Most cold emails are bad because the person writing them has never seen a good one. They open a blank compose window, type "I hope this email finds you well," and wonder why nobody replies.
Good cold emails exist. They just live in the sent folders of people who have no reason to share them.
The idea: collect effective cold email examples for one industry, put them in a Google Sheet, and make them fillable. It is one of the 100 business ideas in Google Sheets on my list, and it is one you can build in a weekend.
The idea
Collect effective cold email templates for your industry. Not generic ones. Ones that fit the way people in that specific business actually talk. A cold email to a dentist reads nothing like a cold email to a SaaS founder, and a sheet that knows the difference is worth paying for.
The buyers are sales professionals, marketers, and entrepreneurs who need to reach out to potential customers or clients through email. Some of them send fifty a day. Some send five a month and dread each one. Both groups want a starting point that is better than a blank screen.
Break each email into parts. Subject lines. Opening paragraphs. Body text. Calls to action. Tailor all of them to the industry. Then let the user mix and match: this subject line, that opener, this close. Ten of each gives you a thousand combinations, and the user gets to feel like they wrote it.
One formula does most of the work here: SUBSTITUTE. Write each template with placeholders like {{first_name}} and {{company}}, and SUBSTITUTE swaps them out with whatever the user typed into a few input cells. The user updates the template with their own details and use case without ever touching the template itself.
What makes the sheet valuable over time is annotation. Next to each example, write one line on why it works. Which line earns the reply. Where the pattern breaks if you copy it badly. That commentary is what a swipe file usually lacks, and it is what turns examples into a lesson.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Templates tab. One row per email. Columns: ID, Industry, Goal (first touch, follow-up, break-up, referral), Subject, Opening, Body, Call to Action, Tone, Why It Works.
- Builder tab. Input cells for First Name, Company, Pain Point, Your Offer, and a dropdown to pick a template ID. Below that, the assembled email with the placeholders filled in.
- Subject Lines tab. A separate list, because subject lines get reused across bodies more than anything else.
- Tracking tab. Which templates the user has sent, to whom, and whether they got a reply. Optional, but it turns the sheet into a tool they open daily.
The features that matter:
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SUBSTITUTE for the fill-in. Nest it once per placeholder:
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(XLOOKUP(B6, Templates!A:A, Templates!F:F), "{{first_name}}", B2), "{{company}}", B3)pulls the body for the chosen template and fills both fields. - XLOOKUP to pull the right subject, opening, and body onto the Builder tab based on the ID the user picked.
- Data validation dropdowns for Industry, Goal, and the template picker, so the lookups never fail on a typo.
- Conditional formatting on the Subject Lines tab that flags anything over about 50 characters. Long subject lines get cut off on phones, and a red cell is a faster reminder than a note.
- Checkboxes on the Tracking tab for Sent and Replied, with a COUNTIF at the top showing reply rate per template.
- Protected ranges on the Templates tab so the user edits the inputs, not the source.
Write the templates in plain text. No fancy formatting survives being pasted into an email client anyway.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is anyone who sends cold email and is not good at it yet. New sales reps. Founders doing their own outreach. Freelancers and agencies pitching clients. Recruiters. Each of those is a separate industry pack, which is the point.
They are paying for the examples, the commentary on why they work, and the builder that saves them from rewriting the same email forty times. The tracking tab is a bonus that keeps them coming back.
Pricing: one-time per industry pack. Sell a bundle of three packs at a discount. If you keep adding templates and refreshing the examples, a yearly plan is fair, but most buyers here want to pay once and get on with it. A service on top could be a paid review of the user's own emails, which you will be very well positioned to do after writing this sheet.
Gumroad is the simplest way to sell the one-time packs. If you go the subscription route, OnlySheets sells access to the live Google Sheet and shares it with each buyer automatically, so new templates show up for everyone without a re-download.
First 10 customers: use the sheet. Pick ten people in your target industry who run small teams, and send them a cold email built from your own Builder tab. Tell them that is what you did. If the email is good, the product sells itself. If it is not, you have learned something about the product before anyone paid for it.
Related ideas from the list
- Sales Leads Contact List, which gives the same buyer the people to send these emails to.
- Write Sales Copy, the same fill-in-the-blanks mechanic applied to longer copy.
- 100 Pre-written Twitter Templates, another swipe file where SUBSTITUTE turns examples into a tool.
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.
