How celebrities and influencers helped Aussie startup Linktree go viral

Melbourne startup Linktree went from being a side hustle to global sensation, by solving a problem faced by millions of social media users around the world.

From Alicia Keys, Billie Eilish and Selena Gomez, to influencers and local small businesses, Instagram personalities wanted to be able to link to multiple external websites.

The problem was that social platforms such as Instagram and TikTok didn't let them, by barring them from inserting clickable links in their posts, and limiting them to a single link in their profile bio.

Linktree, which started in 2016 and exploded during the pandemic, created a link-in-bio which now boasts 50 million users and two billion visits a month.

Co-Founder Alex Zaccaria sat down with Tech Wrap-Up Australia to discuss Linktree’s meteoric rise.

He also shares advice for budding entrepreneurs on how to nurture a side hustle into a successful startup, and discusses the trends shaping influencer marketing and e-commerce.

Alex, where did the idea for Linktree come from?

My brother Anthony Zaccaria and I, and our friend Nick Humphreys , were running a digital strategy agency that specialised in music, events and culture for festivals, record labels and artists.

We realised there was no effective way for an artist to link out to other websites from a marketing perspective.

Artists have a lot of different links to many different revenue streams — they have their music on Spotify, videos on YouTube, merch on another platform, ticketing on another.

The problem for artists with Instagram is you can only link to one of those. So we started running Linktree on the side to help solve that problem for artists.

You just cracked 50 million users. When did you realise this was a problem faced by millions, not just a handful of musicians?

In the early days we almost immediately saw a product market fit. We created this solution in less than a day to just solve a very specific problem for our clients.

But it took off beyond artists because — as we quickly realised — the entire internet was fragmented. This problem wasn't just impacting artists, but pretty much every business you can think of.

At first we were only signing up 10 users a day. Melbourne City Council was one of our first signups, which surprised us because it wasn’t the type of user we expected.

Signups originally stayed pretty steady though, in the low hundreds per day. This was very much a side hustle to the agency for quite a long time.

What changed?

Alicia Keys signed up, organically! Linktree went to signing up about 3,000 to 4,000 per day. And then once the pandemic hit, we went to about 50,000 a day.

The music agency we were running had a fair bit of trouble when the pandemic hit and all the clients could no longer put their events on, but then Linktree took off instead and it was all hands on deck. We had to learn as quickly as possible, and start to hire the team.

It’s what every startup founder aspires to do. Find a problem and create a simple solution. You nailed that brief.

It feels surreal. We never expected it to be this meaningful to this many people across the world for so many different categories. Reaching 50 million users hasn't quite set in. It sounds cliche, but really it's still only day one. We see our Total Addressable Market (TAM) to be in the billions, so the 50 million is still a very small number for us.

You just announced Billie Eilish had signed on as a user. What is the value of those big names?

Yeah! Alicia Keys was significant for us originally because it was so validating. To see that we solved a problem for such a massive artist who was having the same issues that even small artists were facing was a big moment for us.

Then her label and her agency signed up once we had spoken to them, adding Pearl Jam, Elton John, The Killers, Eminem and Tupac.

That is a key strategy that we still use today in terms of expanding through agencies and record labels.

Now we have Selena Gomez and Olivia Rodrigo, through to POTUS and the White House, and then big businesses like Uber and Netflix.

But then it was fascinating growing and watching individual verticals blow up.

This would happen when a major personality within that vertical started to use Linktree. For example, when Jamie Oliver signed up, we saw emerging chefs sign up too.

And then came the influencers. What value did the average social media user bring to you?

Celebrity clients and influencers both matter equally for us. We are super fortunate and very grateful to work with these massive artists and creators and businesses and brands, and the emerging creators.

But more recently the SMBs also took off. The local 'mom and pop' stores selling candles on Etsy or the local pizza shop, for example. It’s humbling to see Linktree is useful to them and helping them solve their problems.

There’s a handful of celebrities out there, but there’s millions of small business owners too, which is where the unexpected scale came from.

The traffic all amounts to close to 2 billion visits in a month!

The idea for Linktree was so simple. Was it an oversight for social media companies to not have a feature like that inbuilt early on?

