“I didn't want to go back to being an accountant!”

“I was an accountant for eight years and used Microsoft Excel every day for hours,” starts Google Sheets and Apps Script expert educator Ben L Collins. “Almost all my work was done in Excel but I had no background. I'd done some coding, but I'd not done any work with spreadsheets.

“Pretty early in the job, my boss was asking me to do a bunch of stuff in Excel – ‘Combine these tables’ et cetera – and I was doing it all by hand!” His boss showed him a few formulas to save some time and Ben realized then and there that a core skill in any kind of finance profession is just being able to manipulate data.

“The people who can do it really well are leagues ahead of the rest of us, who are just bumbling through,” Ben continues. I thought, ‘Right, I need to really gen up on these skills’ so I found a bunch of websites online such as mrexcel.com and chandoo.org – these people were doing what I'm doing now, but in Excel, 15 years ago.”

The more Ben looked into spreadsheets and formulae, the more fascinated he became: “It was this rabbit hole that just went deeper and deeper.” He realized that applying some of the coding education he received at college could be combined with other programming languages for databases such as VBA.

Over the course of his career as an accountant, he actually became much more interested in technology and less interested in accounting and finance. “After eight years, I was like, ‘I've had enough!’. I wasn't quite sure what I could do next, but one of my initial ideas was to move into becoming a developer,” Ben tells me.

Ben L Collins speaking at an event

He took some courses, and started applying for jobs. “It didn't really go anywhere but through that time I was creating my own website and writing articles. Some of the early articles I wrote were about Google Sheets and they're the ones that got picked up in [Google] Search.” These led to a number of client requests and paid freelance work.

“In 2014 and 2015 there was enough of a trickle of inbound traffic saying, ‘Hey, can you help me build that dashboard in Sheets?’ Or ‘Can you have a look at my company spreadsheets and help me figure out how to improve those formulas?’.”

The work encompassed Excel, Google Sheets, SQL and Tableau. “It was any work really but it was enough of a sign to say, ‘Maybe there's something here. Maybe I can be a freelancer instead of going back to the old job’ . I didn't want to go back to being an accountant!” Ben smiles. “I wanted to keep going with the technology and development.”

Goodbye accounting, hello education

At this time, the education website General Assembly was just a startup and was launching vocational courses for developers and data analysts. “They were introducing a part-time data analysis course. Because I'd done a course with them as a student on one of their developer courses, I knew the team there. When they introduced this data course, they were recruiting for instructors and it was Excel, SQL and Tableau,” Ben continues. “I said, ‘Hey, that's like what I've been doing for the last eight years!’.” He completed the interview process and got the job and he taught that course for a few iterations in 2015.

“That got me interested in teaching again,” Ben recalls. “I’d done some teaching at college as a mentor to younger students when I was in my final year.” He started adding in some corporate training to his online offering, including selling courses and tutorials. “As I started to grow an audience, in 2017 I thought I should try my own course and see what happens.”

A course on the Query function in Google Sheets

The teaching course was received quite well – well enough to encourage Ben to launch a second course. “I used a site called Teachable because I wanted to have a direct relationship with my audience and own that relationship myself rather than hand that over to a marketplace like Udemy.”

I would do some research and the name that kept coming up was the guy who runs the tech newsletter Stratechery, Ben Thompson. He's the OG!” Ben laughs. “I signed up for some memberships myself to see how other people such as Flowing Data and Craig Mod were doing it.” Ben had been getting their free newsletter for years and I was interested in how they had implemented their membership businesses. I was like, “I want mine to be just like that.’. I really loved how the sign-up was so simple and smooth - I thought, ‘I want that member experience.’

Moving forward sustainably

For context, Ben’s membership offering currently consists of premium (or ‘gated’) content that is hosted on WordPress and a premium email newsletter sent through emails through Kit (formerly ConvertKit). As for content, it centers on Google Sheets – including product features and updates – and tips to get the most out of it.

“The next newsletter is a deeper dive into some of the new functions that Google came out with last year,” Ben adds. These are really useful functions for manipulating data so there'll be a tutorial about that with a link to a Google Sheet template that people can then download themselves. He adds that he’ll be hosting a live session about this. “I use the newsletters to share the time and the Google Meet link for the live sessions.”

When asked about the future, Ben imagines that membership will become the core of his business. “I obviously would like to get more people in because I would like the membership to become the sole product,” he says. “I have that model of a library of free content, and then you can become a pro member and support me and get the additional content.”

Simulating a game of chess with Google Sheets

He explains that he used to offer consulting and publish ads in his free newsletter but he aims to move away from this: “if I can build the membership to be big enough, it would be nice to get rid of all that other stuff. There's some small things to work on but growing the membership is key. “

He mentions that he has various ideas for expanding his offering. “I’ve got some ideas at the moment: I can do a better job of sharing these live sessions and we've got initiatives to bring members in coming up next year. The product itself will evolve. I don't think it'll be radically different but we'll do more live stuff.”

He adds that he wants to find a better way for members to share the sorts of data problems they're working on and what they'd like to solve – “That might be through ‘office hours’ or a better way for them to submit questions” – as long as it is in a sustainable and valuable way for everyone concerned.

Ben confirms that, at the moment, all the interactions with his community are done through email newsletters. “I actually encourage people to reply saying, ‘Hey, let me know what you're working on’ – I like it because it’s manageable.

He used to offer forum conversations and ‘cohort courses’, working though Google Sheets issues online together as a group. “We did two of them in 2021 when they were all the rage. It worked really well, but it felt very intense for the five weeks of the course – it was a ‘firehose’ of questions. I haven't done this community like that yet because I'm wary of once I've switched it on, I can't really turn it off. I want to think it through: how would I do it in a sustainable way?

“I wasn't even promising live sessions when I first launched, because I thought, ‘Just launch and see what the reception is. See if I enjoy doing it before I promise everything.’ But it's going well! He seems keen to add live sessions: “They're fun and people really get a lot of value from them. We'll see how that goes!”

Ben hosting a Zoom session for his members

“Right now I'm teaching topics: I'll pick a topic and we'll cover that for the live session,” he continues. But in the cohort courses the format was more of an open forum: “People would come in and say, ‘Hey, here's the formula I'm stuck on’ and we’d work through it live and other people could watch. That's something we'll look at doing next year; it’s a great way for people to get involved.”

In closing, he thinks that perhaps a Discord Q&A forum is definitely a possibility, too but clarifies: “I just want to make sure I can do it in a way that doesn't overload me.” It sounds like Ben is already on the road to building a long and stable relationship with his community. We agree that sustainably is crucial to a successful membership: “Little steps – we'll just build it up over time!” he smiles.

More information

Ben Collins is an educator, writer, developer and founder of The Collins School of Data. He creates online courses and writes about Google Workspace tools. I focus on data analysis and automation, using Google Sheets and Apps Script.

Ben L Collins' website

He loves building lightweight, data-driven applications for the Google stack: Google Sheets, Looker Studio, Google Apps Script, Forms, Docs, Gmail, etc. For more information go to benlcollins.com.