I tried the procedural text tutorial and couldn't get it to work, so I did this:

font
sort by x
delete unselected
xform (animate) about centroid
merge

then copy and paste the delete and xform, delete the next letter, grab the channels and shift them up a frame or so.

Is there a chops way of taking the first xform channels and offsetting by a number frames, I don't seem to be able to figure this out. Or would I have to do a foreach thing like Adam Swaab's demo?

Shift chop?