Every town has deals. The taco place does half-price Tuesdays, the gym waives its sign-up fee twice a year, the bookstore runs a clearance nobody hears about until it's over. The problem is that none of it lives in one place. It's scattered across Instagram stories, chalkboard signs, and the back of a receipt.
So the idea is simple: build a Google Sheet that captures every local business deal in one market, keeps it organized, and makes it easy to find the good ones fast.
It's one of my 100 business ideas in Google Sheets, and it's one of the few on the list where the barrier to entry is knowing your own neighborhood rather than knowing a whole industry.
The idea
A Local Business Deals sheet is a great fit for savvy deal seekers, entrepreneurs, and community organizers who can build a dynamic, functional spreadsheet. You need a basic understanding of a single local market. You need to be familiar with the kinds of businesses in it. And you need an eye for finding and curating the best deals in town.
That last part is the whole product. Anyone can dump coupons into a list. The value is in the curation: which deals are actually good, which ones are expiring, which ones apply to the person looking at the sheet right now.
Pick one market. Not a state, not a metro area. One town, or one neighborhood in a big city. A sheet that covers "deals in Austin" is competing with every app and newsletter in Austin. A sheet that covers "deals within ten minutes of the university" has no competition at all.
Then present it in a way that's organized and user-friendly. Formulas like VLOOKUP and INDEX-MATCH let someone search and retrieve deal data by location, category, or discount percentage. FILTER creates dynamic lists based on what the user types in. Conditional formatting highlights the best deals, or the ones expiring soon, so the most attractive offers jump out at a glance.
The end state is a sheet that fully automates the display of the deals. You maintain the raw list. The sheet does the sorting, the flagging, and the presenting.
How to build it in Google Sheets
Keep the raw data separate from the views. That's the one rule that makes this maintainable.
- Deals tab. One row per deal. Columns: Business, Category, Neighborhood, Deal Description, Discount %, Start Date, End Date, Days of Week, Source Link, Verified Date, Active (checkbox).
- Businesses tab. One row per business: Name, Address, Category, Phone, Website. The Deals tab pulls category and neighborhood from here so you only type them once.
- Finder tab. The user-facing view. A couple of dropdown cells at the top (Category, Neighborhood, Max Distance) and a FILTER underneath that shows only matching deals.
- Expiring Soon tab. A filtered list of anything ending in the next seven days, sorted by end date.
- Intake form. A Google Form that feeds the Deals tab, so you can add a deal from your phone while standing in the shop.
Features that earn their place here:
- Data validation dropdowns for Category and Neighborhood, so the filters actually match and you never end up with "Coffee" and "coffee" as two categories.
-
FILTER on the Finder tab, driven by the dropdowns. Something like
=FILTER(Deals!A2:K, Deals!B2:B=B1, Deals!K2:K=TRUE)shows active deals in the chosen category. - Conditional formatting on End Date to color anything expiring within a week, and on Discount % to shade the biggest discounts darker.
- XLOOKUP to pull a business's address and phone onto the Finder tab when someone picks a deal.
- Google Forms intake so adding deals is a thirty-second task, not a spreadsheet session.
- Time-driven Apps Script trigger that unchecks the Active box on any deal whose End Date has passed, so stale deals disappear without you touching anything.
A checkbox column for Active is worth more than it looks. It lets you pause a deal without deleting it, and every view in the sheet respects it.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
There are two buyers, and they pay for different things.
The first is the resident. They pay for the time saved and the curation. They don't want to follow forty local businesses on social media. They want to open one sheet on Friday afternoon and know where to go. For them, this is a low-priced subscription, because the value is entirely in the updates. A sheet of deals from last month is worthless.
The second is the local business itself. Once you have a few hundred people opening the sheet every week, a featured row at the top is worth something to the taco place. That's a monthly listing fee, and it can end up being the bigger revenue line.
Pricing: sell the resident access as a monthly subscription through OnlySheets, which handles sharing the Google Sheet automatically with paying subscribers and revoking it when they stop. Sell the business listing fee directly, by invoice, or as a simple Gumroad product they buy once a month. If you'd rather sell the framework than the data, you can also sell the empty template on Gumroad to people in other towns who want to run the same thing.
Getting the first 10 customers: walk into ten businesses and ask if you can list their deal for free. Most will say yes, because it's free. Then post the sheet in the local subreddit, the neighborhood Facebook group, and the community Slack or Discord if there is one. Give it away for the first month. The people who keep opening it are your first subscribers, and the businesses that see foot traffic from it are your first listing fees.
Related ideas from the list
- Niche Deals List, which is the same curation mechanic pointed at a topic instead of a place.
- Create a Local Marketplace, which serves the same local buyers and sellers with a broader sheet.
- Create a Curated Directory, because a deals list is really a directory with an expiry date on every row.
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.
