Gumroad has thousands of products and almost no good way to browse them. The Discover page shows you what the algorithm likes today. It does not show you what is actually good, what is priced sensibly, or what a buyer in your corner of the internet would want.
That gap is the business. Build a curated, annotated database of the best Gumroad products in a Google Sheet, and sell it to the people who are too busy to dig through the site themselves.
This is idea number 11 on my list of 100 business ideas in Google Sheets. Of all of them, it might be the one that makes me smile most, because you are selling a spreadsheet on Gumroad about what sells on Gumroad.
The idea
Create a curated list of the most popular and highest quality products on Gumroad, across categories like eBooks, courses, Notion templates, icon packs, presets, and, yes, spreadsheets.
For each product, capture the name, the creator, the price, a short description, and a link to the product page. Add ratings and reviews where they exist. Gumroad shows sales counts and ratings on many product pages, so a lot of this is public.
The raw facts are not the product, though. Anyone can scrape names and prices. What people will pay for is your take. Annotate every row from your own perspective. Why is this product selling? What is the hook on the landing page? Is the price too low? What would you do differently? That commentary is what makes the sheet yours and not a copy of the Discover page.
Here is the version I like best. If you are a copywriter, pick 10 to 100 Gumroad products and rewrite their sales copy. Put the original and your rewrite side by side in the sheet. Then email those creators, hand them the rewrite, and ask them to try it and tell you whether conversion went up.
Some will ignore you. Some will say yes. The ones who say yes hand you a case study for your copywriting service, and the sheet itself becomes a portfolio that doubles as a lead magnet. You have a list of Gumroad products for people who want to browse, and a stack of before-and-after examples for people who might hire you.
That two-sided structure works for other skills too. A designer can redo the cover images. A pricing consultant can annotate every price with what they would charge instead. The list is the excuse; the commentary is the sale.
How to build it in Google Sheets
Keep it to three or four tabs. A sheet like this lives or dies on how easy it is to filter.
- Products tab. One row per product with columns for Product, Creator, Category, Price, Rating, Sales (if shown), URL, One-line description, My take, and Date added. Make Category a data validation dropdown so you can filter cleanly later.
- Categories tab. A short list that feeds the dropdown. Keep it under 15 categories or the filtering gets mushy.
- Copy rewrites tab (if you are doing the copywriting angle). Columns for Product, Original headline, My headline, Original first paragraph, My first paragraph, Status (Emailed, Replied, Adopted), and Result.
- Top picks tab. A dashboard that pulls the best rows automatically, so a buyer opening the sheet sees the good stuff first.
Features worth using here:
-
FILTER to build the top picks view without copying data. Something like
=FILTER(Products!A2:J, Products!E2:E>=4.5)pulls every product rated 4.5 or better. - QUERY when you want a sorted, grouped view per category, like the five most expensive products in each one.
- Conditional formatting on the Price column so cheap and expensive products stand out at a glance.
- Checkboxes in a Reviewed column so you know which rows still need your commentary.
- Protected ranges on the Products tab so buyers can filter and sort a copy without wrecking your source data.
- IMPORTXML can pull a product title from its Gumroad page URL, which saves typing when you are adding dozens of rows. Test it on a few pages first, because page structures change.
If you go with the copywriting angle, add a simple onEdit trigger in Apps Script that stamps the date when Status changes to Emailed. Then you can see how long creators take to reply without tracking it by hand.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
Three buyers come to mind.
First, people about to launch their own Gumroad product. They want to know what works, what to charge, and what a good page looks like. They are paying for the research and the opinions.
Second, creators already selling on Gumroad who want to benchmark. Am I underpriced? Is my category crowded? They are paying for the comparison.
Third, if you did the copy rewrites, the creators themselves. They are paying for your service, and the sheet is what got them in the door.
Pricing: a one-time template at $19 to $49 is reasonable for a well-annotated list of 100 or more products. If you commit to adding 20 new products a month, a subscription for the updated sheet makes sense at $5 to $10 a month. The copywriting service on top is priced however you price copy.
Sell it on Gumroad, obviously. The irony helps the marketing. Use OnlySheets to sell access to the Google Sheet itself, so buyers get shared on the live sheet automatically after paying and see your updates without you emailing new links.
For the first 10 customers: post one row a day on Twitter or LinkedIn. Screenshot a product, give your take in two sentences, and mention the full list. Creators whose products you feature will often share it, because you just gave them free praise. Ten days of that usually finds ten buyers.
Related ideas from the list
- Create a Curated Directory, because this is a curated directory with a very specific source.
- Write Sales Copy, which pairs naturally with the copy rewrite angle.
- List of Freelancers with Reviews, another list where your annotations are the real product.
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.