Microsoft Excel might be the most taught skill on the internet.
YouTube has thousands of free tutorials covering every function from VLOOKUP to pivot tables. Udemy sells courses for fifteen dollars.
If you need to learn a formula, you’re only a search bar and five minutes away from the answer.
Kat Norton charges between $297 and $1,598 for her courses and has sold to over 22,000 people.
Her live webinars regularly draw 4,000 to 5,000 people, and in one day managed to sell over $100,000.
So how did a painfully shy consultant who struggled to turn up to her own birthday party end up dancing on TikTok, teaching spreadsheets to millions, and building a business that earns over $2 million a year selling what most of the internet gives away for free?
A Consulting Firm, a Childhood Bedroom, and a Vision of Drake
As a kid, Kat Norton told people she wanted to be a rock star.
By her twenties, the ambition had gone quiet. She was soft-spoken, anxious about public speaking, the kind of person who hung around theater kids but watched in the audience while others took the spotlight.
She graduated from Binghamton University in 2016 with an MBA and went straight into consulting at Protiviti, where she spent nearly five years doing securitization reviews for banks. Her own description of the work: “which is just as fun as it sounds.”
But she was good with Excel. Unusually good.
Colleagues kept coming to her with questions, and during a slow week between clients she started building an Excel training course on her laptop, just for fun.
A managing director noticed and asked what she was doing.
Protiviti backed her. Before long she was flying around the country, hosting Excel workshops for the firm’s clients alongside her regular consulting work.
Then the pandemic hit.
The travel stopped, and Norton found herself back in her childhood bedroom, working remotely with hours she hadn’t had in years.
She spent two months doing something that had nothing to do with Excel.
Inner child work, shadow work, meditation.
She later described it as trying to understand “why I act the way I do and what limiting beliefs I held.”
She wanted to strip away everything that was keeping her from showing up as herself.
She would come out the other side a different person.
One day during meditation, she had a vision: Drake’s “Toosie Slide” paired with Excel’s left and right function.
A dance and a formula, playing together above her head.
She watched an hour of YouTube tutorials on how she could bring this vision to life, did her hair and makeup, and posted her first video.
Her fourth video hit 100,000 views.
Her twentieth hit 3.6 million.
Within three weeks she had over 100,000 followers.
That summer she ended up working 100-hour weeks, consulting by day and building Miss Excel by night.
One Week Off and a $297 Bet
Morning Brew, a business newsletter with millions of subscribers, noticed her about four months in.
A business coach reached out around the same time and told her that if she was going to get that kind of exposure, she should have something to sell.
She took a week off from Protiviti and built her first course.
The Excelerator: 100-plus video lessons covering the Excel skills she’d been teaching corporate clients for years, priced at $297 when standard advice was to launch at $47.
By Black Friday she had it ready to sell, and two months later, the passive income from that one course was earning more than her salary at Protiviti.
Two days after crossing that threshold, she quit her role and went full-time as Miss Excel.
Half Price, Straight to Checkout, and a $100K Day
The course sold well, so she added a second, the Advanced Excelerator, and revenue continued to grow.
But every sale was still a single transaction, one course at a time, and she could feel the ceiling.
It was webinars that would change everything for her.
She started running live sessions in April 2021.
Each one followed the same format: 45 minutes of teaching a real Excel class, the kind of session she’d been running inside Protiviti for years, with music playing as people joined and the energy of someone who finds genuine excitement in “conditional formatting”.
She would tell the audience at the very beginning that there would be an offer at the end. No surprise pitch.
The people who were ready to buy could start thinking about it, and everyone else just got a free Excel class.
At the end, she’d offer her full course bundle, normally $997, for half price.
Then rather than send them to a long form sales page to try and convince them to buy, she’d send them straight to checkout.
The 45-minute teaching session served as the sales mechanism.
The bundle pricing made the decision easy.
The Excelerator course cost $297. The Advanced Excel course cost $397.
That’s $694 for two courses.
To make the buy a no-brainer, she created a bundle that included both of those plus a Dashboard mini-course at $497.
