Sheet to Site

Andre Azumov had a dream: escape Ukraine's harsh winters. A developer by training but frustrated with traditional employment, he started a small agency in 2017 that let him travel to Thailand and Bali while working remotely. By late 2017, he was living in Bali on an incredibly modest budget—$400/month (rent: $200, food: $150)—and working as a product manager at Wells Fargo. But something was gnawing at him. He wanted to build his own thing, to convert his hobby into a sustainable business. So in March 2018, he made the leap: quit his job, commit to a "hardcore year," and set a goal of reaching $1,000 in monthly recurring revenue by November.

Andre barely knew how to code. His first project was a surf app showing the best times to catch waves. He learned PHP in a month—scrapy, no frameworks, just Google searches and determination. It made $300/month and felt like a dead end. His second idea was a physical red button you'd hit to deploy code (à la Kickstarter). He raised $250 in prepayments, realized it wouldn't work, and refunded everyone. Failure felt normal.

Then came the insight. While building a "Dark Mode List" (a simple collection of apps with dark mode), he faced a problem: how to update data without knowing SQL or databases? He knew spreadsheets. He hacked together a way to pull data from a public Google Sheet via an API and loop it into HTML cards. It worked beautifully. He realized others probably faced the same bottleneck.

He built Sheet to Site in a couple of days—a single green page, no login, no payments, no polish. Just: paste your Google Sheet URL, get a website. He showed it to 10–20 people first. That user testing was critical. People didn't understand how to make the sheet public. He refined the instructions. Launched it on Twitter, indie hackers, everywhere.

Sheet to Site initially made only $300/month—not enough. But Andre had learned a crucial lesson from Peter Levels' "12 startups in 12 months" approach: throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. He didn't quit; he pivoted.

His next hit was a Mac menu bar app called "Year Progress," inspired by a Twitter account showing daily progress through the year. He spent time figuring out Swift and the animation. His scrappy solution? 50 pre-rendered progress bar images and an if-statement to show the right one. It felt hacky. It sold 300 copies at $5 each—$1,500 in one day. Four months of runway in 24 hours.

He followed with "Make OS X Great Again," a $10 Mac app fixing annoying macOS behaviors (the persistent "update tomorrow" popup was the top requested feature). Within two months, people were pre-ordering before it even existed.

Andre's process was relentless: build, ship, write a blog post about it (title: "Hardcore Year First Month: Getting Press Coverage and Reaching $361/Month Revenue"), tweet updates, submit to Product Hunt, gather feedback, move on. Each project fed his Twitter audience and email list. Each post included revenue numbers—vulnerable, real, build-in-public. Indie hackers loved it.

He also learned to expect the "depression stage." Every launch felt underwhelming. Post-launch, people said "nice idea" but didn't flood in. He learned this was normal, part of the game. Knowing that helped him push through.

By January 2019, after launching 7–10 projects in less than a year, Product Hunt named him Maker of the Year. He won alongside builders like Peter Levels and Mubashar Iqbal. A guy who'd barely known PHP a year earlier, living in Bali on the margins, was now recognized as a top maker.

But the real victory came when Andre returned to Sheet to Site. It was still alive. Users wanted features—especially custom domains. He'd been manually sending them iFrame hacks to get it done. Bad scalability, but good validation.

He spent 3–4 months rebuilding Sheet to Site 2.0, leveling up as a developer, adding real features: custom domains, payment handling, proper login (though still no password reset). The tool that once made $300/month became his flagship product with proper subscription revenue. By the time he sold the company, he'd built a sustainable, recurring revenue business—exactly what he set out to do.

The lesson: sometimes the best idea is the first one. But you have to build enough projects to recognize it.