YNAB Origin Story From Expense Recorder to $10M a Year Revenue

0:00 This is the actual real world story of how YNAB, or You Need a Budget, started so it's two people who are married, they have babies, they're on a budget, and GSE starts keeping their entire budget in a spreadsheet.
0:16 In 2003 they were married they were broke and GSE actually asked Julie can we sell our budget and she said no okay she said yes to getting married yes to babies but no to selling the spreadsheet think the lore that GSE did not comply and he actually tried to sell it and it was very lucky they started
0:35 selling it they were doing this as a side project side income side hustle selling this spreadsheet that they they use themselves and they called it you need a budget or YNAB YNAB it was only three years later so in 2003 they started selling it in 2006 did they make a web app and then funny enough in 
0:54 2010 another four years they created a actual web app so the first one was a computer program and then the third in two thousand ten they released a web app so this is Taylor the guy who came on and was their actually first employee and it was funny the co-founder Jesse was the second employee and so
1:15 they kept growing kept growing they even just talked to customers they month over month year over year they just kept growing and now they're making ten million dollars a year okay I'm saying all of this and showing you this YNAB starter story the story of how they started because I just put together
1:34 15 businesses actually 16 right now that businesses that started as a spreadsheet you can get this at bettersheets.co slash started just go to bettersheets.co slash started and it will bring you to this google sheet you can copy it you can review it I have all the categories which are three of them I
1:54 found which is validated by sharing where somebody created a spreadsheet of data like nomad list shared it back into the spreadsheet where they use a sheet as the product itself or the back end services or something like YNAB did and then there's also forecasts in the sheet so flexible and SpaceX take
2:14 care of these kinds of things but YNAB is not a unique story umm and I wanna share this little quote What started as a simple expense recorder evolved into a very fancy spreadsheet and it worked.
2:32 Thats the key. It actually worked and they used it. They were able to anticipate needs just as they went and even save substantially for the future so they were doing pretty much heroic acts with this spreadsheet that they themselves used and they thought I think other people can use this and this is
2:48 pretty cool right turning a simple expense recorder into what is now a 10 million dollar a year revenue business Jesse you're doing great that's the YNAB story that's the YNAB starter story how it started and I really love this I think there are like thousands of more businesses that are capable of starting
3:12 as a spreadsheet today if you're watching this and trying to get some gleaming take away out of this I would say go into your google drive look at the actual spreadsheets that you yourself use and then try to consider how can I sell this selling so I have a course that I'm creating called selling spreadsheets
3:33 you can check it out selling spreadsheets.com is where I talk about this the the course itself if you're a better sheets member and watching this you'll get that course absolutely free everyone no matter where you're watching this and get this little stories absolutely free bettersheets.co slash started
3:51 and I want to hear your questions you know how would I want to know of this this spreadsheet that you found in your own google drive send it to me let me know what your questions are of how do you sell it again selling spreadsheets.com is another course that I'm building I'm in the middle of recording
4:11 it. Here it is here it is sellingspreadsheets.com that actually should work I dont know why it didnt work but selling spreadsheets here is the outline of it its over 5 hours long so far umm not so far in total umm we are gonna talk about what matters when you are creating a spreadsheet to sell what happens
4:45 in your mind to sell a spreadsheet we are gonna create a few little cool things that I found are really fun to add to a spreadsheet that you sell so that other people can use it really really well we are gonna talk about sales page we are gonna talk about marketing it what marketplaces to go to beyond
5:01 Etsy beyond Gumroad Discover which is doing fairly little for my business we are gonna break down actual spreadsheets that people are selling how to create better lead magnets there is a lot of cool stuff I have interviews already of interviews with people who are selling spreadsheets and want to sell
5:20 spreadsheets so go check it out but this YNAB story really fun I linked to it in bettersheets.co started so there is a link to any of the stories that I found I tried to get a first person interview if there is none I do try to find a story that features this startup out of the now 16 businesses here
5:42 only two are shut down most of them are active ready they're in total bringing in 17 billion dollars of revenue that's crazy to me it was very exciting to see I hope you can get something out of this story from YNAB you need a budget umm that will help you sell your own spreadsheets