Anthony Zakaria: We never really set out to have this like, you know, take over the world mentality. Like, let's just solve a problem that a whole lot of people have and keep building on it from there. There's no dancing around, there's no political correctness, there's no just like, you know, having to sugarcoat anything. It's just straight to the point. A lot of temptation to just go down various paths. But we'll end up looking like MySpace 2.0 if we do that, right? Nobody wants that.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that Express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course, keep your customers adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart.
Nathan Bush: My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and director at E Commerce talent agency E Suite. Now, you know that little link in
Nathan Bush: bio that you see on Instagram profiles?
Nathan Bush: It's pretty nifty, right? Well, today we have the guy who invented it and he's joining us.
Nathan Bush: Not a bad guest. Hey, sometimes I'm pretty proud of myself.
Nathan Bush: Anthony Zakaria is 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 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 month and a team of 270 people
Nathan Bush: scattered all over the globe.
Nathan Bush: Not bad for a little custom feature, right? In this chat, we cover how linktree's content creators and brands utilize linktree to promote their content across all of their channels. We talk about linktree, celebrity users, how to avoid burnout when building a unicorn, and what happened when Instagram banned them for 20 minutes. So, thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Paclio, here's our conversation with Anthony Zakaria, co founder of linktree. Anthony, thank you for joining us on Add to Cart.
Anthony Zakaria: Thanks for having me, mate.
Nathan Bush: No worries. All right, so I am assuming that everyone here who is listening has used linktree one way or another, but some may not have realized it. How do you describe what linktree does?
Anthony Zakaria: So linktree allows you to house everything in your online ecosystem in one link. So wherever you're growing your audiences or wherever your audience lives to wherever you want to send them to either purchase or engage with content, linktree allows you to do that under one link. Essentially, we're the category creator of what's now known as LinkedIn bio tools. So we're the first one to create that about six years ago when we're running a digital marketing agency. So 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 the LinkedIn 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, yeah, we saw this problem that we had for ourselves in our agency and we built. Built a MVP version of it and kind of went from there. Use it for our clients and as a side hustle to the agency for a few years till it started to do its thing.
Nathan Bush: Not a bad side hustle.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, it's not bad at all.
Nathan Bush: So did you ever envision that it would turn into what it has today?
Anthony Zakaria: No, not when we first started in that first year or so. Definitely not. It was just very much a let's solve a problem that we had. And then obviously a lot more people had it themselves and wasn't just musicians. That was the first use case. And it made a whole lot of sense because in the music industry, your value chain lives everywhere. Different streaming providers where music lives, different ticketing providers for where you buy tickets, and then artists merch live on another platform. And that's just. That's just one example. And so what we realized pretty quickly after that is that the whole Internet is fragmented and everyone has this issue where their content and their audiences live in multiple places and where they're trying to drive their audience to also lives in multiple places. And so I think the first user to sign up on their own that wasn't within the sort of music or creative world was like the Melbourne City Council. And that was like one of the early aha moments, like, oh, shit, council. That's like a, you know, maybe a little bit of a boring use case, but actually made a whole lot of sense. They had all different stuff they wanted to get their social audiences to engage with. So probably once the first big user to sign up the end of 2016 was Alicia Keys or her team signed up. And so that was like, oh, wow, okay, this is. Yeah, it's not just that. Not just a thing here in Australia. Like, it's a. It's. This has got legs. But, yeah, we never really set out to have this, like, you know, Take over the world mentality. Like, let's just solve a problem that a whole lot of people have and keep building on it from there.
Nathan Bush: And when you have a user like Alicia Keys, do you do a deal with them or does she just sign up?
