A Google Sheets Add-On That Finds LinkedIn Profile URLs in Bulk. 2,000+ Installs and Here Is What We Learned

Hey IH community 👋

This is the story behind Smacient's LinkedIn Profile URL Finder, a tool born out of a frustration seen repeatedly across sales teams, recruiters, and growth marketers.

The problem
Anyone who's done outbound knows this pain: there's a list of names and companies, and LinkedIn profiles need to be found. One by one. Tab by tab. Copy-paste. Repeat 500 times.
It's soul-crushing work. And it's surprisingly hard to automate without expensive tools or custom scripts.
The same complaint kept coming up from sales reps and SDRs: "2 to 3 hours a day just finding LinkedIn profiles before outreach can even begin."

What was built
The LinkedIn Profile URL Finder is a Google Sheets add-on that converts a plain list of names (and, optionally, company names, country, and designation) into a list of LinkedIn profile URLs. Right inside Google Sheets. No API keys, no scraping scripts, no switching between 10 browser tabs.
Paste in names, click Search, and URLs appear in the sheet. Done.

But then users started asking: "okay I have the URLs, now what?"
That's how the second feature was born: Get Profile Data. Paste in LinkedIn profile URLs and extract a full structured dataset including job title, company, location, industry, headline, about section, connection count, follower count, current job duration, up to 7 past work experiences, 5 education entries, and 5 languages known. All neatly organized directly in the sheet.

Where things stand
The add-on just crossed 2,000+ installs on the Google Workspace Marketplace. That number was genuinely surprising. There was no big launch, no paid ads. Growth came almost entirely through organic search and word of mouth within sales and recruiting communities.
The most common feedback: people who used to spend hours on manual LinkedIn research now get it done in minutes.

Key lessons
The Google Workspace Marketplace is a seriously underrated distribution channel. Building something genuinely useful that integrates with tools people already live in, like Sheets, Docs, and Slides, means discovery happens naturally. Platform marketplaces deserve more attention as a growth channel.
The second feature (Get Profile Data) came directly from user requests and turned out to be the right call. It increased value per user significantly and made the credit model much stickier.
What's next

This is part of a broader suite of Google Sheets add-ons for marketers at Smacient, including AI ad copy generators, meta description writers, Amazon listing generators, web traffic metrics, and more. The vision is to bring powerful marketing and sales intelligence into the spreadsheet workflows people already use every day.

Happy to answer questions about building on the Google Workspace Marketplace, the credit-based pricing model, or the product itself. Would love feedback from this community!