Two weeks ago, Alston published a video laying out his plan to build a $10,000-per-month income stream using Microsoft Excel. Not teaching people how to make money online. Not launching another course about side hustles. Just Excel, one of the most used software programs on the planet, sold to people who already want to get better at it.
This is the 14-day update. You will see the TikTok growth numbers, the Facebook ad setup, the exact product pricing structure, and what happened when Alston spent $38 on ads. He made $56 back. That is $18 profit in 2 days on a brand new campaign, targeting a skill most people call boring. Here is everything he did and how you can apply the same model to a skill you already have.
What You’ll Walk Out With
- How to research TikTok for video ideas that already have proven demand in your niche
- The two-videos-per-day posting strategy and the creative persona that made a brand new account grow
- How to structure a $17 digital product with an order bump and upsell stack before the product is even finished
- The exact Facebook ad targeting setup running at $20 per day with worldwide targeting
- Real numbers from the first 14 days: $38 spent, $56 earned, one ad doing all the work at $7.15 per sale
- Why boring software niches outperform make-money-online content on every platform
- A seven-step playbook you can follow to launch your own version of this funnel
- How to figure out which boring skill is your best starting point at finder.platformproof.com
Why Excel? The Logic Behind Choosing a Boring Niche
Most people who want to make money online get pulled toward the same three options: dropshipping, affiliate marketing, or selling a course about making money online. The problem with all three is the same. Everyone is already doing them. The audience is skeptical. The ads are expensive because every marketer on the internet is targeting the same “make money online” interest category on Facebook and Google.
Alston made a different choice. He picked Microsoft Excel, a skill that hundreds of millions of office workers, students, and small business owners want to improve. The reasons are practical: everybody uses Excel, and everybody either feels behind on it or wants to use it faster. That means the audience is enormous and almost entirely untouched by the usual internet marketing crowd.
There are three kinds of software that work for this model: software that saves people time, software that saves people money, and software that helps people earn more. Excel qualifies for all three categories depending on who is using it. A freelancer who can build better client reports earns more. An office worker who can run pivot tables faster gets promoted. A small business owner who actually understands their numbers makes smarter decisions. That is a wide, motivated, paying audience that has nothing to do with the make-money-online world.
The niche test is simple: does this skill or software save people time, save people money, or help people earn more? If yes, there is a paying audience. Excel passes all three. So does Canva. So does AutoCAT. The same funnel structure Alston built for Excel works for any of them.
The TikTok Content Strategy: Research First, Create Second
Alston did not sit down and try to brainstorm original Excel content from scratch. He did something smarter. He opened TikTok, searched “Microsoft Excel,” and studied which videos were already pulling hundreds of thousands or even millions of views. Then he built a system around recreating those videos in his own way.
The system works like this. Every time he finds a TikTok video about Excel that is performing well, he copies the link into a Google Sheet. He tracks each video’s like count so he can sort the list later. Some entries in that sheet have 5 million likes. Others have tens of thousands. When he sits down to create content, he sorts by likes, picks a top performer, watches it, and makes his own version of the tip it covers.
His creative spin is to play a character from the TV show The Office, presenting himself as an employee of that fictional company teaching his coworkers Excel. That persona gives his account a recognizable tone that makes the content feel different from generic tutorial videos, even when the underlying Excel tip is identical to what others are covering. The persona requires no extra production effort but creates a consistent identity that viewers can recognize across videos.
He posts two videos every day: one in the morning, one in the afternoon. The hooks follow a consistent structure across videos, with small variations depending on which Excel tip he is covering. After about one week on a brand new account, he had gained close to 100 followers. Several videos were pulling between 400 and 600 views. For a zero-follower account in a niche as unglamorous as spreadsheets, those numbers represent real early traction and prove that the demand is there before a single dollar is spent on ads.
The Product Stack: $17, Order Bump, and Upsells
The entire funnel runs off a simple sales page attached to a custom domain that Alston bought specifically for this project. Traffic from TikTok and from Facebook ads goes to that page. Here is how the product stack is structured at the 14-day mark.
The main product is priced at $17, one-time. It is a focused Excel offer designed to deliver a clear, actionable result for buyers who want to get better at specific Excel skills. The product was not fully finished when he launched the ads. He ran paid traffic to an incomplete product and still made sales. That is a meaningful data point: the demand exists before you have spent months perfecting the deliverable.
