Table of Contents
- Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
- How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
- Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
- What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
- What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
- Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
- What other products are you working on?
Leandro Zubrezki is the founder of Sync2Sheets - a Micro-SaaS to Give Notion the superpowers of Google Sheets
Tell us about your product and what inspired you to start it?
Sync2Sheets is a Google Workspace Add-On that allows users to sync their Notion databases with Google Sheets, that's the main value proposition. The product then also has other features like recurring tasks, enabling the usage of Sheets formulas and syncing the value of a single cell with a Notion block to name a few.
In May 2021 Notion released the beta of their public API, which users were eagerly waiting for!
I knew Notion before but never invested too much in the product, knowing now that there was a public API I thought it was a good idea to see what opportunities were there. I deep dived into the product itself, communities like Reddit and Facebook groups to better understand users and realized that syncing databases with Sheets would enable some workflows that were currently not possible otherwise.
I already had knowledge about the Sheets API because of a different product I was building so I decided to give it a go. It took me 2 weeks to build the MVP and publish it to the Google Workspace Marketplace. It had some bugs but having it on the open really helped to start conversations with users and start building from there.
How long did it take you to acquire your first 50 customers, and what was your growth strategy?
It took me 10 days to get my first 50 users which was great! In other products I built that never happened and I was always pushing the product to people, this time it felt different and people were pulling for the product. That's something super important in my opinion for microsaas, you need to feel that users pull for your product and not that you have to push it.
In the beginning Sync2Sheets was free, it allowed users to sync 3 workspaces and 3 databases which updated automatically every hour and also with the option to run the updates manually.
I then use those limits with some iterations to define paid plans. I learnt the hard way that I was giving away too much for free so it took some time to find the right limits and features for each of the tiers, something that I am still exploring.
Since I introduced paid plans it took 5 months until reaching 50 paying customers! I should have definitely done it sooner but I am happy to be now at $2.500 MRR, it is a nice number
Growth has always been organic, I am active on Reddit, Twitter, Facebook Groups and where Notion users hang and try to provide value to them, mentioning Notion2Sheets when appropriate.
Which technology stack are you using and what challenges and limitations does it pose?
To give some context, Sync2Sheets is a Google Workspace Add-On, you open it from the sidebar of a Google Sheet. To build add-ons you need to use Google Apps Script, it gives you a set of APIs to build UI elements programmatically and that's all you got. You have the chance to build it using HTML but it comes with some gotchas, that's why I decided to avoid it. You have a lot of constraints, you depend on Google infrastructure and there's nothing you can do, that has been the biggest challenge, how to provide the best possible experience with what you have available.
The backend is all Firebase and Google Cloud to communicate between both the Notion API and the Google Sheets API. I have learnt a lot along the way and there were many changes on how the product works with some big refactors, I feel it is pretty stable now, but you always depend on how both Notion and Google APIs work, the changes they make and their availability. Double platform risk.
What are some of the most essential tools that you use for your business?
Of course I use Notion and Google Sheets, it's important to be your own user when possible!
Apart from that I use SendGrid for transactional and email marketing, Mixpanel for user behavior and analytics, Gumroad to process payments and Tidio for live chat on the landing page.
What have been some of the biggest insights you've gained since starting your entrepreneurial journey?
Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War, "no plan survives first contact with the enemy". Well no feature survives first contact with users!
Even though everyone tells you to release as soon as possible to get customer feedback, experiencing it first hand is much more powerful for a lesson. That's one of the things I learnt while building Sync2Sheets, release as soon as possible, track user behavior and create a feedback loop for improvements.
Your recommended books/podcasts/newsletters etc.:
For books I would say Antifragile by Taleb is a must read for everyone, it really helps you make better decisions in what to invest your time and mostly what to avoid.
I read a lot of stoic philosophy, Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Letters from a Stoic by Seneca and the newsletter from Ryan Holiday Daily Stoic is great to keep the concepts always fresh.
There are other two newsletters I enjoy, Brain Food by Farnam Street and More to That by Lawrence Yeo, both always with great insights that makes you dive deeper in different concepts.
What other products are you working on?
I am also developing Packs for Coda and have a contract with them to include my Packs in their paid tiers, maybe something for the future :)
