This week, we hit a milestone: 1,000+ installs of our new Google Workspace extension, AdminSheet Pro, in just one week. In the startup world, people love to talk about “growth hacking” or viral marketing. But the truth is much simpler, and perhaps a bit more “old school.” We didn’t hit this number because of a lucky post or a big ad spend. We hit it because we spent years building relationships before we ever wrote a single line of code.
1. Identifying the “Orphaned” User
We knew exactly what problem to solve because we were feeling the pain ourselves. For nearly a decade, Ok Goldy—a popular free Google Sheets add-on—dominated the GUI-based landscape for Google Workspace administrators. It allowed admins to perform critical bulk operations like creating, updating, suspending, or deleting users, groups, and aliases directly from a spreadsheet. It was the “Admin’s Secret Weapon”—simple, sheet-based, and effective. At its height, it had over 21 million installs.
Then, the lights went out.
Ok Goldy stopped being maintained. We saw the frustration firsthand. One of our long-term clients, an IT Administrator at a large school, was stuck halfway through his student cleanup because his usual tool simply gave up. Along the way, other tools such as BulkyDuce tried to fill the “free” tool void, but they eventually went dark too.
Based on our relationships with several admins, we knew one thing for certain: admins don’t want “innovative” features; they want their routine tasks to work every single time without a “Resource Exhausted” error.
2. The Technical Moat: Beating the “6-Minute Wall”
The biggest reason legacy tools like Ok Goldy and BulkyDuce died wasn’t a lack of interest; it was the technical debt of the Google ecosystem. For example, Google Apps Script has a hard 6-minute execution limit. When you’re managing 5,000 users, most scripts simply crash, leaving your domain in a half-synced mess.
We built AdminSheet Pro with what we call “Intelligent Pacing.” The tool is state-aware; it knows when it’s approaching that 6-minute wall, pauses gracefully, saves its spot, and resumes automatically. This ensures that massive operations—like school year rollovers or enterprise-wide group migrations—actually finish without the admin needing to babysit the screen.
3. CLI Pain vs. Spreadsheet Comfort
While there are powerful open-source command-line alternatives out there like GAM, GAMADV-XTD3, and GYB, a large number of IT managers are “GUI people.” They live in spreadsheets.
We saw our clients struggling with complex installations and cryptic command-line syntax just to do a simple group migration. We built AdminSheet Pro as an internal solution first—scratching our own itch—because we needed that same spreadsheet-based control without the “terminal anxiety.” It turns out, thousands of other admins were looking for the same thing.
4. The “Middle Market” Gap
When we looked at the market, we saw two extremes: tools that were free but abandoned (leading to crashes) and high-priced alternatives tailored strictly for enterprise customers.
A few paid alternatives emerged to fill the vacuum, but many pivoted toward high-cost models, charging $150 to $250+ per user, per year. While these prices might be justifiable for an enterprise-grade IT Admin with a massive budget, they are a non-starter for a school, a mid-sized business, or the “accidental admin”—the non-technical employee who unexpectedly inherits IT duties.
We realized there was a massive unserved market of millions of admins who needed a sustainable, professional tool but couldn’t justify enterprise-level pricing.
5. Sustainability over “Free-ever”
One of the biggest lessons we learned from the tools that came before us is that “free” isn’t a sustainable business model for a professional admin tool. When a tool is free, it eventually dies when the developer moves on or the API changes. We didn’t want to be another name on the “deprecated” list.
We decided to walk a fine line: an affordable price for those who can afford to pay, and a free credit request module for those who truly can’t.
- Standard Tier: $39.99/year (Unlimited operations, full core functionality).
- Professional Tier: $59.99/year (Priority support and early access to new modules).
We are, in effect, making it free for those who can’t pay and affordable for those who can. This keeps the tool alive and ensures the code is always maintained.
6. Try It Yourself
We reached 1,000+ installs in 7 days because we prioritised reliability over “shiny” features. We are carrying the torch for the workflow that Ok Goldy started, but with the professional support and “Intelligent Pacing” required for the modern Google Workspace environment.
We offer a 100-operation free trial with no time limit – and you can also request additional free credits because we want you to finish a real project for free before you ever spend a dime.
Get AdminSheet Pro on the Google Workspace Marketplace: https://gsuite.google.com/marketplace/app/foo/888820086604
If you’re a sysadmin who has been “orphaned” by legacy tools, welcome home. We built this for you.