On the checkout page there is an order bump. An order bump is a small add-on offer that appears right at checkout, typically as a checkbox. The buyer can add it with a single click, without going through a separate cart or checkout process. Alston’s order bump is a cheat sheet that his virtual assistant put together. Both of his first two buyers opted into it. That one element is what changed his revenue from $34 (two base purchases at $17 each) to $56, which is what pushed him from a loss to a profit on a $38 ad spend.
After the main purchase, there is an upsell for done-for-you Excel templates. Templates are a natural complement to a skills product: the buyer learns the skill from the main offer and then gets ready-made files that put that skill to work immediately. Alston is also planning a second upsell, a more extensive Microsoft Excel course that goes deeper into the subject. That course has not been built yet at the time of this update. The goal of adding it is to increase average order value for buyers who want to go further, without needing to run more ad spend to find new customers.
Setting Up Facebook Ads at $20 Per Day
Alston started running Facebook ads roughly two days before filming this update video. The daily budget was set at $20 using the Advantage Campaign Budget option inside Facebook Ads Manager. Someone in the comments of his original video told him he would need to spend more than $20 per day to see results. He ignored that advice and made profitable sales at $20 per day. Budget minimums are rarely as high as people claim.
The campaign type is a sales campaign optimized for purchases, not clicks or reach. He set up a dedicated Facebook pixel for this Excel funnel and used that pixel to track purchase events. The campaign runs as a manual sales campaign rather than fully automated, which gives him more control over the audience targeting settings.
For the audience, Alston went worldwide. His reasoning: everyone uses Excel, so there is no good reason to restrict the campaign to one country. A digital product ships instantly to any country. Worldwide targeting also gives the Facebook algorithm a much larger pool of potential buyers to find purchase-likely users in. Inside that worldwide audience, he switched from Advantage Plus audience to the original audience setting and targeted people with expressed interest in Microsoft Excel, Microsoft Office, and Spreadsheets. Three related interest categories, all pointing at the same motivated audience.
The ad creatives are vertical videos, the same format as his TikTok content. Because they are short vertical clips, they appear in the Facebook and Instagram feed as organic-looking content rather than obvious advertisements. That format reduces the resistance between the scroll and the click. The viewer does not immediately process it as an ad. They engage with the Excel tip first and find themselves interested in the product before they have had a chance to tune it out.
Not sure which skill to build your funnel around?
Take the free quiz at finder.platformproof.com to find the boring skill you already have that people will pay to learn.
The 14-Day Numbers: Real Spend, Real Revenue
Alston started paid ads on a Sunday. By the time he filmed this update, he had been running for approximately two days. Here are the exact figures from Facebook Ads Manager as he walked through them in the video.
Total spent: $38. Total purchases: 2. Total revenue: $56. Net after ad costs: $18 profit. That is not a number that changes anyone’s life immediately. But it proves the funnel is working. Money went in, more money came back, and the difference is positive. That is the entire criterion for a working paid traffic campaign at the testing stage.
Both buyers took the order bump. That single fact is why the revenue hit $56 instead of $34. Without the order bump, the campaign would have lost $4 on two sales. With the order bump, it made $18. Order bumps are not a nice-to-have detail in a digital product funnel. They are often the line between profitability and loss at the early stage when cost per purchase is still relatively high.
The blended cost per purchase across the entire campaign was $19. But when Alston looked at the performance broken down by individual ad, he found something important: one specific ad was responsible for both purchases. That ad’s cost per sale was $7.15. Every other ad in the campaign generated zero purchases while consuming a share of the $38 total budget. The winning ad was carrying the entire campaign at less than half the blended average cost.
Reading the Ad Data and Cutting What Does Not Work
Finding a winning ad inside a campaign is not the end of the process. It is a trigger for action. When one ad is generating all purchases at $7.15 per sale and every other ad is spending budget with zero conversions, the correct move is to isolate the winner and cut everything else. Letting losing ads continue to run is the most common way to inflate your average cost per purchase beyond what the funnel can sustain.
Alston’s plan is to duplicate the winning campaign, strip out the underperforming ads, and run only the one that converted. When more of the $20 daily budget goes behind a single proven ad instead of being distributed across five or six unproven ones, the purchase volume should increase. The cost per purchase may edge upward slightly as the algorithm reaches into a broader audience to find more buyers, but the overall return on spend should improve.
Beyond eliminating losers, he is planning to produce new ad creatives by downloading his best TikTok videos and testing them as Facebook ads. A video that performed well organically on TikTok has already demonstrated that the concept holds attention. Running it as a paid ad is a low-cost way to see whether that same creative converts at the sales level. This is why the TikTok posting strategy and the Facebook ad strategy are not two separate efforts: they feed each other.
