Sam breaks down the story of Miss Excel — a consultant-turned-TikTok creator who built a multi-million-dollar Excel course business by combining trending TikTok formats with genuine keyboard-wizard expertise. Sam and Shaan discuss why Excel is one of the most durable course topics, how she built a content flywheel across every Microsoft product, and why Shaan initially doubted her staying power before reversing his view.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Miss Excel’s Origin Story [00:00:00]
Sam: I wanted to bring this up. We’d talked about this in the past, but this is a story about Miss Excel. Her name — she calls herself Miss Excel. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen her. I don’t think you’re a big TikTok guy, but I am. I’d seen this person going viral on TikTok, and basically it’s a woman who puts out Microsoft Excel tips and tricks — little hacks, like, “Oh, you know how your columns are always poorly formatted? Just hover over the column and hit Command+G and it auto-formats everything perfectly.” Or, “Do you know what a VLOOKUP is? You do this, this, and this — and boom, you can find anything.”
Sam: So she puts out these little clips on TikTok. But it’s not just the content — it’s the way she does it. It’s what works on TikTok: cute girls dancing, humor. Those are the things that work. So she does that. She’ll put a trending song on it, she’ll dress up, she’ll have a screen share behind her with herself overlaid on top, and she’s showing something funny while explaining it quickly and in an entertaining way.
Her Background as a Consultant [00:02:00]
Sam: Here’s her story. She’s a consultant — kind of a boring job. She was a consultant, and she realized that a lot of consultants and bankers, if you watch them, will not touch a mouse. They just use a keyboard like a wizard. They can do everything just by hitting shortcuts and macros on the keyboard in Excel. There are a lot of people who used to work at BCG who basically had a mouse — a wired mouse with the cord cut — and it was like framed on the wall. They’re like, “That’s what you’re going to do here. That’s what your mouse needs to look like. You don’t use the mouse.”
Shaan: Exactly.
Sam: I don’t know how any of this works, but I’ve definitely seen a bunch of friends who can do it. It’s kind of amazing when you watch them. So she basically took that idea and started turning it into interesting clips.
Going Viral and the Course Decision [00:03:30]
Sam: She tells the story where she’s like, “I wanted to try making some content, but I felt embarrassed — isn’t TikTok for kids? It’s just the silly thing to do. I shouldn’t make a TikTok account. I’m a consultant.” But her gut said, “You should do a TikTok.” So she listens to her gut, makes a TikTok, and pretty quickly — I think within the first week or so — she goes viral with one or two clips and gets over a hundred thousand views. She’s like, “Holy crap, this is awesome.” So she does it again, and again.
Sam: Then she buys a little ring light, gets a green screen so it looks a bit better, does it again, and gets a video that gets a million views. She starts branding herself — amazing branding, by the way. Miss Excel. She is the Excel woman. So she starts doing this and she’s getting popular, but she’s not making any money.
Sam: Then Morning Brew reaches out. They’re going to do a feature story on her. At the same time, a business coach reaches out and says, “Hey, I saw you have this really great following. Your content is super unique.” She’s like, “Yeah, it’s great — I’m going to be featured on Morning Brew.” And the coach says, “Awesome. What do you have to sell?” She’s like, “I don’t sell anything. It’s all free content.” They go, “If you’re going to get featured, you should have something to sell.” And she says, “Okay, challenge accepted. I’m going to make a course.”
Sam: She’d never done it before, and I think she had something like two weeks to pull the whole thing off.
The Business Today: Six Figures a Month [00:06:00]
Sam: Let’s fast-forward to today. She is making courses, and she is making six figures a month. Single-digit millions a year. She has a few days a year where she’s made over a hundred thousand dollars in a single day in course sales — that’s kind of her Black Friday. And she’s working toward a million-dollar month. That’s her goal. Microsoft loves her, they’re pumping her up. She’s featured in Business Insider, BuzzFeed, a whole bunch of places because of this great story.
Sam: What I love about this: she quit her job as a consultant, she now works 15 hours a week — unless she’s making a course, in which case it’s 50 hours a week. She has one employee, which is an overseas virtual assistant. Her cost structure is that VA, which I’m guessing makes something like six to ten dollars an hour — probably paying them five hundred dollars a month, ballpark — plus she pays $97 for Thinkific, which is the course platform, plus a video editor to edit the videos for the course. All in, her expenses are probably sub-fifteen hundred, maybe two thousand dollars. And she’s making six figures a month. So she’s profiting at least a hundred thousand dollars a month doing this thing.
Shaan’s Initial Reaction and Reversal [00:08:30]
Shaan: Quick reaction to that — amazing. I don’t think it’s going to last. That was my initial instinct. I was like, “Awesome, run.” But who knows if she’s here two years from now. And then I changed my mind when I read a little bit more about her.
Sam: Here’s what I liked. We’d talked about Excel way back — maybe a year ago, when I was going to create a course. We did a deep dive: what are the best courses? It’s always Excel. Microsoft Excel is always at the top. If you go to Teachable’s top courses, Udemy’s top courses, learning to master Excel is always in the top ten earning courses. And you think it’s hard to be the one — but it’s a topic people will pay for.