Nathan Bush: During using the linktree sign up form,
Anthony Zakaria: quite a lot of big users signed up organically because their teams would see it in use across, across socials. And so those first couple of years was, was very much about discovery, like, oh, what the hell is this thing in people's bio links? And so that was her digital marketing team that signed up directly and just started using because they needed, they needed something for themselves. And so similar things started happening across different verticals. Not just in music. You know, I think like celebrity chefs started like Janie Oliver team signed up. You know, we didn't have a direct relationship there. We would, you know, they kind of signed up on their own. So we have a team in place now that works with, with curators and celebrities and that kind of thing as well. But yeah, a lot, a lot of it is really organic because it's just solving a problem.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's amazing. It's, it's so good because the problem that we all kind of saw, but you just came with a solution that was simple but innovative at the same time.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, that's been a, that's been the biggest thing just to maintain the simplicity of it. You know, it's, it's a micro landing page with a list of links that direct people to where you want them to go. And often as a business or a brand or creator, you know, you don't just drive people to one, one place, don't just drive them to your website. Often, you know, especially the certain websites become quite cumbersome and clunky and you know, if you drive through the landing page, you've got them, you've lost or automatically. Right. So if you want to engage with video content or whatever. Yeah, we sort of solve that problem.
Nathan Bush: Because I could imagine that there's probably been a lot of investors, even a lot of ideas internally which could overcomplicate the product pretty quickly.
Anthony Zakaria: Definitely, yeah. Even today we definitely bring back to that. It's one of our core principles product, but also one of team values around pursuit, deliberate simplicity. And it's a lot of temptation to just go down various paths. But looking like MySpace 2.0, if we do that right, nobody wants that. So yeah, we might need to be very, very careful with it.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's cool. So obviously you are a tool that is used by creators all around the world. You talked about the music community, but it goes beyond the music community to anyone creating content and linking to multiple platforms and multiple versions of content throughout the web. Where do you see, what channels or sites do you see that your creators most commonly link to?
Anthony Zakaria: Oh, look, there's. Yeah, so we've got, We've got over 24 million users around the world and we're generating about 1.2 billion visits a month on profiles. And that's like. So you can imagine the clicks that are happening each month onto various profiles. So it's quite varied. It's not just like creators, businesses, brands, but you know, communities, activists, all sorts using it and keeps it. There's no one vertical that makes up more than 10% of our user base. And so the distribution of content people link you to is pretty broad, but you kind of bucket into a few areas. Other social platforms, platforms is a big one. So we're platform agnostic and people use us everywhere they're generating content, but people, you know, you've got the social icons at the bottom of profile. So people still wanted to drive people to their TikTok from Instagram or their Twitter from TikTok or LinkedIn or whatever it is. So that's a big one. Obviously for music artists, the streaming services, There was like 90 million clicks last year alone to streaming providers like Spotify or Apple. But we've got our music link feature now which embeds it directly into profile. So we're reducing that friction. Obviously any path to monetization that's often like some sort of E commerce platform where people are driving transactions. But recently there's definitely been a big increase in traffic with, you know, going with certain trends. So linking to nft platforms like OpenSea has been increasing quite a bit recently. Saw a little bit of an uptick in some live shopping platforms, particularly in Southeast Asian markets. And also when it comes to like other social channels. Big increase in people linking to Discord servers recently as well. But yeah, it's pretty broad.
Nathan Bush: Ever scrolled through an E commerce packaging website for fun? Nah, me neither.
Nathan Bush: Until today.
Nathan Bush: Paclio is putting the joy into the packaging game. So let's play a game. I'll tell you the name of the Paclio product and you have to try and guess what kind of product they are.
Speaker E: Fairy floss.
Nathan Bush: Compostable mailer. Queen bee Honeycomb Padded mailer.
Nathan Bush: Here we go.
Nathan Bush: Gummy shark water activated tape. Now if my jaded self thinks that this packaging is fun, imagine what your customers will think Paclio is also eco friendly Australian owned and operated with same day dispatch and 14 day returns. Now that's pure jar joy for everyone. Check out the Paclio range of E commerce packaging options@paclio.com that's Paclio P A C K L E O paclio.com
Nathan Bush: do you have to put much censorship or limitation around the types of channels that people can link out to?