Their game is to keep people on the platform. Making that easier isn't in their interest. I wouldn't call it an oversight. For them, their focus is on having good content on their platform and that is what they do best.

You have 50 million users, the second-biggest link-in-bio platform has about 7 million. How have you managed to stay ahead of competitors?

Yeah, I think it's fascinating. We had thousands of what we refer to as "clones" early on. They were copy-and-paste versions, because the platform is perceived to be so simple from the outside, but actually it's not.

Initially Linktree was about finding a quick solution to links on Instagram. But quite quickly we evolved into having much more functionality than just adding external links.

You can now track your analytics, and you can drag and drop the order of your links, you can schedule your links and you can customise the appearance.

People care deeply about expressing themselves and their identity online. That was the first piece that differentiated us.

The second is that we unify content and your audience across different platforms. Linktree is this safe space that is entirely platform agnostic. You use your one Linktree across various social platforms.

Now I feel bad for calling Linktree “simple”! There’s a lot of depth to it.

Exactly! To create something that simple and make it easy to use is actually incredibly difficult. It is also the key to our success. An incredible amount of pain and work has gone into making it feel simple and seamless.

Our other advantage is that we deeply understand the problem that link-in-bios solve. We were artist managers and paid media marketers, we were social content marketers. When you're going to create a competitive version of Linktree, you also need the innate understanding of what the core user needs.

Having the user at the centre of everything we do has helped us innovate and continue to move ahead of the rest.

What's the future plan for Linktree?

We estimate there are around 200 million creators out there, so having 50 million on our platform is still only 25% of that market.

We want every brand and individual to be using Linktree. Right now it is mostly used by creators and businesses showing their content, or their opening hours, or their menu at a restaurant. But we also want to see it being used by individuals to be able to show the things they care about, curate content they care about, podcasts they love and music they love.

That's something really excited we're working towards.

You’re also breaking into e-commerce by letting creators add storefronts to their link-in-bio pages, and you will take a commission on those sales. What insights do you have into the changing nature of consumer habits and emerging trends that have underpinned that idea?

About 2% of Amazon's global traffic goes through Linktree. There's around 500,000 Shopify stores on Linktree.

There is this behaviour of shopping and commerce happening very directly on Linktree, but more broadly on social platforms and through creators.

Around 50% of gen Z say they're now influenced by creators in a purchasing decision, and we are going to continue to see that grow. For generations before them it’s about a third.

Ultimately we believe the future storefront is actually just going to be creators. Brands will be selling directly to consumers through creators rather than needing to have necessarily bricks and mortar stores or paying for television commercials or billboards.

So we are building a platform that is going to enable brands to sell their products through creators in a really seamless way. We are launching it at the moment.

So the creator economy is not only here to stay, but surpassing traditional advertising?

Creators are just ruling the world. Creators are the modern day celebrities. They are the ones influencing culture and, ultimately, purchasing decisions.

If you just scroll on TikTok, you'll just see it is mostly creators making the content, and way less brands making it. In turn, brands need to build that very deep direct connection with their audience in the same way creators do, which is why they're utilising creators to do that.

We will continue to see that build as a major trend.

How Australia can create more tech unicorns?

The main thing that needs to happen is we need to have more cycles and generations of startups.

If you look to the US, it has had many cycles before this generation of startups and major companies that have gone all the way through to exit and IPO.

That creates experience. People that have seen that scale phase are not going to make the same mistakes again. More generations also creates more liquidity. The people that got equity early and made some money will start angel investing.

Australia is just like a few cycles behind that, but were about to see it really happen. Were seeing those kind of liquidity events with Canva, Atlassian and Afterpay and that money is then reinvested back into the ecosystem.

Were also seeing the alumni from these startups launch their own startups. In my view, the growth will become exponential.

This is why I, along with my two co-founders, Anthony and Nicky and some others including Jaddan Comerford , Emily Casey Matt Allen , Ben Grabiner , Markus Kahlbetzer , started our own fund Side Stage Ventures — for the exact reason that we as alumni need to reinvest in the ecosystem.

We all come from artist management backgrounds, and learnt that the way you help musicians grow their career is by encouraging and educating them. It’s the same thing for supporting a founder.

We are seeing more micofunds boost access to capital for startups, moreso than there was a few years ago, and that’s a good thing.

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