[Voiceover]: Welcome to the checkout. We catch up with previous add to cart guests and ask them five quick questions to get to know them better and leave you with a little extra inspiration to get you through your Friday.
Nathan Bush: Today's checkout features Anthony Zakaria, co founder of leading link in bio solution linktree. What started as a custom web feature for a band has turned into a $1.3 billion business used by the likes of Selena Gomez, Alicia Keys, Jamie Oliver and about 24 million other content creators. Today they have 1.2 billion visits every
Nathan Bush: month and a team of 270 people scattered all over the globe. Not bad for a custom feature, right?
Nathan Bush: Anthony, you have shared so much around
Nathan Bush: linktree, how you got started and where you're going with linktree. But we're here to learn a little bit more about you. So I've got five quick questions for you.
Anthony Zaccaria: Cool. Let's do it.
Nathan Bush: Number one, what's the weirdest thing that you've ever bought online?
Anthony Zaccaria: It was in the early days of my twins were born and it was this, this dummy that has like these duck lips out the side of it. So when your babies are sucking a dummy, it looks like they got a duck beak. That was delirious. We're probably like feeding the babies at three in the morning and I was just scrolling, I don't know what it was and I just, I was inspired. I didn't, it didn't last long, let me tell you, but at the time I thought I was a genius.
Nathan Bush: Did you get some good photos at least to bribe them with later on?
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah, I got a couple of good photos, but yeah, my wife wasn't impressed.
Nathan Bush: Sometimes you just have ideas like that
Nathan Bush: and your wife's just like, no, you're an idiot.
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah, exactly.
Nathan Bush: Number two, who is your favorite retailer?
Anthony Zaccaria: I'm going to say it's Bunnings. Now I've moved into a house and become an adult and a parent and it's Bunnings. Whether it's delivery, click and collect. Get a snag on a weekend. Got anything I need? Just about. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: I've grown.
Anthony Zaccaria: My affinity for bunnies has grown over the last six months.
Nathan Bush: Look at you, you've gone full dad mode now.
Anthony Zaccaria: Dad mode.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah, join the club. All right, number three, which E commerce
Nathan Bush: practice do you wish was history?
Anthony Zaccaria: It's got to be ending up on mailing lists for no reason still, I don't know how with all the spam laws and privacy laws are still ending up on random junk and I guess it's not specific to E commerce. But display advertising, I hate it. Was, you know, a big part of where we. The agency, when we started, that would be part of that was like, we can build a sustainable digital marketing business doesn't rely on display advertising. And we just. We just hate it. I think it's not. I don't find it that effective. I think it's efficient. Maybe it's cheap, but it's just full of junk. But it's still around. It's however many years on, it's still around.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's amazing. I remember doing some display ads Back 15 years ago in agency land and going, these are surely on their way out. We won't see these for much longer. And here we are, 2022.
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah. At least we don't have those flash ones anymore. True.
Nathan Bush: All right, can you recommend a book
Nathan Bush: or a podcast that our listeners should immediately get into?
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah, this is. I mean, I love listening to podcasts like how I built this and all those sorts of ones as well. But one I really love is. Is called Song Exploder.
Nathan Bush: Yes. So cool.
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah, it's awesome because it's one of those ones where you. So it's. Each episode is you break down. They break down a song, and the artists talk through how they kept the song, came about the process of recording it or writing it, and it's about 20 minutes long, and they break it down bit by bit. What was. You know, what parts inspired them from where. And you see little elements like a little vocal line, a little drum line or a guitar line. And they talk about how the song is built. And then you listen to the song in full again at the end of the episode. And all of a sudden, you hear the song completely differently because the artist is taking on this journey of how it came about. And then again when you listen, whenever you hear that song again that you listen to an episode for, same thing just changes your perspective on it because you just heard intimate detail about the song. And I love it. I think it's actually now a Netflix series, too.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I haven't watched all of them,
Nathan Bush: but I saw the Johnny Cash one where they did her, and it's incredible.
Anthony Zaccaria: Yeah, it's so good, isn't it? I love it. And so I still listen to that all the time, just because it's a. It's just a good switch off from listening to business or marketing podcasts.
Nathan Bush: I agree. That's a brilliant, brilliant recommendation. All right, number five, the last one I have for you. Finish this sentence. The future of retail is frictionless.
Anthony Zaccaria: Personalized and decentralized.
Nathan Bush: Nice. Which one of those is most important do you reckon?
Anthony Zaccaria: I reckon frictionless. Like I said before, any way that businesses and creators can get closer to their customer and in a simple way as little if you can even go less than one click, that's where it's at.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and obviously linktree plays a huge role in that and especially some of the features that we've seen around. The integration with PayPal and ability to feature product within your Linktree profile is all key to that. So thank you again for sharing Anthony and can't wait to see what's next for linktree.
Anthony Zaccaria: Thanks a lot Nathan. Appreciate it.
Nathan Bush: To hear more from Anthony, jump back into episode 192 where Anthony shares how Linktree's creators and brands utilize Linktree to promote content across all of their channels. We talk about linktree's celebrity users, how to avoid burnout when building a unicorn, and what happened when Instagram banned them for 20 minutes. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep adding to cartoon.
