In college, I developed a tool which helped users export their Kindle highlights to a Notion database. Here's the story.

TL;DR

In college, I developed a small tool called "Kindle Export to Notion" (a terrible name, but explains what it does). I launched it on Reddit and gained some traction, users, and revenue.

Kindle Export to Notion

Idea

In my undergraduate years, I used to read a lot of books on my Kindle. I would often highlight my favorite quotes, stories, and phrases so I could come back to them at a later time.

However, I found that I never quite came back to it. This was because you could only access your highlights on your Kindle itself. So I decided to make Kindle highlights more accessible. I am a frequent user of Notion, a tool used for note-taking and documentation. I decided to build a small app that would import all my Kindle highlights into a Notion database.

Execution

After spending a couple of weekends I completed a MVP. It was a simple web page where someone could upload their highlights file from Kindle, a Notion database link, a Notion authentication token and press a button. After giving all the right info, they could hit the submit button and magic! They could see a whole library of books in their Notion database with all their Kindle highlights arranged by books.

I spent some more time on additional features like adding automatically adding book cover, author name, and book metadata. After those tweaks, my database of all books looked like this:

Pretty good right? A user could click a book and this page would pop up:

• Book highlights
• Author
• Metadata
• A book description from the internet

After seeing how it solved my problem, I decided to check if other people needed it too. I did a soft launch on Reddit and people loved it.

I spent some days writing authentication and payment logic and made a small product out of this tool. I also made a pretty landing page that showed all the features of the tool. I launched this on Reddit and gained some traction! I received a lot of positive feedback from people. I also had a naive pricing strategy where the user would pay $1 for every export since I thought people would seldom export highlights and a subscription wouldn’t make much sense.

I had 250+ users who signed up and 70+ who purchased my product in the first week.

The project is no longer live because the traffic died down after the initial few weeks and there were better open-source and free alternatives on the market.

Tech stack: NodeJS, Python3, MongoDB.