Most people who need to tweet for their business hate tweeting. They open the box, stare at it, type something, delete it, and close the tab. That's a daily loss of attention for them and a daily opportunity for you.
The idea is simple. Write 100 tweets ahead of time for a specific kind of person, put them in a Google Sheet, and sell the sheet.
It's one of my 100 business ideas in Google Sheets, and it's one of the fastest to get to a first sale.
The idea
Figure yourself a good writer? Ghostwrite tweets for other people. And you can do it before they ask you.
Write 100 tweets today for an archetype. Then 100 next week for another archetype. A SaaS founder. A bootstrapped indie hacker. A real estate agent. A fitness coach. Each one has a recognizable voice and a recognizable set of things they need to say every week.
Sell it as a one-off for $10, or as a membership of $10 a month. Every week, write 100 new tweets for people to use. The one-off gets you cash today. The membership gets you a reason to keep writing and gives them a reason to keep paying.
The sheet contains a categorized and itemized list of pre-written tweets, which can be customized to fit different needs. Cover the topics your archetype actually posts about: marketing, product updates, hiring, lessons learned, contrarian takes, questions to the audience, and so on.
The trick that makes this a product instead of a list is the blanks. A tweet that reads "We just shipped [FEATURE]. Here's why we built it: [REASON]" is useful to a hundred founders. A tweet about your specific feature is useful to one. Write in the template layer, and let the buyer fill in the specifics.
This business idea is ideal for people with skills in content creation, social media management, or marketing. You use your skill to create the sheet. Others who lack the knowledge or the time to create their own content buy the shortcut.
Use formulas such as SUBSTITUTE or REGEXREPLACE to make the formats easy to fill in. The buyer types their product name once, and every template updates. That's the moment they realize a spreadsheet was the right container for this.
How to build it in Google Sheets
Keep it to three tabs. The buyer should understand it in under a minute.
Tabs
- Setup: a handful of named cells the buyer fills in once. Product Name, Your Name, Niche, Main Benefit, Website.
- Templates: one row per tweet. Columns for ID, Category, Template (with placeholders like [PRODUCT]), Filled Tweet, Character Count, and a Used checkbox.
- By Category: a filtered view so they can grab five "Lessons Learned" tweets without scrolling past 95 others.
Features to use
- Named ranges for the Setup cells so your formulas read like English and don't break if you move a row.
-
SUBSTITUTE to swap the placeholders for the buyer's values. Nested calls handle several placeholders in one template:
=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(C2,"[PRODUCT]",ProductName),"[NAME]",YourName). - LEN in the Character Count column so they can see at a glance which filled tweets run long.
- Conditional formatting that turns the count red past 280 characters.
- Checkboxes in the Used column so they don't post the same tweet twice.
- FILTER on the By Category tab, driven by a data validation dropdown, so they pick "Hiring" and get only hiring tweets.
- ARRAYFORMULA down the Filled Tweet column so you write the SUBSTITUTE once and it fills every row, including ones you add later.
Write the 100 templates in the sheet itself, not in a doc you paste in later. You'll catch the ones that don't work as templates faster.
Who pays for it, and how to sell it
The buyer is someone who has to post for their business and doesn't want to. Founders, agency owners, coaches, consultants. They're paying for the blank page to go away. They're paying for the taste, the variety, and the fact that it took you a day and it'll take them ten minutes.
The $10 one-off is the easy entry. It's an impulse price. A $10 monthly membership with 100 new tweets each week is a much better business, because one buyer is worth $120 a year instead of $10, and because it forces you to keep writing.
Sell the one-off on Gumroad with a view-only link the buyer copies. For the membership, use OnlySheets. It handles the payment and adds each buyer to the sheet automatically, so you can update one master sheet every week and everyone sees the new tweets.
Add a service if you want higher prices. Offer to write 100 custom tweets in the buyer's own voice for a flat fee. The template sheet is the lead magnet for that.
For the first ten customers, tweet the templates. Post one filled-in example a day from the archetype's point of view, and say where it came from. People who see a tweet they wish they'd written will buy the other 99. Reply to founders complaining about content and hand them the link.
Related ideas from the list
- LinkedIn Post Generator, the same fill-in-the-blank mechanic pointed at a different platform.
- 100 Blog Ideas, another pre-written batch of 100 sold to people who don't want to start from zero.
- Social Media Scheduler, the natural home for these templates once someone has bought 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.