Build & Sell Spreadsheets with AI — Step-by-Step Guide & Transcript

[00:00] All right, so the internet is going crazy once again because Google just dropped some updates to Cloud that gives it full access of Google's tools, like Google Drive, documents, slides, sheets, and a bunch of other stuff as well.

[00:13] And because of that, along with some other updates that were just released to Cloud, today I'm able to show you how we can use these new AI tools to build out digital products that you can sell for hundreds of dollars a day. Up until now, you haven't been able to create this type of product using AI, and doing it manually would take forever, which is why I think this is pretty cool.

[00:32] So in this video, I'm going to show you what the product is, how much money you can make selling it, with proof of course, and then we'll actually build it out live so you can see how to do everything using AI. These are one of the all-time best-selling digital products there is, and I'm of course talking about budgeting spreadsheets, like the ones that you can see on my screen.

[00:52] These make thousands of dollars a month as digital products, and today I'm going to show you how you can use Quad to build out the entire product using AI. But before I do that, let me just show you how well they're selling. I'm on Etsy, which is a popular marketplace where people make and post digital products just like these for sale.

[01:08] The way this works is the seller picks a specific problem to solve. So in this case, they've made a travel planner, and they've built that out using Google Sheets. Once they have the template made, they just make a mock-up image by putting it in an iPad,

[01:22] and then they post it for sale on websites like Etsy, where it can sell passively over time. And as you can see just from scrolling through, these spreadsheets make a lot of money. Just to pick one out, this one is making over $5,000 a month.

[01:35] Now, it's a bi-weekly paycheck budget tracker selling for $11, and it's just a Google Sheets and Excel download. So as soon as the customer buys it, they get a direct link to access this template.

[01:47] Here's another product. It's almost the exact same thing. This one's the Ultimate Wedding Planner, so it just helps you plan something different. You can see it's making an estimated $3,700 per month, and it's the exact same Google Sheets digital download.

[02:01] The idea here is really simple. The customer has a problem staying organized in some area of their life, and they don't want to spend 18 hours in Google Sheets trying to build out a custom solution that may or may not work.

[02:13] So instead, they come to Etsy looking for a pre-made solution to their problem. They'll come through and they'll find one that fits their needs. They'll buy it for between $10 to $20, saving them not only the headache,

[02:25] but also the time of having to build it out for themselves. And because this type of product solves a real problem, you get insane listings like this one but selling over 900 times per month and making an estimated $19,458.

[02:41] And this is all from one single listing, not even the overall shop. Once again, I didn't even clickbait as hard as I could have. Almost any customer can access Google Sheets, which makes it the perfect place to build out and sell your spreadsheets.

[02:53] And because these are digital downloads, you don't have any product costs, which means you keep around 90 to 95% of the sale in profit. You also don't have nearly as much customer service since it's a digital product, and that also means that you don't have to worry about returns, exchanges, and cancellations

[03:08] because they're not allowed. People have been able to start this as a side hustle and grow it into what you could consider a full-time business. Like this shop that has only 48 of these spreadsheets posted for sale, they've been able to make over 144,000 sales.

[03:22] Or this shop that opened only nine months ago, they've already managed to sell nearly 6,000 of their spreadsheet templates, bringing in an estimated $11,000 per month, and they've only posted 15 of these spreadsheets for sale.

[03:35] I wasn't lying when I said this is one of the best-selling digital products that you can make. There are dozens of shops that sell spreadsheets just like this that make tens of thousands of dollars per month, and some of those shops have scaled to seven figures and beyond in just a couple years,

[03:50] all from selling these spreadsheets. There's even gigs on Fiverr that offer to create these planners for you, and this specific gig with around 300 orders at their cheapest price of $65 has made over $19,000.

[04:03] That doesn't even include if people bought the standard or premium package. So now that you can see how well this product actually sells, how do we actually go about building it using AI? I've broken it down into three really simple steps.