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, definitely. Especially with like I mean we've got a pretty big trust and safety team because you know with that many users we're pretty big on ensuring like there's, there's you know, no misinformation on the platform, no spam, any of that kind of stuff. So that's pretty tight. We've got pretty tight community guidelines there because we need to you know like I said there's 1.2 billion people visiting a month. We need to make sure that people are trusting landing on a link tree link they know what they're going to get. But yeah we have censorship warnings on anything that might be slightly adult content related but we're pretty, pretty tight on what those kind of things are. So if you're linking, if creator might be linking to something like an only fans there's censorship warnings on that where you have to before you click through, you have to pass it, you know, click something there so it goes straight through. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Cool. And do you find that obviously with Instagram TikTok trying to keep users within their, their walls of their own gardens to keep people scrolling through the content is it obviously linktree is playing a bigger and bigger role in helping creators link those profiles that aren't natively easy to get out of.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, it's look, I think anything all platforms are going to, are going to want to do that and I think like I said we're platform agnostic so wherever creators or businesses are building audiences where they're using us so we'll still drive traffic between the two. And in terms of like all the social platforms are doing various things to either keep people on the platforms but also help them monetize further as well. You see the creative funds or the integration with payment providers within platforms, direct payments and you know we have payment solutions as well but in our eyes anything that gets creators or businesses closer to their customer and closer to monetization is better for everybody. So we don't see it as a threat. If anything it's like it's actually a good thing. There's more places for creators and businesses to generate revenue, get close to their customers then great Everyone wins. So that's sort of our view on it. And you know, like I said, our traffic's really diversified across all social channels but also in the physical world we're seeing our QR codes every week. We see our team sharing something that's in the wild. Like we've seen QR codes in bars and nightclubs, in advertising, in retail. People put us in their email signatures. So it's quite varied.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I know that some of our listeners ears would have picked up when you talked about leading to increased monetization and integrated payment options.
Nathan Bush: What have you seen from an e
Nathan Bush: commerce perspective, some of your e commerce brands and partners in how they utilize linktree in a way to drive traffic and generate that revenue that might have caught you by surprise or that you think is really innovative.
Anthony Zakaria: We've got a few really interesting use cases. So we've got. You can generate generate revenue directly through your link tree 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 buy a heap of different e commerce brands as well to integration with Shopify and Spring so you can embed your Shopify store or collections directly into your link tree. And so we're seeing quite a few different use cases for that. So beyond 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 link tree to drive that and showcase all the things that they are as a brand beyond just their revenue. So video content, collaborations, one off pieces of whatever it might be that they're doing. Vinyl Me please, which is a vinyl subscription service in the U.S. they've got, you know, in on their link tree they've got like they're using a podcast link, right? So embedded the three podcasts that they've got going on directly to the link tree so people can discover more about that. They've got their Shopify collections in there as well, but they've got like join our club, sign up to our mail list, get SMS updates, our FAQs and link to all the other socials as well. So whilst their source of revenue is vinyl subscriptions, they're also showcasing and trying to build a brand alongside that because they don't want just, they don't want to lose customers along the way and they want to Showcase a little bit more about what they are holistically. So that's just a few of the
Nathan Bush: examples and that makes linktree a really engaging platform as well. Not just seeing you visit for a couple of seconds and get somewhere else.
Anthony Zakaria: Exactly. Yeah. You know, we've been seeing it like sports teams. Right. They've got their merch on there, that's a big thing. Or ticketing. But they'll update their link tree every week with obviously, you know, new games that are happening. But they might put a game from the weekend as a recap as YouTube video on the link tree and put a short of that on socials and then drive to their link tree for people to watch the rest of it or link off to YouTube from there if they want to go even deeper. So. Exactly right. We kind of this, we maintain being this platform agnostic place to allow our users to curate and grow their audience even further. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And from a competitive point of view, because as you mentioned, you're absolutely first on the scene with the link in bio type service, but with that mission of maintaining simplicity, how do you make sure that linktree maintains a competitive moat around some of the competitors that might be coming along, including some of the platforms themselves who think that they can add it on as a piece of functionality rather than a dedicated product?
