Pretty Arrow: 29,000 Budgeting Spreadsheets Sold — How Two Sisters’ Etsy Shop Reached $10,417/Month

Since all figures are in dollars, an approximate yen conversion at $1 = ¥150 is added in parentheses for readability.

$1.56 Million a Month, From a Budgeting Template

Emily McDermott started Pretty Arrow in January 2021. A few months earlier, she’d quit her full-time job citing burnout recovery. What she had on hand was her own experience of paying off over $30,000 (about ¥4.5M) in student loans through household budgeting, and a personal deadline: she wanted to have an online business before turning 30.

At the time of the interview, Pretty Arrow’s monthly revenue was $10,417 (about ¥1.56M). What it sells are budgeting templates for Google Sheets and Excel, with cumulative sales since launch topping 29,000 units. The team is just two people — herself and her sister Lena, who handles operations.

What matters in this case is not the size of the monthly revenue but the single pivot point: what changed between when her first product barely sold and when she moved to the side that did sell.

The Numbers Lined Up

The First Product Barely Moved

Pretty Arrow’s first product was a 50+ page printable made in Canva, a household budgeting worksheet bundled together on paper. The idea was natural enough: it was simply a formalization of the method she herself had actually used.

But sales were sluggish. What she did next shaped the following 2.5 years.

The Turning Point: Checking the Shelf Before Building

McDermott learned Etsy keyword research. Using a tool called eRank, she searched for long-tail keywords with high demand and low competition. What she found was that spreadsheets had far more search demand than printables, and less competition.

She learned how to use Google Sheets from YouTube tutorials and shipped her first spreadsheet product within a few weeks. In the 2.5 years since, this one product category alone has sold over 29,000 units. She recalls, “I remember getting my first sale on day one.”

Put in one line, the turning point was reversing the order from “build first, then find buyers” to “look at what’s already selling, then build.” She didn’t raise the quality of the product itself, nor pour money into ads. She simply took the same knowledge (household budgeting) and rebuilt it into a format with proven demand.

Breaking Down Why It Grew

That reversal in order worked not in isolation but because of the systems placed around it afterward.

She placed it where buyers were already searching, wallet already open. Etsy is a shelf where people typing “budget spreadsheet” arrive already ready to buy. The battle here isn’t about building awareness. It collapses into matching the search term to the product name. Her eRank research was the work of building that match.

She narrowed her customer to a single group. The target is young women who want to pay off debt and manage a household budget. McDermott’s own advice is roughly this: “Make your product a no-brainer purchase for one specific group. You can’t target everyone at once and have it work.” This overlaps with her own history of paying off $30,000 in debt, which is the foundation that gives her product descriptions credibility.

She emphasized design and brand over features. What she prioritized wasn’t advanced spreadsheet functions but usable design and branding. She A/B tests designs and scales the ones with higher conversion. Her read is that what buyers want isn’t formulas. It’s “a budget I can actually stick with.”

She brought Etsy customers back to her own list. This is arguably the most structurally important part of this case. She used a free budgeting resource collection as a lead magnet, placing it on the shop banner, product images, product descriptions, and even inside the spreadsheets she sold. Etsy is a platform that doesn’t hand customer lists to sellers, but by embedding a funnel inside the product itself, buyers migrate onto her email list. She describes her email list (ConvertKit) as “the backbone of the business,” and operates by sending 3–5 value-first emails before any promotional email.

She pointed ads at the lead magnet, not the product. Facebook/Instagram ad landing pages lead to a free signup, from which the $17–$27 bundle is then presented. This design produces a 2–3x ROAS. Rather than selling a single item directly via ads, funneling people into the list first and then showing the bundle captures higher per-customer value. That’s the ordering.

The Biggest Mistake She Names

The biggest early mistake McDermott names is assuming “to make a living from this full-time, I need to create a huge number of spreadsheets.” What actually worked was how she sold the products already selling, not adding more of them. She also says she underestimated the effect of running paid ads early on. Her future direction is not mass-producing new products, but marketing the existing high-converting products more and strengthening blog SEO.

What’s Copyable, and What’s Not

What’s copyable is the ordering and mechanisms: confirm demand with keyword research before building, narrow buyers to one group, embed a lead magnet inside the product itself to migrate platform customers onto your own list, and point ads at a free offer rather than the product. All of this transplants across genres.

What’s not copyable is equally clear. Having paid off $30,000 in student loans on her own is a source of credibility that can’t be manufactured after the fact. The demand for digital templates around 2021 is a market condition that can’t be chosen either. And having a few months to experiment without income after burning out and quitting is not a condition everyone has.

The numbers also need careful reading. $10,417 is revenue, not profit. What remains after Etsy fees and ad spend isn’t disclosed. On top of that, a spreadsheet product is easy to copy and imitate, and traffic could shift overnight if Etsy’s search algorithm changes. Her calling her email list “the backbone” is likely a reflection of her awareness of that fragility.

Related Reading

• 24 Kindle Books, ¥50,000–70,000/Month in Royalties — same “put a digital product on a platform’s shelf” model. A contrast between pushing volume vs. narrowing and pushing distribution.
• A Solo Developer Reached $2M ARR With Zero Marketing Spend — Carrd’s “Don’t Add Features” Strategy — shares the design philosophy of narrowing to one thing rather than adding features.