The Scaling Math and the Plan Going Forward
At the 14-day mark, here is what Alston is doing next. First, he is duplicating the winning ad and pausing the campaign containing the underperformers. Second, he is continuing to post two TikTok videos per day to grow organic traffic and to generate new creative material to test as paid ads. Third, he plans to finish the main product, which was not yet complete when the ads launched. Fourth, he wants to add the second upsell, the comprehensive Excel course, to increase the revenue per buyer and raise the ceiling on how much the funnel can earn per customer acquired.
The scaling math is simple. If spending $1 returns roughly $1.47 in revenue, then spending $100 should return approximately $147. Spending $500 should return approximately $735. As long as the conversion rate holds, putting more money into the funnel produces more total profit. The main risk is cost per purchase rising as the winning ad reaches further into the audience. That is why testing new creatives continuously is not optional. When one ad fatigues, you need another one ready to replace it.
On the TikTok side, Alston is open to posting three videos per day once bandwidth allows. Two is sustainable. Three would accelerate follower growth and give him more creative material to test as ads, but requires more time in front of the camera. That decision will depend on how quickly the paid ads scale.
Honest Drawbacks: What This Plan Does Not Guarantee
Two sales in two days of paid ads is a signal, not a proof. A cost per purchase of $7.15 on the winning ad could rise significantly as the campaign scales and the algorithm exhausts the most purchase-likely segment of the audience. What looks like $2 back for every $1 spent at $38 total may look different at $500 total.
The product is also unfinished. Buyers who purchased before the product is complete may experience delays or a less polished result than they expected. This is a real risk to refund rates and to the long-term reputation of the product on the sales platform.
TikTok organic reach for a new account is not guaranteed to keep growing. Some videos got 400 to 600 views. Others may get far less. Building 100 followers in a week is a good start, but 100 followers is not enough to sustain a meaningful organic traffic channel. Consistent posting over months, not weeks, is what builds that foundation.
None of these drawbacks mean the model is broken. They mean the 14-day mark is the beginning of the experiment, not the conclusion. The numbers are promising. The framework is sound. But $10,000 per month from this funnel requires sustained execution over a much longer time horizon than two weeks.
Step-by-Step: How to Launch Your Own Boring-Skill Funnel
Here is the exact process Alston used, laid out as a sequence you can follow for your own skill niche.
- Pick your skill. Choose a software tool or professional skill that saves time, saves money, or helps people earn more. Excel, Canva, and AutoCAT are examples from this video. The skill should be something you can demonstrate on camera for short vertical videos without needing professional equipment.
- Research TikTok for proven video ideas. Search your chosen skill on TikTok and log every video with strong likes or views in a Google Sheet. Sort the list by likes. This is your content calendar. You are not brainstorming. You are curating from what already works.
- Build a simple product and sales page. A focused digital product at $17 is enough to start. It does not need to be fully finished before you launch ads. Add an order bump at checkout, even if it is only a cheat sheet your VA assembles. That one checkbox is often what separates a profitable test from a loss.
- Buy a custom domain and connect it to your sales page. A domain that matches your product niche builds credibility before the buyer reads a single word of copy. The cost is minimal and it pays for itself on the first sale.
- Start Facebook ads at $20 per day. Use a sales campaign optimized for purchases. Set up a pixel and track purchase events. Target worldwide or your primary English-speaking markets. Use interest targeting around your specific skill and related software categories. Run multiple ad creatives at once and let Facebook identify the winner.
- Cut losers, scale the winner. Once you have found the ad with the lowest cost per purchase, pause everything else. Duplicate the winning campaign and run it with more budget. Test new vertical video creatives regularly, pulling from your best TikTok content, so you always have a replacement ready when the current winner fatigues.
- Add upsells as the funnel matures. Once the front end is converting consistently, add a done-for-you templates upsell, then a deeper course upsell. Each layer increases revenue per buyer without increasing ad spend, which raises the amount you can profitably pay to acquire each customer.
Find Your X
Alston built this funnel around Excel because he could see the demand, knew the material, and found a creative angle that felt natural on camera. The skill is not the hard part. Identifying your skill is the hard part. Most people who could run this model never start because they are not sure what they know that other people would pay to learn.
