools, it’s becoming increasingly easy to build software, meaning marketing is becoming increasingly more important as your key differentiator. Especially with B2B software, people are chomping at the bit to share their tech stack. It’s just not something that comes up in conversation. You need to dedicate time to marketing.

If I asked you to share the key ingredient in your “secret sauce” for inbound marketing, what would it be?

People love free tools, especially free AI tools. They love being able to test something out / get value out of something without having to sign up. I offer a handful of free tools, which act as lead magnets from SEM and SEO.

Formula Bot

How can our readers follow your work?

Website: formulabot.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidbressler1/

X: https://x.com/bresslertweets