David Bressler was working at an analytics agency in Orlando with no coding background when he took paternity leave in 2022. He used the time to build something of his own: a tool that takes a plain-English request like "sum column A where column B is yes" and returns the matching Excel formula in seconds. He assembled the first version over a single weekend using Bubble for the front end and OpenAI's API for the logic, then put it online as Excel Formula Bot.

The reaction was almost immediate. He shared it on Twitter and Reddit, a TikTok creator posted about it to several million views, and the tool started showing up in the "websites that should be illegal to know about" style roundups that productivity influencers love to post. Hundreds of accounts shared it for free. The catch was that he had launched with no paywall and no usage limits, so the OpenAI bill climbed to around $5,000 in the first couple of weeks and he found himself thousands of dollars in the hole.

Instead of pulling the plug, he turned it into a business. He added a freemium model with a free taste of the product and a credit-card free trial for the full experience, which he reported was converting at roughly 80 percent. He paired that with relentless distribution work: replying to anyone talking about Excel formulas from the product's account, responding to every brand mention, and being first to comment under big Excel and productivity accounts. Inside about two months, still holding his full-time job, he reached roughly $3,000 in monthly recurring revenue and about $20,000 in total revenue.

From there he kept building on the same no-code stack rather than rewriting everything, and brought in part-time Bubble developers once revenue could support it. Excel Formula Bot grew into FormulaBot, a broader AI data analyst that generates formulas, writes SQL, builds charts, and analyzes spreadsheets. By 2025 he was reporting more than a million users and roughly $500,000 in annual recurring revenue, all bootstrapped, solo, and without outside funding.