In this episode of Add To Cart, we are joined by Anthony Zaccaria, the Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer of the brilliant Australian tech company Linktree. What started as a custom web feature for a band has turned into a $1.3 business used by the likes of Selena Gomez, ALicia Keys, Jamie Oliver – oh, and 24 million other content creators. Today, they have 1.2b visits every month and a team of 270 scattered all over the globe. Not bad for a little custom feature! In this chat we cover how Linktree’s content creators and brands utilise 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.
“We never really set out to have this take over the world mentality. Let’s just solve a problem that a whole lot of people have and keep building on it from there”
Anthony Zaccaria
Questions answered in this episode include…
- Where do your clients commonly link to?
- What are some of the most interesting ways you have seen eCommerce brands utilise Linktree?
- Can you tell us about some of the benefits you have implemented for your global remote teams?
From side hustle to world domination
“We realized we had this problem for ourselves, with all of our clients who were all musicians and record labels at the time, and so we needed to change a link in bio all the time to direct people to new content, to buy new stuff and it was around the same time the Instagram algorithm had changed from chronological to algorithmic. And so we saw this problem that we had for ourselves in our agency and we built a MVP version of it and kind of went from there, used it for our clients and as a side hustle to the agency for a few years till it started to do its thing.
The first big user to sign up at the end of 2016, was Alicia Keys, and so that was like, oh, wow. Okay. This is not just a thing here in Australia, like this has got legs. But yeah, we never really set out to have this like take over the world mentality. Let’s just solve a problem that a whole lot of people have and keep building on it from there.”
Beyond revenue
“There’s a few, I’ve got a few really interesting use cases. So we’ve got, you can generate revenue directly through your Linktree with our integrations with PayPal and Square. So it’s got a support me or request me link and so we’ve got a bunch of creators generating funds directly through that. But we also use bio heap of different eCommerce brands as well to, we’ve got an integration with Shopify and Spring. So you can embed your Shopify store or collections directly into your Linktree. And so we’re seeing quite a few different use cases for that.
So brands are more than just what they sell, right? Obviously you want to drive as much revenue as possible, but you’re also building a brand and building a customer base. So how you do that through marketing, content marketing and the like, people are really using their Linktree to drive that and showcase all the things that they are as a brand beyond just their revenue.”
Balance
“I used to work pretty hard building the agency and then COVID hit and within four or five months of lockdown, my wife and I had twins, who were born premature. We’re in lockdown, working from home with twins without family, and then at the same time raised our first round. You can operate on very little sleep and there’s untapped levels of adrenaline there, but it does hit you eventually.
There’s no shortage of info out there and talk about mental health and burnout, particularly through COVID and stuff. I’d be like, I’ve got heaps of stamina. I just love what I do and I just want to build the best team, build the best agency, build the best product, but I think just knowing when to not do that and focus on myself.
Took a while to get there, like a few issues of back pain and insomnia and that kind of thing. Like, all right, I’ve got to focus on me a little bit and have a bit of balance. So that realization came through. No matter how much people would tell you about got to have balance in your life. I’ve got it now. You don’t have it when you all you do is work.”
Links from the episode:
- Linktree
- Paypal
- Square
- Vinyl Me, Please
- Go Fund Me
- Side Stage Ventures
- Packleo | Eco-Friendly eCommerce Packaging (sponsored)
- Shopify Plus and Incu (sponsored)
This episode was brought to you by…
