Most business owners know they should write. A blog post a week would bring them customers. They never do it, and it is not because they are lazy. It is because a blank page asks them to invent a topic, a format, and an opening all at once, and that is three decisions too many.
The idea: build a Google Sheet with 100 blog ideas, each attached to a format and a fill-in-the-blanks starter, made for people who do not think of themselves as writers. Sell it to the niche you serve. This is idea 13 on my list of 100 business ideas in Google Sheets.
The trick is not the ideas. It is doing the first ten percent of the writing for them.
The idea
This is a product for people who do not normally write. Think about who you serve and what kinds of blog posts they could write easily with just a little nudge. A plumber can write "three things I check before I quote a bathroom job." A bookkeeper can write "the receipt mistake every new freelancer makes." Neither of them will, unless someone hands them the format.
So start the writing process for them. Build a sheet with formats, and a way to fill those formats in with their own business and experience. A format is something like "the mistake list": a headline pattern, an opening sentence with blanks, three sub-headings, and a closing line. The buyer fills in the blanks with their own stories and suddenly has a draft.
Think about how non-writers actually run their business. They already have key insights, workflows, checklists, and processes that would make good posts. They just do not see them as content. Your sheet should point at those: "write about the checklist you use before every client call" is an idea that already exists in their head, waiting for permission.
So the sheet is not just a list of 100 ideas. It is ideas, plus formats, plus worked examples of each format, ideally from businesses like theirs.
Then go one step further with a checklist of easy places to publish. Specific subreddits that welcome practitioner write-ups. Publications like Hackernoon that take written submissions. Industry newsletters that run guest columns. For each, note the submission rules and link to a successful example of someone like your buyer publishing there. A non-writer who sees that a person like them got published somewhere is far more likely to try.
Ideas, formats, examples, and places to publish. Each layer makes the previous one more useful.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Ideas tab. 100 rows with columns: Number, Idea, Format (dropdown), Best for (type of business), Effort (Low, Medium, High), Example title, Done (checkbox).
- Formats tab. One row per format, maybe 10 to 15 of them: Format name, Headline pattern, Opening sentence template, Section structure, Closing pattern, Typical word count.
- Draft builder tab. The buyer picks an idea from a dropdown, the sheet pulls the matching format template into a set of cells with blanks, and they type their answers next to each blank. A final cell stitches it all together into a rough draft.
- Where to publish tab. Outlet, Type (subreddit, publication, newsletter), Submission URL, Rules in one line, Example post by someone like you, Last checked.
Features to use:
- Data validation dropdowns on Format and on the idea picker, so the draft builder can look things up reliably.
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XLOOKUP or VLOOKUP in the draft builder to fetch the headline pattern and section structure for whichever format the buyer picked, for example
=XLOOKUP(B2, Formats!A:A, Formats!C:C). - TEXTJOIN to assemble the filled-in blanks into one draft cell the buyer can copy straight into their blog editor.
- Checkboxes in the Done column plus a COUNTIF at the top so they can watch "7 of 100 written" climb. Progress is motivating for people who hate writing.
- FILTER on a "Pick for me" tab that shows only Low effort ideas they have not done yet. Small wins first.
- Conditional formatting to grey out completed rows.
Resist the urge to add more. The person buying this wants fewer decisions, not a more powerful spreadsheet.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is a small business owner, consultant, or freelancer in a specific niche who knows they should publish and has not. Pick the niche you know. "100 blog ideas" is generic; "100 blog ideas for independent bookkeepers" is a product.
They pay for the removal of the blank page. Concretely, they pay for the formats and the examples, because those are the parts they cannot do themselves. The publishing checklist is the bonus that makes it feel complete.
Pricing: $19 to $39 as a one-time template feels right. If you want recurring revenue, sell a monthly version that adds 10 fresh ideas and updates the publishing list, at a few dollars a month. A service on top is natural too: for a fee, you fill in the first five drafts with them on a call.
Gumroad is the easy route for the one-time version. For the live, updated version, OnlySheets lets you sell access to the Google Sheet and shares it with buyers automatically, so new ideas show up in their copy without you sending anything.
First 10 customers: write three posts yourself using three of your formats, publish them where your niche reads, and end each with "I used format number 4 from my 100 blog ideas sheet." You are demonstrating the product in the product's own medium. Then email ten people in your niche who you know are not writing and offer it to them directly.
Related ideas from the list
- 100 Pre-written Twitter Templates, the same fill-in-the-blanks mechanic at tweet length.
- LinkedIn Post Generator, which turns formats into posts the same way, for a different platform.
- Feature Article Ideas and Where to Pitch Them, a bigger version of the "where to publish" tab.
Want the other 99? This is one idea from my list of 100 business ideas you can build in Google Sheets. Get all 100 business ideas as a free Google Sheet.
And if you want to learn how to package and sell spreadsheets, my course Selling Spreadsheets walks through exactly that.