[04:16] First, we'll do some research to figure out which specific type of spreadsheets sell best. Then we use Claude new GWS CLI which is a fancy way to say Google integration to automate the process of building these out in just a few minutes And then we use AI to build out a

[04:33] full marketplace listing with images so that we can post it for sale. So the first thing we need to do is figure out what's selling and why. And I'll show you my simple research system that I've used to sell over $2 million of digital products in the last three years. First, you find an already

[04:47] best-selling product, then you pick one area to improve on it or pivot and make it slightly different, and then you recreate that product and post it for sale. This method lets you sell to customers who are already coming to the platform to buy a product, but sell them something that's

[05:02] original and unique to you. The first option is to find long-time best-selling evergreen products like this one. So what you'll see here is that this is a bookkeeping spreadsheet targeted towards small businesses, and it's been on Etsy for 36 months, which is quite a while. But what you'll

[05:20] see is because I have this ListingView plugin, I can see that this is an evergreen listing, and it's sold consistently over time. It's still making an estimated $4,700 per month. But at the same time, something like this could also be a good option. It's an ultimate budget

[05:34] planner, but you could see this one was posted only two months ago, and it's already making an estimated $1,700 a month, which basically just means this product was posted recently and it's growing really quickly. Now, what you'll find is that bundles tend to sell the best.

[05:49] A bundle is just a listing that has several other spreadsheets all bundled together and sold as one. So what I like to do is instead of building out the entire bundle in one go, I'll pick one part of the bundle to start with.

[06:01] I'll build that out so that I can post that for sale and then reuse it as a part of a bundle later on. So for our example, I think we're going to go with something like this 50-30-20 dashboard. This is basically just a budget tracker, but we know that this idea is popular and that it sells super well.

[06:17] And so that's where we'll start with. Now, because I'm using the ListingView plugin, if I make a separate search for this specific type of spreadsheet, I can see that there's only 1,200 other listings showing up for this search, which means there's hardly any competition.

[06:31] And they're making an average of $713 per month. And that's an average based on all of the listings on this search page. So although some of them might not sell, there's enough in this niche that are selling every single month,

[06:44] which tells me that this is a great place to start. Now, before we can start building this out, you're going to have to install the Google Workspace CLI on your computer so that you can actually do this with Quad. And this is much easier to do if you have the Quad app installed on your computer

[06:59] so that you can switch between the chat and Quad code, which we'll be using to install the Google Workspace CLI. Now, don't worry. You don't have to code anything out. You just have to use Claude's code to install it on your computer and actually build out the spreadsheets.

[07:13] But I'll show you how to do everything. I'm going to have all of the prompts that you need right below the subscribe button, so you can just open this document and copy and paste the prompts. But the first one we need is this prompt to install the GWS CLI.

[07:26] So I'm going to copy and paste it in, and make sure that Claude has just pointed to a generic folder. You can read and write some files through. It doesn't really matter where you're doing it. And we'll run this prompt. It's basically going to read through all of the documentation here for what needs to be set up

[07:40] so that we can control our Google account through Quad. It should give you a few different options on how to install it depending on your machine. So I said let's try installing it via NPM. It's asking me to allow some commands, so I'm just going to run these.

[07:53] And then once it's installed, you'll have to go through the authentication process so that we can actually link it to your account. Now, during this installation process, there's really two things we're installing. The Google Workspace, which gives Quad the ability to create and manipulate files in our Google Sheets and other Google tools in our account.

[08:10] And we also have to install GCloud, which is basically how Quad will authenticate itself and actually get connected to your Google account. This is where it gets just a little bit technical, but if you follow the instructions, you don't have a problem.

[08:23] So first, we have to configure an OAuth consent screen. So we just need to click on the first link that Claude gives us. And this takes you to the Google console where we need to create a new project. So I already have a project here, but we're just going to make a new project.

