Finding an internship is a second job. Students bounce between university career portals, LinkedIn, company sites, and whatever a friend heard about, and most of what they find is expired or irrelevant.
Employers have the opposite problem. They post an internship and hear from two hundred people who never read the description.
The idea is a curated directory of internship programs in Google Sheets, sortable by industry, location, and duration, sold as a membership that stays current. It's one of my 100 business ideas in Google Sheets, and it suits anyone who likes research and can keep a list honest.
The idea
Create a comprehensive resource for students and recent graduates to find and apply for relevant internship opportunities. The sheet is categorized by industry, location, and duration, with pre-built formulas that filter and sort so a student can go from "I want a summer marketing internship in Chicago" to a shortlist in a few clicks.
The person to build it has experience in data management, research, or HR. Research skills matter because the value is in what's not on the big job boards: the smaller company programs, the ones that only post on their own site, the ones with a quiet application window. HR experience helps because you know what a well-run program looks like and can flag the ones that aren't.
Collaborate with employers and internship providers to keep the information up to date. Once your directory has an audience, employers will want to be in it, and they'll tell you when their dates change. That's free maintenance, and it's the moat.
Sell a membership to include future updates as the landscape of internships changes. Programs open and close every season. A directory that was accurate in March is half wrong by September. That's not a flaw of the product, it's the reason people keep paying.
The formulas doing the work are FILTER, QUERY, and VLOOKUP, to sort and extract the relevant rows. On top of that, custom Apps Script functions could generate automated email responses to internship applications, or send reminders to applicants about upcoming deadlines. The reminder is the feature a student will actually thank you for. Nobody misses an internship because they couldn't find it. They miss it because the deadline was a Tuesday and they forgot.
How to build it in Google Sheets
- Programs. One row per internship. Columns: Company, Program Name, Industry, Location, Remote, Duration, Paid, Application Opens, Application Deadline, Start Date, Link, Requirements, Last Verified.
- Search. Dropdowns for Industry, Location, and Duration, plus a Paid Only checkbox, with a FILTER underneath.
- My Applications. The student's own tracker. Columns: Program (a dropdown fed from Programs), Status, Applied On, Deadline (pulled in by VLOOKUP), Next Step, Notes.
- Deadlines. A sorted view of everything the student has marked as interested, by deadline, with days remaining.
- FILTER on the Search tab, because a student should never have to scroll the full list.
-
VLOOKUP on My Applications to pull the deadline in automatically once a program is picked:
=VLOOKUP(A2, Programs!B:I, 8, FALSE). - Checkboxes for Remote and Paid. Those are the two filters students use most.
- Conditional formatting on the Deadlines tab so anything due within seven days turns red.
- Time-driven Apps Script trigger with MailApp to email the student a reminder three days before each deadline on their list.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
Students and recent graduates are the obvious buyer, and their parents are the quiet one. Parents will happily pay for something that makes the search less miserable. University career offices are a third buyer if you can package a site license.
They pay for the research and for the currency of the data. A student is not going to spend thirty hours building this list. They'll spend a small amount to skip it.
Price it as a membership by season or by year, since the data changes constantly. A one-time price only makes sense for a niche cut, say design internships only. The service tier is a resume review or a mock interview, which you can offer if you have the HR background.
Use OnlySheets to sell membership access to the live Google Sheet, so every buyer is automatically shared on the one copy you keep updating. Gumroad works for the one-off niche cuts.
First 10 customers: go to one university's student groups for one major. Post the directory filtered to that major, with ten programs they probably haven't heard of, and offer the full sheet for a small price. One good student Slack or Discord will get you ten buyers in a week if the list is genuinely better than the career portal.
Related ideas from the list
- Niche Job Board, the same directory-plus-membership mechanic for people past the internship stage.
- CV Templates for Millennials, which serves the same buyer at the next step of the application.
- Mentorship Matching, another sheet that connects early-career people with the people who can help them.
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.
