A Notion-to-spreadsheet sync add-on hits $8,400 MRR: how it reached 400+ paying customers in two weeks

Dollar figures in this article carry an approximate yen conversion at ¥150/$1.

From a two-week add-on to $1.26 million a month in revenue

When Notion opened its public API beta in May 2021, a developer named Leandro, based in Buenos Aires, Argentina, put together an MVP in two weeks and published it to the Google Workspace Marketplace. The product was Notion2Sheets — a modest-sounding add-on that simply syncs a Notion database directly into a spreadsheet.

That add-on has since grown to roughly 40,000 lifetime installs, 400+ paying customers, and $8,400 MRR (about ¥1.26 million/month), an annualized run rate of roughly ¥15 million. Development and operations are entirely solo, and the only major fixed cost on record is SendGrid at $89.90/month (about ¥13,000).

The full picture in numbers

400+ paying customers against roughly 40,000 installs puts the free-to-paid conversion rate across the whole user base at around 1%. That’s not an unusual number for a micro-SaaS, but flip it around, and it also means this scale of monthly revenue required 40,000 installs to build.

He chose what people were already pulling for, not what he could build

Leandro had eight years of experience as a freelance software developer and was already comfortable with the Sheets API. But that’s not what decided he’d build this. He researched Notion’s Reddit community and Facebook groups first, and found a cluster of people already saying, out loud, that syncing with Sheets would unlock workflows that were currently impossible. Rather than building what he wanted to build, he reached for a complaint that had already been put into words.

His own quote captures the core of this case in one line.

You need the feeling that users are pulling the product, not that you’re pushing it.

The MVP was rough and had bugs. Even so, he says shipping it early meant putting it in an open space where conversations with users could start, and building it out from there. Fifty users in 10 days. He looks back on that as “great,” saying the feeling was qualitatively different from services he’d built himself in the past. Fifty in ten days is a small number on its own, but as a leading indicator, the fact that it was earned without any hard selling made it meaningful.

The target customer was also clear: operations, project management, and product management people at companies who use Notion heavily. They’re trying to push past Notion’s limits using a Sheets connection. Because the buyer’s job function was narrowly defined, a single comment in a community would land.

The decisive call: killing the free plan

What clearly bent this business’s trajectory was a pricing change, not a new feature or an ad campaign.

Notion2Sheets originally had a free tier: three workspaces, three databases, updates once an hour. But Leandro himself admits the free plan gave away far too much. For anyone who just wanted to sync Notion and Sheets in their day-to-day work, those limits were already practical enough.

After removing the free tier, he says he got “two really good months of growth.” He hasn’t disclosed a before/after comparison of absolute revenue, but this is the only turning point he explicitly names. Without changing the product or the acquisition channel, simply pushing demand that had been satisfied for free over to the paid side moved the numbers. That’s the structure here.

This isn’t a general rule that “killing free always grows revenue.” It worked because the free tier had already handed over the entire core value (ongoing automatic sync), leaving no motivation to move to paid. The correct design for a free tier is to let people experience the value while falling short of what production use actually needs, and Notion2Sheets’ original settings had crossed that line. He also notes he still hasn’t finished figuring out the optimal caps for each plan.

What worked: staking a claim on search before anyone else

Right now, the strongest acquisition channel is the Google Workspace Marketplace itself. Search “Notion” in the Marketplace, and Notion2Sheets shows up at the top.

This structure is strong. By the time someone reaches the Marketplace, their intent is already narrowed down to “I want to connect Notion to the Google world.” Sitting there as the standing answer to that intent removes almost all persuasion cost. And install counts and ratings push ranking upward, which in turn drives more installs, a self-reinforcing loop. Claiming that shelf space just two weeks after the API opened reads as something that has compounded over years.

As a short-term spike, the move Leandro himself calls “without question the best marketing decision I made” was the Product Hunt launch. He had Ben, a Notion employee, act as the hunter (the person posting it), and landed a top-10 spot plus a newsletter mention. Being introduced by a third party, and specifically someone from Notion itself, lent credibility to an otherwise unknown solo-built add-on.

What didn’t work, and what has since decayed

The product made the Hacker News front page. Traffic moved a lot, but Leandro dismisses it flatly: it “didn’t translate into installs or revenue.” A straightforward explanation is that the readership there didn’t match the buyer, non-engineer operations staff running Notion at work. This is a concrete example of buzz-driven traffic not necessarily moving business metrics.

Social tactics that worked early on have also stopped working as-is. Reddit’s moderation policy changed and got stricter on self-promotion. He stopped promoting there and switched to simply answering relevant questions. Doing the same thing in the same place no longer produces the same result, an ordinary truth playing out on a multi-year scale.

Growth hasn’t been a straight line either. After the good two months following the free-tier removal, he acknowledges a plateau: “October was pretty quiet, and November looks about the same.”

Risks and limits

This business sits on top of two platforms at once, Notion and Google. If Notion officially expands its own external integrations, demand itself could disappear; if Google Workspace Marketplace’s ranking rules or review criteria change, the primary acquisition channel could shrink. The source article doesn’t discuss competitive risk or the possibility of Notion adding equivalent native features, so readers should discount for that gap themselves.

One more point: a 1% conversion rate means most of those free installs are a one-time try that goes nowhere. The 40,000 figure is impressive, but the real size of the business is set by the other number, 400.

What generalizes, and what doesn’t

What’s reproducible: the speed of claiming shelf space within two weeks of an official platform change like an API opening, the sequence of confirming demand from community posts before building, and the discipline of checking whether a free tier is handing over the entire core value. None of these require capital.

What’s harder to reproduce: the one-time timing of Notion’s API opening in May 2021, eight years of hands-on experience already using the Sheets API, and the connection that let him put someone from Notion forward as his Product Hunt hunter. That last one especially can’t be copied later and expect the same amplification. Platform-opening events like this do recur, though, so what’s worth taking from this case isn’t a specific tactic. It’s the posture of being ready to move within two weeks the next time one opens.

Related reading

• How the open-source analytics tool Plausible reached $1M ARR
• PDF.ai founder Damon Chen’s multi-product strategy