[08:36] I'm going to call it Claude GWS, and I'm just going to hit Create. Then inside your project, click on Overview, Get Started. For the app name, just use GWS CLI. You can put your own email as the support email You going to select External for the app Once again you can put your own email address as the contact information Hit I agree and just create the Aloft screen Then you can

[08:59] click create an Aloft client. Choose a desktop app. You can call this whatever you'd like and just hit create. From here, it's going to give you some keys that I'm going to have to blur out, but you'll want to download those to your computer. You can also just drop them into

[09:11] cloud and have it create the directory for you. And the very last thing you need to do so that all of this can actually work is come over into audience, add a test user, and add your own email address as a test user. It saves. Sometimes there's a little bit of back and forth debugging with

[09:26] Cloud Code, but eventually you should get a link like this, which lets you authenticate your account. And once you complete the authentication process, it'll bring you back into Cloud Code, and we're finally ready to go. So now that the installation is done, we can move on to the fun

[09:38] part of actually building out the product. To get the best results, Cloud Code needs a super detailed prompts that it can use to go and build out the spreadsheet. And the way that I like to do this is to start by grabbing a screenshot of a product that's already selling super well so that

[09:52] we have a visual reference to get started with. So I'm going to paste that into Cloud and then I'm going to grab the second prompt that I'll have in my Google Docs and upload that as well. I also have this little file which I'd recommend adding into your prompts to get the best result. I'm

[10:05] going to hit generate and we're going to give this a few seconds to build out an entire prompt. From Here, it should ask you a few questions about how you actually want to build out your product, which is super helpful if you haven't done this before. And I'm going to go with a new color scheme just so that we can build out something original.

[10:20] All right, honestly, that took a little while, but now what we should have is a full prompt that we can use to create one of these spreadsheets, hopefully in one shot. This is a super detailed and really long document, so all I really need to do is just copy it.

[10:33] We'll come back into Cloud Code, and we can paste this in. I'm going to hit enter, and we're going to give it a few minutes to see what it comes up with. What makes this really powerful is I can launch multiple agents in parallel. So I can start Cloud Code building out one spreadsheet,

[10:47] and then go back into my original chat and create a plan for the next spreadsheet, all simultaneously. So basically, if you're willing to go through all those steps to get it set up, you can build these out really quickly.

[10:59] I can come back into the regular Cloud and ask, what's another spreadsheet planner I can make? It's going to think and then give me a few options to choose from. I can grab the next prompt, paste it in with my instructions file, and then just let it do its thing.

[11:12] Now I have two of these running simultaneously in the background. I could go create more prompts, do more research, or just let them finish up. Just remember, you might have to come back in here and click to allow permissions every once in a while.

[11:24] And now that it's finished, we have this link where we can test it out. So I'm just going to open up the link. And from here, you can see everything it built. So this is our actual product opened up in Google Sheets.

[11:36] Now, there's a few formatting issues. These kind of overlay on some of the text, but honestly, it's nothing that big of a deal. We can adjust some of these columns and organize it depending on what we want, but overall, I didn't have to do anything to build this besides write a couple prompts.

[11:52] So just by taking a look at this, there's a bunch of different fields here. We have our savings goals, my goal allocation, where your money went, so kind of tracking where you're spending your money. We have some pie charts and we even have bar graph over here that shows you how you're spending on a wants and needs.

[12:08] It also built out a couple tabs here. So we have the transactions log. So this is where we would come in and actually input some transactions. You can see we have certain things color coded as well. We can categorize everything. And we also have the setup page.

[12:23] Again, there's a few styling details that we might want to come in and modify just a little bit so that it looks a little cleaner. Overall, this entire document looks really good. And everything in here should be dynamic and linked. So, for example, if we come through and we change this rent payment to something crazy like $10,000 for January,

[12:41] if we come back into the dashboard, what you'll see is that everything updates. So our needs column absolutely spikes. You can see we overspent on needs there. Our pie chart, you can see we way overspent in the needs category.

[12:54] And basically everything in here is updated. So the idea is that now a customer could use this template, start filling out and categorizing and staying organized with things like their transactions, and they can monitor the progress over time.