Sam: Ankur from Teachable — good Twitter follow, by the way — he tweets out some of the biggest earners. He won’t explicitly say who they are, but he’ll say, “One earner just crossed 20 million in revenue.” And then he’ll also say the top course is this Excel thing. So you can kind of triangulate. And on Udemy, I was able to search and sort for the top best-selling courses, and Excel was at the top there too.
Shaan: That’s amazing.
Why She’s the Right Horse to Back [00:10:30]
Sam: Excel has real demand. Then the question is: who’s going to be the best brand in the Excel space? And she’s the horse I would pick.
Sam: First — her content is fundamentally better. She has the best top-of-funnel. Her top-of-funnel strategy is highly exciting, quick-hitting, snack-sized TikTok videos. TikTok itself is like the crack cocaine of content. Ten-second video with music overlaid — that is crack cocaine for content. And she’s using that for Excel, when all the other Excel creators are bloggers doing stale old things.
Sam: Then her brand and her personality — Miss Excel, good-looking woman who understands how to do content. And she understands the content. When I was researching her, she said something that’s really kind of off the beaten path. She goes, “Most people, when they think of content strategy — especially for B2B-type content — it’s always strategic, intellectual, trying to figure it out.” She goes, “I spend most of my time just getting into a certain state of mind.”
Sam: This is her exact quote. She goes, “The way I run my business is through energetics. Most people don’t even know what that means. I get my energy to a place where my presence is truly magnetic. I get a vision of what’s going to go viral. Then I run to my computer and I create it. And sure enough, it goes viral.” She goes, “Because most content people don’t understand — content is just energy transmission. I’m having a great time, I’m excited about this topic, so I’m going to push that through the phone into you. And sure enough, you’re going to learn something, but you’re also going to laugh while you’re watching my thing.” And nobody else is doing that.
Sam: I read that and I go, she gets it. She gets one of the most important things about business and life — being able to manage your own energy. And she gets the content strategy in a way that I don’t think anybody else in this space is really going to get.
The Scaling Strategy [00:13:30]
Shaan: The second thing — go ahead.
Sam: She now has scale. At first I was like, okay, but she’s just an individual creator on TikTok. Who knows, maybe the algorithm changes. But here’s what she’s doing — she’s basically saying, “I’m going to scale in two ways.”
Sam: First, she’s expanding into the whole Microsoft suite. It’s not just Excel. She’s doing PowerPoint, Word, Outlook, everything that a billion people on earth have to use professionally. And Microsoft is helping her. Every time they’re releasing something new, she’s getting first look at it and gets to come out right away with the content that highlights the new function or feature. So that expansion gives it more legs than just Excel.
Sam: The second thing — she hired a performance marketing agency. And she’s like, “The beautiful thing is, I don’t sell my course. I just put my most viral content and I put ad spend behind it. People love that content — they like it, they comment on it — so Facebook’s algorithm promotes it.” So I was like, oh, that’s kind of an unstoppable flywheel. She keeps creating juicy, quick life-hack content, promotes it, it’s already inherently viral, and she’s putting paid spend behind it. She’s growing her following on Instagram now, plus TikTok, plus YouTube, plus all these different places. And she says, “Oh yeah, Reels came out, so I just jumped on Reels and became one of the most viral Reels creators on Instagram.”
Sam: Now she’s diversifying the audience. She’s got the courses behind it. She’s going into more parts of the suite. I like that formula.
Bold Predictions [00:16:00]
Shaan: I was wrong. She’s going to crush it. My bold prediction — she’s going to get to a hundred million dollars in sales. That sounds outrageous.
Sam: I would say a hundred million — I think she could do it. A hundred million a year, or lifetime?
Shaan: A year.
Sam: I actually agree with you. I think that’s bold. I think likely she gets to like twenty-five million dollars a year in revenue, and could probably sustain that for many years. But yeah, I think it’s crazy.
The Lifestyle and Digital Nomad Angle [00:17:00]
Sam: I loved her thing. There were also these other little nuggets. She’s working 15 hours a week, so she’s like, “Cool, I quit my job. I’m going to be a digital nomad” — something you kind of did last year. She and her boyfriend just move to a different state every month. They want to experience America, so they’ll hang out in a state for the month and hop around.
The Webinar Flywheel and B2B Upsell [00:18:00]
Sam: The other nugget I liked — she does these webinars, because she understands her funnel. Top of funnel, if you don’t know, is basically how you get new customers to even hear about you. For her, that’s going viral on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube.
Sam: Then there’s the middle of funnel — where a lot of people fall out. You’ve touched someone once, they’re not ready to buy, but how do you get them to invest in a deeper way? For her, she runs these webinars. She calls them “high energy Excel parties.”
Sam: She invites people to these, and what happens is — of course it’s someone from BCG who shows up. And they go, “Oh, this is amazing.” And then they’re like, “Hey, we’d like to buy 1,500 seats of your course for our company.” Or someone says, “I work in Target corporate training. We have 25,000 employees who would benefit from this. Could you create something custom?” And she says, “Yeah, here’s the same thing but now I say the word ‘Target’ at the beginning, and I charge you five million dollars for it.”