He Made Google Sheets Feel Expensive

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Episode #158

🕵️ Wednesday is for spotting the thing everyone uses but nobody talks about. The Ramen Hustle is digging into quiet demand, strange customer habits, and niches with more money than attention.

Claude vs Gemini. GPT-7 vs Llama 5. Which AI lab ships AGI first. These are live Kalshi markets with real money on both sides, updated in real time as releases land. The person who follows model cards and tracks evals has a genuine edge here. If that's you, trade it.

Trade the model race

❌ The problem: Everyone uses spreadsheets, but most people are bad at them. Small business owners, freelancers, marketers, consultants, and teams keep duct-taping workflows together inside Google Sheets. They do not want a giant software rollout. They want the sheet they already use to stop being messy, slow, or confusing.

💡 The pitch: Teach one ordinary tool in a creative, outcome-specific way. Google Sheets for gym owners. Airtable for wedding planners. Excel for real estate agents. Notion for therapists. Canva for churches. The product can be tutorials, templates, audits, scripts, automations, or a membership. The trick is making the boring tool feel like business infrastructure.

🚀 The bigger opportunity: Workplace tools have become their own mini-economies. People buy courses, templates, add-ons, scripts, and coaching because the tool is already embedded in their daily work. A solo person can win by becoming the guide for one tool and one use case.

Andrew Kamphey built Better Sheets around Google Sheets, one of the most ordinary business tools on earth. The business started in April 2020 as a side project, then made $56,410 in revenue in 14 months and passed 2,100 customers.

The key is the product shelf. Better Sheets is not just “a course.” It became tutorials, templates, scripts, toolkits, automations, Google Apps Script lessons, and training on how to turn spreadsheets into sellable products. The business turned a free tool into a paid library of outcomes.

Kat Norton did the same thing with Excel at a bigger creator scale. She launched Miss Excel in June 2020, taught spreadsheet tricks through TikTok and Instagram, and turned one of the most boring office tools into a personality-driven course business. Thinkific’s case study says she had her first six-figure month, bringing in more than $105,000, and sold courses across Excel, dashboards, Google Sheets, and Microsoft tools.

The opportunity is not the tool. It is the annoying workflow inside the tool.

A beginner could build:

The best angle is to make the promise specific. “Learn Airtable” is weak. “Track every wedding inquiry, deposit, vendor, and follow-up in Airtable” is stronger. “Learn Sheets” is weak. “Build a client dashboard in Google Sheets” is stronger. “Canva templates” is weak. “30 Instagram templates for local gyms running January promos” is stronger.

The ladder is simple. Start with one free tutorial that solves a visible pain. Turn it into a paid template. Add a short video walkthrough. Offer a $99 audit. Offer a $499 setup. Then bundle the best pieces into a membership or niche toolkit.

What seems likely next is more one-tool education businesses around practical workflows. Watch the boring software people already use but secretly hate. That is where the paid shortcuts live.

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Gardening is shrinking.

Google Trends’ U.S. gardening report says search interest in “mini garden” hit an all-time high in 2026, and it highlights “tabletop garden” as another small-scale garden type. It also notes that search interest in gardening spikes every spring.

That is a strong ecommerce and local workshop signal.

Not everyone has a yard. A lot of people have apartments, patios, balconies, kitchen counters, desks, classrooms, or small backyards. They still want the feeling of growing something.

Zoom out: gardening demand is not only suburban anymore. Search interest around mini and tabletop gardens shows that plant culture keeps adapting to smaller spaces.

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🎧 Justin Jackson helped grow Transistor into a bootstrapped podcast-hosting business passing $30K MRR, proving that a small SaaS can win by serving a specific creator workflow better than the giants.

📄 User Onboarding is a useful swipe source because it tears apart how apps teach users what to do next, which is where a lot of “great products” quietly lose people.

📙 The War of Art is still worth keeping close because half of solopreneurship is not strategy, it is repeatedly beating the part of your brain that wants to disappear.

📹 Screen Studio is a polished little tool for product demos because it makes screen recordings look expensive without needing motion-design wizardry.

🔍 Build-A-Bear is worth studying because the product is not the bear, it is the ceremony of making the bear, which is a useful reminder that participation can be the margin.