1.2 Million users as a solo founder
Using Reddit and micro-tools
David Bressler launched FormulaBot just before ChatGPT exploded onto the scene. Within the first few months, he attracted over 100,000 users. Three years later, he’s at 1.2 million users.
What’s interesting about David’s story is that he built his entire product while off work for a few weeks for Paternity leave.
He launched with a simple Reddit post. That post led to tens of thousands of users signing up for his app within a matter of months.
Is this post, we’ll pick apart the strategy and see if it’s replicable.
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The Viral Loop
David built a simple Excel formula generator using Bubble.io during his paternity leave in July 2022. As a senior director of data analytics with some light software development experience, he taught himself no-code development through YouTube and Twitter (now X) tutorials.
His MVP took about a week and a half to create. It was remarkably simple: an input box where users described what they wanted to accomplish in Excel, and an output box that generated the formula.
But here’s what made it spread like wildfire:
The initial spark: David posted about his tool in the Excel subreddit. The post resonated immediately with people who spent their days wrestling with complex formulas. It went viral within that niche community, then got cross-posted to r/InternetIsBeautiful - a much larger subreddit where people share interesting and novel websites.
The amplification: A tech influencer with approximately 10 million followers was actively scanning that subreddit for cool tools to share with their audience. They discovered FormulaBot and posted it to their TikTok and Instagram channels.
The cascade effect: This is where things got interesting. Micro-influencers who followed that larger creator began resharing it to their own audiences. Instead of going directly to Reddit to find content, these smaller influencers were watching what the big accounts posted and then redistributing it to their followers.
This created a domino effect that lasted 4-5 months: Reddit → Major influencer → Micro-influencers → Their audiences. The wheel kept spinning with almost no additional effort from David.
Why It Worked
Several factors aligned to make this launch particularly effective:
1. Perfect timing - This was literally months before ChatGPT launched in November 2022. AI-powered tools were still novel enough to feel magical. There was no Claude, no accessible ChatGPT interface. FormulaBot filled a gap that billions of Excel users didn’t even know existed.
2. Zero friction - In those early viral days, there was no login required on FormulaBot, everything was completely free, and there were no guardrails or usage limits. Users could just visit the site and start generating formulas immediately. This made it incredibly shareable and easy to try.
3. Clear, immediate utility - Unlike many AI demos that felt like parlor tricks, FormulaBot solved a real, painful problem. Anyone who’s ever spent 20 minutes debugging an Excel formula immediately understood the value proposition.
4. Active influencer discovery - Tech and AI influencers were actively hunting for interesting tools to share with their audiences. Reddit, particularly subreddits like r/InternetIsBeautiful, was a primary hunting ground. David’s posts landed exactly where these influencers were looking.
The Cost of Going Viral
Not everything was smooth sailing. Because David had no API limits, rate limiting, or usage caps in those early days, he racked up several thousand dollars in OpenAI API costs before implementing any monetization strategy.
He also hired contractors from Upwork to help with Bubble development since he was still working his full-time job and had a family to care for. Between the OpenAI bills and contractor costs, he estimates he was $8-10K in the hole before making his first dollar of revenue.
The risk was real. He was burning through savings with no guarantee that people would actually pay for the tool once he added subscriptions.
But the gamble paid off. He broke even within two months of launching. The viral traffic had built enough momentum that when he finally added a paywall for premium features, conversions came immediately.
What Happened After the Viral Wave
The exponential growth lasted about 4-5 months before it levelled off. Not declined - just stopped the explosive growth pattern.
This is the challenge with viral marketing that he describes as “a slot machine.” You can produce what you think is the highest quality content and get nothing, then post a random shower thought and it explodes.
After the initial wave subsided, David needed more sustainable growth channels. Enter his second major strategy: SEO through free tools.
The Free Tools SEO Strategy
With his background in data analytics for digital marketing, David recognized that the AI explosion had changed the SEO landscape. He was bearish on informational content in the age of Google’s AI Overviews, which now summarize everything. Why would someone visit a specific website to learn about something when Google tells them the answer directly?
But he noticed something interesting in Google Trends: searches for “free tool,” “tools,” and “generator” were exploding. Google was being used less for information, but more for utilities.
The hub-and-spoke model: David built approximately 15 different free tools that now drive about 75% of his overall traffic. These tools fall into two categories:
Extracted product features - He took existing functionality from FormulaBot and created dedicated landing pages. The Excel formula generator became a standalone tool. He added generators for SQL queries and VBA macros. Each got its own SEO-optimized page.
New SEO-focused tools - Through keyword research, he identified high-volume searches related to data analysis and built tools specifically for those queries. For example, he now ranks #1 for “PDF to Excel AI” - a search term that didn’t exist three years ago but gets substantial volume today. He also built a bank statement converter and other specialized tools.
The strategy behind it: These free tools act as indirect product offerings. A PDF to Excel converter isn’t his core product - FormulaBot is a comprehensive data analysis platform. But if you’re converting PDFs to Excel, you probably use Excel for data analysis. It’s a natural pipeline.
The cost of running these free tools is minimal. David uses lower-tier AI models since they’re simple input-output operations without needing conversational context. The acquisition cost is low compared to the number of customers they drive to sign up for paid plans.
The Google Ads Experiment
David also runs Google Ads, but sporadically. As a bootstrapped founder, the economics are challenging. Customer payback periods can stretch to 8 months - great for VC-backed companies, but not ideal for bootstrapped solofounders.
This constraint forced him to focus on organic channels where the returns compound over time rather than requiring constant cash infusion.
Applying to your own Tiny Empire
You don’t need a complex distribution strategy to launch successfully. David’s playbook combined two approaches:
For launch:
Build something genuinely useful
Post in relevant subreddits where your target users hang out
Make it frictionless to try
Let influencers discover and amplify it organically
For sustainable growth:
Identify high-volume search terms related to your product
Build free tools that rank for those terms
Keep costs low by using appropriate AI models
Convert free users to paid through natural product pipelines
The hard part isn’t the strategy - it’s building something people actually want to share. David had domain expertise in data analytics, understood Excel users’ pain points intimately, and built exactly what they needed at exactly the right moment.
Could this Reddit strategy work today? Probably not as well, particularly if you’re in the AI space as it’s now saturated, ChatGPT has made these capabilities mainstream, and the novelty factor is gone. But the underlying principles remain: solve a real problem for a specific community, show up where they gather, and make it really simple for them to try your solution. Then build sustainable channels that don’t depend on lightning striking twice.
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