Gamified Excel training for office workers

The idea

Millions of office workers touch Excel daily, quietly fake competence, and burn hours doing manually what XLOOKUP or a pivot table does in seconds. They will not sit through a 14-hour Udemy course — completion rates on those are single-digit. Codédex built $88k MRR proving Duolingo mechanics — streaks, XP, skill trees — get people paying to learn technical skills. It gamifies coding for aspiring developers; the population that needs spreadsheet fluency is an order of magnitude larger and no gamified product owns it.

The wedge is grading real work in a real sheet: an embedded engine evaluates the user’s actual formulas against the task, so this is practice, not video. Excel-trick content already pulls huge numbers on TikTok and Shorts, which means acquisition content and product are the same asset.

Who pays

Individuals — analysts, admins, ops and finance juniors — at $10-15/mo or $99/yr, often expensed. The upsell is teams: a manager who watched an analyst struggle buys 10 seats for the progress dashboard. Distribution is short-form Excel-trick video funneling to the free daily challenges, plus SEO on learn XLOOKUP and pivot table practice queries where everything currently ranking is a blog post or video, not interactive.

MVP scope

• Embedded spreadsheet challenge player with AST-based formula grading
• Two full tracks at launch: Formulas Foundations and Lookups and Logic
• XP, daily streaks, and a visible skill tree
• Free tier with daily challenge limit, Stripe for pro and annual plans
• Shareable track-completion badges
• Skip for v1: team seats and manager dashboards, Google Sheets mode, VBA/macros, mobile app, certificates

Build SheetQuest, a gamified Excel training web app.

Core flow: a user picks a track — Formulas Foundations, Lookups and
Logic, Pivot Tables, Data Cleaning, Power Query Concepts — and works
through 5-minute challenges. Each challenge drops the user into a live
in-browser spreadsheet (Univer or Handsontable with HyperFormula) with
a realistic messy dataset and a task: fix the broken XLOOKUP, dedupe
these customer rows, build a pivot showing revenue by region. Grading
runs client-side by checking target cell values and formula ASTs — an
answer computed with a hardcoded value instead of a formula fails, with
a hint explaining why. Completing challenges earns XP, maintains a
daily streak, and unlocks the next skill node on a visible skill tree.
Each track ends with a timed boss level combining its skills, which
issues a shareable completion badge.

Stack: Next.js App Router with TypeScript, an embedded in-browser
spreadsheet engine with HyperFormula for evaluation, Postgres via
Prisma for progress, Stripe for billing.

Pages: marketing page, skill tree home, challenge player, streak and
profile page, leaderboard among friends, team admin with seat
management and progress reports.

Non-obvious details: grade formula ASTs rather than string-matching
formulas so every valid approach passes; keep challenge datasets
office-realistic (invoices, HR rosters, budget sheets) because
relevance is the retention hook that toy data kills.

Pricing: free tier with one track and 3 challenges/day, $12/mo or
$99/yr for everything, team seats at $8/user/mo with manager progress
dashboards.