Mailchimp Data Studio Connector

My connector was approved in mid-February but it wasn't until March that I broke through and got my first two paying customers. At $15 / month that's $30 / month of recurring revenue - not bad for the first full month after going live and without a real launch yet.

Both sales came from the link in the Google Data Studio connector gallery which gives only about 10 visits per month. But they are obviously visits with intent to buy as 20% were willing to buy without a free trial.

I've been writing a couple of analytics focused blog posts to try to get some more traffic to my connector (for example: https://www.epilocal.com/blog/connect-mailchimp-to-data-studio/) and next month I'm planning to create a free trial option so people don't have to commit to buying right away. Once this is done, I think I will be in a position to do a wider launch on someplace like ProductHunt.

Once I had my connector working and fully tested, I went through the process of submitting it to Google for their review and approval. (https://developers.google.com/datastudio/connector/pscc-requirements)

I first submitted around the middle of January and had some back and forth with the team for a couple of silly things that I missed that I should have included. Once I fixed these, I had to go through two in-depth reviews: first is OAuth approval and the second is approval by their Data Studio Connector team.

Both of these require video walkthroughs for their teams to understand how your app is authenticating and why it is using any scopes that Google deems as sensitive.

Once these reviews were complete, it took a couple of weeks for them to add it to their Google Data Studio Connector Gallery. (https://datastudio.google.com/data)

I had started in December playing around with Google Data Studio Connectors in my spare time. I had used Data Studio in prior jobs and knew there was a gap in the market for simple and affordable connectors.

After following a great series of blog posts on Medium (https://bajena3.medium.com/building-a-custom-google-data-studio-connector-from-a-z-part-1-basic-setup-445a6d965d3f) I was able to adapt it to the Mailchimp API and had a working connector in about a month.