How I updated a personal tool to sell it for $5 on Gumroad

I had created this spreadsheet to help my wife and I keep up on our household chores.

It worked for both of us. She wanted a paper list and I wanted something easy to maintain.

I describe the spreadsheet and the process here.

In this article I'll go step by step how I dressed it up to sell on Gumroad.

Table of Contents

I wrote an article about the tool

“Wait a second,” you may be thinking. How does that help you get it ready to sell on Gumroad?

In writing the article, I explained what the tool did for me and the context of why I put it together. This helped me to define my audience.

I also scanned one of our marked-up spreadsheet to illustrate the system (which wasn't complex). The only thing I altered was redacting my daughter's name.

I saved off a copy of the spreadsheet and unhid all of the columns

I figured that the easiest way to show how it all worked was to unhide all of the columns. I didn't give a whole lot of explanation for the columns because (a) they were mostly self-explanatory and (b) everything was there in plain sight

I made it a bit more user-friendly

There was a nested IF statement with hard-coded numbers. This wasn't user-friendly (for me or anyone else) so I pulled the parameters out into their own hidden columns.

I added instructions

I just added a tab in the spreadsheet and put instructions in there.

They weren't elaborate instructions and they didn't cover every possible use case. I didn't feel the need to put in a lot of stuff that could easily be Googled. People who buy it know that they're getting a spreadsheet so they're likely not scared to use them.

But I did explain: