You've read a hundred business books. Most people in your field have read four, and they feel bad about it.
The idea is to turn your reading into a product. Summarize books for a very specific audience, put the summaries in a Google Sheet that can be sorted and searched, and sell it.
It's one of the 100 business ideas in Google Sheets I put together, and it's one of the few where your existing habit is the whole supply chain.
The idea
Read a bunch of books? Summarize those for others.
But don't summarize "business books." That market is owned by apps with venture funding. Niche down and ramp up. Summarize 100 books for a very specific audience.
Some titles I'd buy:
- 100 Book Summaries for iPhone App Designers
- 100 Business Book Summaries in 1 Sentence
- 100 Book Summaries for Failed Entrepreneurs
Each of those is a different product for a different person. The app designer wants the three ideas from each book that apply to app design and nothing else. The one-sentence buyer wants speed. The failed entrepreneur wants to know which books would have helped and which would have made it worse.
The niche is the product. The summaries are the material. A generic summary of a famous book is available for free everywhere. A summary that says "here's what this means if you're a freelance designer with two clients" is not.
This business idea is ideal for people with skills in writing, research, and business analysis. You need to be able to read fast, pull out what matters, and say it in a way that makes someone nod.
Create a categorized and editorialized list of book summaries, which can be easily searched and filtered. Editorialized is the important word. Rate the books. Say which ones to skip. Say which chapter is the only one worth reading. Your opinion is the thing nobody else can copy.
Sell the sheet, or monetize it with affiliate links to popular reading tools. Or both. A sheet with affiliate links in every row earns twice.
How to build it in Google Sheets
Tabs
- Summaries: one row per book. Title, Author, Year, Category, One-Sentence Summary, Three Takeaways, Who Should Read It, Who Should Skip It, My Rating, Read Time, Link.
- Search: a single input cell and a results area underneath. Type "pricing" and see every book that mentions pricing.
- By Category: a dropdown and a filtered list.
- Reading Plan: a checklist the buyer works through, with checkboxes and a date column.
Features to use
- Data validation dropdowns for Category and Rating so your own data entry stays consistent across 100 rows.
-
FILTER with SEARCH on the Search tab, so a keyword pulls matching rows from the summary and takeaways columns:
=FILTER(Summaries!A2:K, ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A1, Summaries!E2:E)) + ISNUMBER(SEARCH(A1, Summaries!F2:F))). - SORT on the By Category tab so the highest-rated books float to the top.
- Conditional formatting on the Rating column, a simple color scale, so the sheet reads like a heat map of what's worth reading.
- Checkboxes on the Reading Plan so the buyer can track progress.
- Protected ranges on the Summaries tab so nobody accidentally deletes your work while filtering.
Write the summaries in the sheet, one row at a time. Ten a week gets you to 100 in ten weeks, and you can sell the first 30 while you write the rest.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is someone inside your niche who wants the knowledge without the reading. They're paying for your filter. Which books, which ideas, and what to ignore. They're also paying for the format: a sheet they can sort by rating and search by problem beats a shelf of paperbacks.
Price it as a one-time purchase, somewhere around $19 to $49. If you keep adding books every month, sell it as a subscription for a few dollars a month, and treat each new summary as a reason to email your buyers.
Gumroad is fine for the one-time version. For the growing version, use OnlySheets, which sells access to a Google Sheet and shares it with each buyer automatically, so you update one sheet and everyone gets the new rows.
The affiliate angle stacks on top. Put a link to buy each book, and to whichever reading app you use, in every row. A buyer who takes your advice and buys three books earns you a little more.
For the first ten customers, post one summary a week in the place your niche gathers, with the "who should skip it" line included. The skip line is what gets shared. Then mention that the sheet has 99 more.
Related ideas from the list
- Niche Mental Models, the same move of taking general knowledge and contextualizing it for one audience.
- Productize your Research into an eBook, another way to package reading and research you've already done.
- Prioritization Frameworks, a curated, editorialized list sold to a similar buyer who wants thinking tools.
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.