That is exactly what finder.platformproof.com is built to solve. The free quiz matches your existing skills, your work history, and your interests to the specific niche where you are most likely to get traction quickly. If you have been sitting on a skill you use every day but have not figured out how to turn it into income, start there.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you need to be an Excel expert to sell Excel products?
No. You need to be ahead of the person you are teaching. For a $17 beginner or intermediate product, that means knowing the shortcuts, formulas, and workflows that most office workers either do not know or use inefficiently. If you use Excel regularly at work, you almost certainly qualify. You do not need a certification. You need to be ten steps ahead of your buyer, and for a $17 offer, that bar is lower than most people expect.
Why does the TikTok recreation strategy work without being flagged as copied content?
Recreating a concept is not the same as copying the content. Alston watches a video, understands the Excel tip it covers, and then films his own version using his own screen, his own voice, and his own Office persona. The information is the same the way a thousand different cooking channels can all teach the same pasta recipe differently. The execution and the character are entirely original. TikTok’s content policies focus on reproducing the actual video, not on covering the same topic.
Is $20 per day really enough to see Facebook ad results?
For Alston, yes. He made two sales and $56 in revenue from $38 in total spend at $20 per day. The key factors are campaign structure (sales objective, purchase optimization) and a pixel with actual buyer data to train on. Starting at $20 per day is smart for a new funnel. It gives the algorithm enough events to find purchase-likely users without exposing you to large losses while you are still figuring out which creative works.
What is an order bump and why is it essential?
An order bump is a small add-on offer that appears on the checkout page as a one-click checkbox. The buyer does not go through a separate cart. In Alston’s case, both of his first two buyers took the cheat sheet order bump. Without it, his revenue would have been $34 on $38 in ad spend, a $4 loss. With both order bumps, revenue hit $56, a $18 profit. A single checkbox built by a virtual assistant was the difference between the campaign losing money and making money on day two.
How quickly did the TikTok account grow in the Excel niche?
Close to 100 followers in approximately one week, posting twice daily. Some videos reached 400 to 600 views during that period. The account had no prior following and no cross-promotion from any other channel. Those numbers came entirely from the content itself and from TikTok’s algorithm surfacing it to relevant users. For a brand new account in a niche as unglamorous as spreadsheet software, that is a legitimate early signal.
Can this exact model work in niches other than Excel?
Yes. Alston names Canva and AutoCAT specifically in the video as other niches where the same approach applies. The TikTok research strategy, the $17 product structure, the order bump, the Facebook ad setup, and the vertical video creative format all transfer directly to any software or skill niche that qualifies under the time-saving, money-saving, or income-generating test. The Excel angle is replaceable. The system is not specific to any one skill.
What happens to the cost per purchase as you scale the ad budget?
It tends to rise. At $38 in total spend, the winning ad produced purchases at $7.15 each. As the campaign scales and the algorithm reaches further into the audience beyond the most purchase-ready segment, cost per purchase typically increases. Alston’s plan to counter this is continuous creative testing. By regularly converting his best TikTok videos into new ad creatives and testing them, he always has fresh material to replace a fatiguing ad before costs climb to the point where the funnel stops being profitable.
Why target worldwide instead of a specific country?
Because Microsoft Excel is used globally and the product delivers digitally with no geographic constraint. Worldwide targeting also gives Facebook’s algorithm a significantly larger pool to find purchase-likely users within, which can produce lower initial costs per purchase compared to campaigns restricted to a single country. Once you have purchase data from a worldwide campaign, you can look at which countries are converting at the lowest cost and use that information to prioritize or exclude markets in future campaigns.
Read Next
This video is one chapter in a longer story about turning professional skills into income streams that have nothing to do with the “how to make money online” space. If you want to see more examples of how specific, boring job skills translate into real monthly revenue numbers, the post below breaks down five of them with specific figures.
Read: 5 Boring Job Skills Making $3,495 Per Month
Sources
- Alston Godbolt, “14 Day Update: My Plan To Make $10K Per Month With Microsoft Excel,” YouTube: https://youtu.be/oylSEPZaDKE
- Facebook Ads Manager data shown in video: $38 total spend, $56 total revenue, 2 purchases, $19 average cost per purchase, $7.15 cost per purchase on the winning ad creative
- TikTok account data shown in video: close to 100 followers after approximately one week, individual videos reaching 400 to 600 views
- TikTok research reference: Excel videos with up to 5 million likes used as content ideation source
Helping 1 million working adults make their first $3,000 online with the skills they already have. Alston Godbolt, Platform Proof.