Built 3 Excel templates for SaaS founders and put them on Gumroad — here's what I learned about the digital product market
Wanted to share a quick experiment. I created three Excel templates specifically for SaaS founders:
- SaaS Metrics Dashboard — enter monthly numbers, get 25+ KPIs auto-calculated (MRR, churn, LTV, CAC, burn rate, etc.)
- Runway & Budget Planner — 24-month cash flow projection from one assumptions sheet
- Fundraising CRM Tracker — investor pipeline with stages, outreach logs, and follow-up tracking
A few things I learned that might help others thinking about digital products:
The niche matters more than the product. Generic "budget template" = drowning in competition. "SaaS metrics dashboard for founders tracking MRR and churn" = specific enough that the right person sees it and thinks "that's exactly what I need."
Formulas are the value, not formatting. Anyone can make a pretty spreadsheet. The reason someone pays $19 instead of building their own is that getting the LTV formula, churn calculation, or runway projection right is genuinely tricky. The templates have 1,010+ formulas across all three — that's the real product.
Excel + Google Sheets compatibility is non-negotiable. If your template only works in one, you lose half your market immediately.
Store link if anyone's curious: https://tobiasboscob.gumroad.com
Happy to share more details about the process or the templates themselves.
The formula complexity insight is gold. Most people sell templates as "beautiful spreadsheets" when the real value is "I spent 3 hours debugging the CAC formula so you don't have to." That pain point positioning would 10x your conversions.
Selling templates on Gumroad can work, but the real lift is not the file, it is getting founders to trust that your sheet saves them time on a very specific job, pricing, runway, or hiring. The ones that move usually have a tight use case, a preview, and a quick walkthrough video. Tradeoff is support creep, even low-priced templates turn into mini consulting if the instructions are not painfully clear.
Make sense, especially niche > product part. Out of curiosity, which of the templates is getting the most traction so far?
fellow gumroad seller here — we have 21 products on there (dev tools, templates, trading data) and the biggest lesson matches yours: the digital product market is insanely crowded but also weirdly underserved in specific niches. generic templates get buried. niche-specific ones that solve one exact problem for one exact audience actually move. what was your pricing strategy? we started at $5-19 per template and wondering if thats too low to signal quality or too high for impulse buys. also curious what your traffic sources are — gumroad discovery alone seems to send almost nothing for us.
The niche specificity point is underrated. I ran a similar experiment with content last year — 'AI productivity tool' got scrolled past, 'voice AI for people with RSI who type all day' got real engagement from the exact right people. Same product, completely different signal.
The formula complexity angle is smart positioning too. Pricing at £19 because the LTV formula takes 2 hours to get right is the kind of framing that should be front and centre in the description, not buried. Most people undersell the hard part.
What's driving most of the Gumroad traffic right now — search or your own promotion?