How I Built It: $9K/Month Micro-SaaS

Leandro

• Background and origin story
  • Studied electronics engineering in Buenos Aires, Argentina, but lost passion for it in college and taught himself JavaScript instead
  • Freelanced for eight years, which he found frustrating due to lack of autonomy and entrepreneurial control
  • During COVID, he quit freelancing entirely with savings and coding experience to build his own product
• Pivotal moments and turning points
  • While building a Google Sheets integration, he gained deep knowledge of the Sheets API just as Notion released its official API
  • He noticed a gap: Notion users wanted to export their data into Google Sheets but no clean solution existed
  • Validated the idea by searching Reddit’s Notion subreddit for keywords like “sheets,” “Google Sheets,” “Excel,” and “CSV,” finding many users asking for exactly this
  • Built an MVP in two weeks with no AI tools, just Stack Overflow and Google
  • Removed the free plan despite backlash, which caused revenue to jump from $5K to $8K per month within months
• Business growth and current status
  • Sync2Sheets has been running for four years and generates $9,000 per month
  • Has over 70,000 total users and more than 450 paying customers
  • Gets around 5,000 visitors per month and has roughly $120,000 in lifetime revenue, with most earned in the last one to two years
  • Operates largely on autopilot with a 90% profit margin

Products and Offerings

• Sync2Sheets
  • A Google Workspace add-on that runs in the sidebar of Google Sheets
  • Syncs Notion databases directly into Google Sheets
  • Supports conditional formatting, data validation, dropdowns, column reordering, and column hiding to mirror how data looks in Notion
• F5 Bot
  • A free tool Leandro built to track keywords on Reddit and receive email notifications when new relevant posts or comments appear

Metrics and Financials

• $9,000 monthly revenue with approximately 90% margins
• Main expense is Google Cloud infrastructure due to real-time syncing between two services
• Other tools are low-cost
• Over 70,000 users, 450+ paying customers, ~5,000 monthly visitors
• ~$120,000 lifetime revenue over four years

Strategy and Growth

• Overall vision and positioning
  • Focused on doing one thing extremely well rather than building a bloated product
  • Targets the gap between two popular tools where users have a clear, recurring pain point
• Primary growth engine
  • Google Workspace Marketplace as the main source of installs
  • SEO-driven blog content related to Notion and Google Sheets as a top traffic channel
• Key tactics and channels
  • Active Reddit engagement using F5 Bot to find relevant threads and provide genuine value before recommending the product
  • Direct conversations with users in Facebook groups, LinkedIn groups, and personal DMs
  • Launched on Product Hunt a year and a half after initial release for visibility
  • Posted on Hacker News and reached the front page, gaining a massive traffic spike and backlinks
  • Used a chat interface on the landing page early on to have real conversations with potential customers

Tech Stack and Infrastructure

• Built using Google Appscript for the add-on UI and functionality
• TypeScript as the primary language
• VS Code as the code editor, with recent adoption of Cursor
• Google Cloud and Firebase for all infrastructure
• SendGrid for transactional and marketing emails
• Mixpanel for analytics to track individual user behavior
• Paddle as the payment processor (chosen because Stripe is not available in Argentina)
  • Handles billing and payments natively
  • Modernization is native to the platform
• Tidio for customer support chat on the landing page

Lessons and Advice

• Finding ideas
  • Look at Zapier’s most common app pairings to find integrations that are painful or messy to set up
  • Browse Upwork to see what people are requesting and consider turning those into standardized products
  • Pay attention to ideas that keep recurring in your mind; those are worth pursuing
• Validating ideas
  • Check if similar products already exist and study their pricing to assess market potential
  • Find a clear angle of differentiation before entering the market
  • Get five users to try the product while you are still building it to ensure you are solving a real problem
• Building an MVP
  • Start with the absolute core function: getting data from point A to point B with no formatting or extras
  • Layer in user experience improvements like formatting and conditional logic only after the core works
  • Focus on small details that make a meaningful difference to users
• Pricing and monetization
  • Charge from the very beginning; do not give everything away for free first
  • If users disappear when you introduce pricing, the product was not delivering enough value
  • Removing a free plan can dramatically increase revenue even if it causes short-term backlash
• General advice
  • Small UI changes like moving a button or changing text can have a profound impact on the business
  • Focus only on tasks that move the needle; skip everything else
  • Find at least one user willing to pay before investing significant time in building