[13:08] And when you compare something like our spreadsheet to some of the ones out there that are already selling super well, it's not even that far off. Sure we could come through and update some of the colors just to make it look a little bit better but all of those customizations are purely visual I definitely don think that this is a bad start for just a few minutes of work And just like that we have another full spreadsheet that ready to go This one would

[13:30] be like a side hustle P&L that we could include as a separate resource, or we could bundle these two together. This one, you can see, honestly might look better than the first one. This would basically let someone track how their side hustle is performing over time depending on what they're

[13:44] doing. Again, we have a few different tabs here. So we have a tab for revenue, a tab for expenses, and once again, it's fully functional. So if I come back into the revenue tab and we make some kind of crazy revenue like $75,000 and we come back into the dashboard, if we come down into

[14:01] the month of February, you can see that we made an insane amount of profit. And so assuming someone used real numbers and for their actual side hustle, this would fully allow you to track pretty much everything that you needed to. It's just insane you can build something like this out

[14:15] in a couple of minutes. But now that we have a final product, it's time to actually build out a listing that we can post for sale online. Almost all of the listings that are selling really well display their spreadsheets in some kind of mock-up. Typically, it's just a computer

[14:28] or an iPod with the spreadsheet inside it. And it's really easy to get this type of effect. So for example, on a website like Freepik, you can find a bunch of these tablet and computer mockups. Something like this one might work really well.

[14:41] If we download the .csd file, we can use a free tool like Photopea to edit it. So if we just drag that file in, it'll open up that mockup, and we can just double click on the smart object window. And then if we grab a screenshot of the spreadsheet that we just made, we can paste it in and position it how we want it to appear.

[14:59] This gives the customer a much better idea of what they get before they buy it, and it also makes it look nicer. But if we want it, we could also just use AI to build out our listing image. So if we come over into Google's Gemini and we turn on image mode, I can grab a screenshot of one of the spreadsheets that I made,

[15:15] paste it in, and write a prompt telling it to put it on a computer screen mock-up so that I can sell it. It'll create an image using that dashboard that we could use to post this for sale. This gives us a professional-looking mock-up using our spreadsheet that we could use as a listing image.

[15:29] An image like this is going to sell the product much better than just uploading a screenshot of the dashboard itself. So once we have the spreadsheet and the images to sell it, all we need to do is create the actual marketplace listing.

[15:42] Now to actually sell this product, the challenging part is that it's a template. So when the customer buys it, there's nothing to really download because we're basically just selling them a link to the template. So when a customer buys it from us, we need to deliver that link to them.

[15:54] The easiest way that I know of to do this is to use a listing management tool like ListingView. ListingView is this tool that shows us sales data for listings right on Etsy, and it also lets us create and manage listings that we've posted for sale.

[16:06] So I'm in ListingView, and I'm just creating a single listing for my shop. I've already got the image uploaded, but we can use AI to basically fill out all of the details for this product. So I can literally just grab the title of one of these products that's selling well and open up ListingView's AI,

[16:22] And from here, I can paste that into the custom prompt. I'm going to change the mode to quad opus since that gets you the absolute best results. And then if I hit generate, this gives me full optimized details that I can use in my listing to post it for sale.

[16:36] And what's really cool about this is if I scroll down into the product section, since this is a digital product, ListingView gives me the option to sell a URL and ListingView takes care of delivering that to the customer. So all I'd have to do is grab my template link, paste it into ListingView.

[16:51] with a brief description of what it is. And if I hit add, you'll see that now this URL is part of the listing. So now whenever a customer comes to buy this from me, they'll get a downloadable PDF with their spreadsheet download link

[17:04] that they can just click to get their own copy. And from here, I could publish this product straight to Etsy's marketplace, which is kind of like a social media platform for selling products because you can post these products for 20 cents each

[17:17] and you don't even have to run paid ads. A lot of these listings that are making hundreds to thousands of dollars a month, they're not even running paid ads. They're just ranking organically in search. So you can start with a strategy like this and then turn on the paid ads once you have some profit coming in.

[17:33] But all of that really just scratches the surface. So if you want an even more detailed and comprehensive guide, make sure you click subscribe because I have a completely free, fully comprehensive digital product course dropping soon.

[17:45] So you won't want to miss it.