Who is Sameer Sanagala?
Co-founder, NotionApps. Known for NotionApps.
This page recognises Sameer Sanagala for what they have contributed to the Notion community. It is written independently, it is not an endorsement, and it does not mean they use thePlus.so.
“Someone told me to look at NotionApps for giving clients a slice of a Notion database without handing over the workspace. Before I put real client data through it, I want to know who built it and whether the person behind it is worth trusting.”
Sameer Sanagala co-founded NotionApps with Jatin Arora and put it in front of people in March 2023. He documented the build in public from day ten onward, including the figures that were unflattering, and the product went through two Product Hunt launches and a 2.0 release. This page collects what he published and where you can read it in his own words.
On March 24, 2023, ten days after NotionApps went public, Sameer Sanagala posted the whole set of numbers: 414 unique visitors, 53 signups, 18 people who connected a database and built something, 21 apps created, and 30 end users who spent an average of one minute fifty seven seconds inside those apps. His read on it was that the positives were positive enough to keep the team going.
NotionApps takes a Notion database and gives it a front end with its own login, so the people using the result never need a seat in the workspace behind it. He built it with Jatin Arora, and for a long stretch the company was the two of them. What began as a way to publish a read only, directory style app grew into a builder with forms, user permissions, support for Notion relations, and 40+ components.
By February 2024 he was reporting 2,200+ signups, 45 paying customers and more than 16,000 end users across 84 countries, with Japan, the United States, the United Kingdom and France as the top markets. NotionApps has never been affiliated with Notion, and the company states that plainly on its own community site.
The fourth pivot in three years began with a phone
Sameer has described NotionApps as his team's fourth pivot in three years. The trigger was ordinary. He found Notion's database experience awkward on a phone, went looking, and found other people saying the same thing. The team already knew how to build apps, so they aimed that skill at the problem and shipped a tool that converted a Notion database into a mobile app. He was honest about how small the first version was when he wrote about it later: a way to turn a database into a view only, directory-like app, nothing more. The additions came in order of what users hit first. Private apps, then database-level permissions, then forms so people could enter and edit data, then page blocks, then a component library.
He published the numbers while they were still small enough to be embarrassing
The ten day report from March 2023 shows how he worked in the open. A 12% visitor-to-signup rate, 18 builders out of 53 signups, end users averaging under two minutes: each figure was posted with what he thought it meant. He read the gap between signups and finished apps as friction in creating a first app and set the team's priority around that instead of chasing end-user engagement. The habit held. A February 2024 progress report on Indie Hackers put the conversion rate at 2% against a 5% target he had not reached, alongside the mission he was aiming at, which was enabling 10 million businesses to get custom apps without hiring developers or consultants.
The argument arrived two years before the product did
In June 2021, well before NotionApps existed, Sameer published an essay asking why every business is not already a tech company. Its claim was that small and mid-sized companies are poorly served by the software on offer to them and end up living in spreadsheets and workarounds, and it set out the qualities such a company actually needs from a tool: flexibility, speed to go live, affordability, privacy, room to scale. The NotionApps site still links that essay from its footer under Vision, which makes the product easier to read. The people it was built for are the clients, vendors, partners and field teams who need one slice of a company's data and were never going to be given a Notion seat to get it.
A second Product Hunt launch, and the 2025 writing
NotionApps first hit Product Hunt on September 21, 2023 and finished #2 product of the day with 823 upvotes and 256 comments. Version 2.0 followed on May 14, 2025, placing #4 with 515 upvotes, and moved the pitch from apps toward web apps and portals built out of Notion. Around that period he and Jatin ran an AMA in the Notion forum on Product Hunt and put usage at 6,000+ Notion users who had built apps and 100,000+ people using them. Asked what had been hardest, Sameer said "prioritizing features hasn't been easy, we get new feature requests almost every week." He also described their go-to-market as Notion-centric: ordinary SaaS channels such as content, SEO and community presence, aimed only at that niche. His byline on the NotionApps blog runs through 2025, including a January piece weighing Notion Sites against Notion website builders and a June walkthrough on building a client portal.
Why Sameer Sanagala is on this list
He gave the Notion community a practical answer to a question it kept asking, which was how to hand someone a database without handing them the workspace, and he gave it as working software with logins and per-user permissions instead of a sharing workaround. He also gave away the arithmetic. The ten day report, the conversion rate he was missing, the country breakdown and the signup-to-active-builder gap were all published where anyone building on Notion could read them and calibrate against real figures from a two-person team.
We wrote this from public sources and we would rather get it right than get it first. If you are Sameer Sanagala and something here is wrong, missing, or you would prefer this page did not exist, tell us and we will fix or remove it.
Building something with Notion?
thePlus.so makes the widgets that go inside the page. Free plan, no card.