Sync2Sheets

It took 6 months ish for this small super niche tool to get into 1k MRR and it is a huge milestone for me.

Having decided to stop freelancing on January 2021 and after trying a couple of ideas that didn't work I can say I am happy with all I have learnt during 2021 and I expect 2022 to be an amazing year full of milestones and new bets.

1k MRR club, I am in ✋

I have to say it was super fun to build, the idea was simple, be able to keep the values from a Sheet in Google Sheets in sync against a table in a Notion page.

I first thought about named ranges, but the problem is that they are not dynamic, if you want new rows to automatically update then you need to also update the named range. I decided to go with the whole sheet approach and have worked perfectly.

I keep a copy of the entire sheet in a hidden sheet as cache to improve the performance, as one request per row is needed to update the values in Notion 🙁

It has been well received in the Notion community, you can see how it works quickly in the video ⤵️

https://youtu.be/a8y8YZTTsGs

Launching on Product Hunt is always a nice accomplishment, no matter the final results.

I have prepared email campaigns at different times to account for different time zones. I have a schedule of posts to do on social media and relevant groups and woke up at 4am to keep an eye on the comments and stats 💪

This is a moment to get feedback and see where the product stands, let's see how it goes!

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/notion2sheets

Sync2Sheets first started with a single feature, sync your Notion databases with Google Sheets, that was our marketing copy.

After adding more features like synced columns, recurring tasks and synced cells, I believe this was not the best marketing copy to give users a glance at what we can do for them.

Give Notion the superpowers of Google Sheets

I think it is more catchy and emotional, it lets users image what they can do with Notion having Google Sheets features at hand.

We then explain in more detail the feature that we have and the best value points.

Keep your databases from Notion automatically in sync with Google Sheets. Use Sheets formulas to send data to Notion, create recurring tasks and even connect cells with Notion blocks for dynamic dashboards!

I have to say this is one of my favourite features, building it was fun and super quick.

It allows users to connect the value of a cell from Sheets with a Notion block, equations included!

Notion users can make their headings, paragraphs, lists and todos dynamic with this new feature, it allows the creation of dashboards, the ability to reference databases data outside them in pages and more.

I built Sync2Sheets dashboard with it, take a look ⤵️

https://notion2sheets.notion.site/Notion2Sheets-de7fbe25ccbd418fa30f61b798473054

On September 10th we achieved the nice number of 1.000 users!

Being active on Facebook groups answering questions, in Reddit helping the community, in Twitter having conversations and creating great content that allows user to do more with Notion in our blog, has allow Sync2Sheets to keep growing and reaching its audience.

Sync2Sheets is now ranking in the first SERP of all related queries regarding Notion and Google Sheets, even higher than companies like Zapier, Automate.io and Integromat.

This is what is working for Sync2Sheets, and we will continue with our efforts around "free" strategies until we are ready to start pouring some paid marketing, with a better understanding of what users are looking for and how to present our value.

Sync2Sheets pricing is divided in 3:

• Free
• Professional / Team at $15 a month
• Business at $49 a month

Today we got our first business plan customer!
The customer upgraded to business because he needed to use more synced columns, one of Sync2Sheets features.

In the free plan you can create 6, in the professional / team 18 and in the business plan it is unlimited. Limited based pricing works, but it is super important for the user to understand the value of the feature and why having more of it is worth the upgrade.

I will continue to iterate around pricing, talking to customers and see which features we can add to business that will make more users to upgrade. Our target customers are companies using Notion.

A feature that has been asked by the community many times, the ability to have some sort of recurring tasks in Notion.

Notion doesn't have the concept of tasks, you just have databases that are containers for pages. Then you can define the properties that each page will have and with that you create your tasks list. So each user has its own version and definition of tasks.

The main goal for this feature is to allow users to schedule page creations at different frequencies; hourly, daily, weekly and monthly with different time and days options.

We hope this can help users automate their tasks creation in Notion and create their own notifications system.

The MVP was ready in two weeks, which was great! But that left me with some tech and architecture debt that was making Sync2Sheets difficult to scale.

I decided then to move all the business and sync logic from Apps Script to Cloud Functions, reducing bugs and having much better control on how the code runs.

During the rewrite, I also removed all the problems caused by having multiple accounts logged in in Google, these are long standing bugs that haven't been fixed by Google for years, so it was time to go around them and provide a great experience to all users.

We released our pricing a couple of days ago and today we got our first paying customer. It was an amazing feeling to wake up, check the email and see that beautiful subject from Gumroad, "You have a new subscriber for Sync2Sheets Professional Plan of $15 a month".

This is the beginning of a journey to make Notion more dynamic, connect it with third party content and put Google Workspace power at the fingertips of Notion users.