The idea was that buying the individual courses was more expensive than buying three of them together.
At such good value, over 80% of her sales ended up coming from bundles.
She later said that moving beyond a single Excel course and creating higher-priced bundles is what pushed the business from six to seven figures.
The product line has since expanded across the full Microsoft Office suite.
Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, OneNote, each solving a workplace skill that sits right next to the one the buyer already came for.
The complete suite now runs at $1,197. A newer Smart Suite covering Microsoft Office plus AI training sits at $1,598 with over 900 lessons.
Roughly 90% of revenue now comes from these digital courses.
Corporate training accounts for another 5%. Over 400 organizations have licensed her material or booked custom training sessions, with a VP of Sales leading that side of the business.
So the system is built, but the question remains.
Why are thousands of people willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a skill the rest of the internet gives away for free?
Why 22,000 People Pay for Something They Could Learn for Free
The answer is in what it feels like to learn from her.
Norton teaches VLOOKUP functions while dancing to Drake.
Her webinars open with music and she asks everyone to bring their favourite drink.
She puts Excel screenshots above her head in TikToks and teaches formulas to pop songs.
A session on data cleaning feels like a party she’s hosting, and the 4,000 people in the room are invited.
For the millions of people who open Excel because their job requires it, that energy changes the experience of learning the tool.
It can make a workday feel a little less heavy.
It can make a skill they’d been putting off feel approachable.
It changes the experience of what is otherwise a tedious part of their day, using an essential tool that is boring and plain, and injects it with a buzz every time they open up Excel.
That’s where the pricing power lives.
In a market where the information is free, changing the experience of using it is the only thing that can command a premium.
As genius as this tactic is, Norton didn’t set out to build her brand in this way.
It emerged from who she is and what she did during those two months of inner work before the first video ever went live.
The energy in the Miss Excel brand is real, and an audience can tell the difference.
The question for anyone selling expertise in a crowded market is what that same logic looks like at their scale.
What a Dancing Excel Teacher Can Show You About Pricing Expertise
Norton has 2 million followers, press coverage from every major business outlet, and a Microsoft MVP credential awarded five times, but the architecture underneath scales down to any level.
The first is about what your pricing is anchored to.
Norton charges $297 for a course teaching skills covered in thousands of free videos. The price reflects the experience of learning it from her.
It reflects the experience of learning it from her.
If your revenue doesn’t match your expertise, look at what your pricing is anchored to.
If you’re benchmarking against what similar information sells for in your category, you’re competing on the wrong dimension.
Your audience already knows the information exists elsewhere. What they’ll pay a premium for is how it feels to learn it from you and the value they take from that.
The second is about what’s coming through in your delivery.
Norton’s energy when teaching is the standout.
That energy came from resolving the things that were blocking her from expressing how she genuinely experiences her subject.
arIf your audience respects your work but hesitates at the offer, the bottleneck may not be in your funnel or your copy.
It may be in the distance between how you experience your expertise and how your audience receives it.
Norton closed that distance. The teaching became the selling because there was nothing sitting between her and the full expression of what she finds exciting about the work.
That’s worth auditing in your own delivery.
Watch your last three pieces of content back and ask whether someone would feel your enthusiasm for the subject.
If it’s not coming through, that’s the highest-leverage problem to solve.
The third is about restructuring what you already sell.
Norton’s biggest revenue shift came from bundling courses she’d already built and pricing the group below what any two of them cost individually.
Over 80% of her sales moved to bundles as a result.
If you have multiple products that your buyers tend to need together, the pricing structure might be suppressing your revenue more than the offer itself.
Price the bundle so that anyone considering two products on their own can see the math points them toward three.
The pricing architecture is the product. The bundle tells your buyer to go all in, and most of them will.
The deeper question Norton’s story raises is one worth sitting with.
If you have genuine passion for your subject, how much of that comes through in the way you deliver it?
And if your audience could feel that passion in every lesson, every live session, every piece of content you create, what would that be worth to someone who’s been putting off learning what you already love?