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, I think that's a big thing. Right. We've got 1.2 billion visitors a month and a big thing for us is maintaining building that trust like I touched on before. So we've worked really hard at that. That when you land on a link tree one you know what it is and often we see people talking about click on my link tree. And it's not a link tree, it's something else. That the concept of this list of links is a big thing for us and ensuring that people feel safe and trust where they're going to land on the link trees. That's a big thing. The brand and brand equity in the, in the name and you know very much about empowerment. So we're platform agnostic and we just provided the best tools and integrations that we can to empower creators to grow more, reach more and sell more. And we are, that's what we do. We build the best linking buyer product we can as opposed to having it be an add on somewhere else and potentially something not a focus. Now the other thing as well is like maintaining that simplicity. You know, we're very key on that. I think a temptation from others out there is to like, well, not as much of this and not as much of that and build a slight iteration of what linktree does. But ultimately we're still growing rapidly and very key for that. They're also trying out a whole lot of new features. The roadmap is years and years long. We're trying to move as quickly as we can through it. So new tools and integrations and partnerships that continue to meet our users where they are. So like I said, the Shopify one or our mailchimp one of the musicians, bands in town for them to list their tour dates more easily done. A partnership with GoFundMe. So for fundraisers, you need to integrate that really easily. So thinking of things like that and moving as quickly as possible to, you know, we're not. We're not going to build the next fundraising platform. GoFundMe have done a really good job of that. Integrate with them and build a partnership and this whole piece around empowerment, that's really big for us.
Nathan Bush: So it's almost like if you put yourself in as the bridge between platforms that helps people get between, everyone kind of wins in that platform ecosystem.
Anthony Zakaria: Exactly.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Okay, gotcha.
Nathan Bush: Have you had we mentioned some of your celebrity users before? Have you had any, Whether it's Jamie Oliver or Selena Gomez come to you and say, I really want this feature, like, can you just do this for me? And you've had to kind of have that awkward conversation.
Anthony Zakaria: You know, folks like those users, it's their teams, their management teams or their digital teams or social teams or whatever that are using it. And for them, it's all very much about the workflow as well, because they want to optimize their time. And we exist as part of their. Part of their stack in marketing or E Comm tools. So there's other things that help improve that for them. But customization is always a big one. You know, how can I get this to look more like X, a bigger thumbnail or a custom font or those kind of things. Other there's a bunch of features that we've been very deliberate about not putting in just yet because of that stuff. I talked about simplicity and also not overcooking the UX to become all things to everyone if we. Yeah, we'd be very careful there. But there was a feature that a big music artist wanted one. So this is the same with retail as well, right? When there's like a big drop of new merch, especially in hype commerce, like in shoes or something like that. But with music, the record goes on sale or is released on streaming platforms on a certain day, usually In Australia it's a Friday and you want to drive people straight there to listen to it. But when tickets go on sale, you want people to go straight to tickets. But often teams don't want to lose the link tree because you might have tickets go on sale in one market but your social profiles are global. So you don't want to just put your ticketing link for Sydney in there. When people in America don't really care about that and want to look at your latest video. Right. So they still want to use their link tree but they want. There was this. They want to drive people there quickly for like a 24 hour period. So we developed this link link feature, allows you to bypass the link tree link. You still keep it in the bio, but it just bypasses going to a link tree directly to that source of where the drop happens, be it a new ticket or new purchase or new record or whatever. And we thought, oh, this is a game changer. Everyone's going to want to use this. It's going to be huge. No, didn't really like Ms. It was a case of like yes, you should listen to your customers all the time and bring. But it's also a good. It still gets used, don't get me wrong, it's still, you know, we still use it and people use it, but it's not the thought of the value of it outweighed the actual use. And it's like we're doing something that hasn't been done before. Like linktree we created six years ago, but this new world and we're a website replacement for many. Right. And so it's this balance of listening to the user's requests and feature requests and building that into the roadmap that also makes sense with the vision and making sure always continue to innovate as well at the same time. And so often that's trying things at that we think will work and testing them out as well and trying to balance that out. It's always a game of cat and mouse each quarter with what goes on
Nathan Bush: the product roadmap, I could imagine there'd be some fun conversations to be had.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: When you're talking about a product roadmap and you are reliant on that ecosystem and partners, especially people like Instagram, if they're constantly changing the rules and we've seen Instagram change how links are displayed and where you can add them to stories and all that sort of stuff, how do you keep up with that game?
Anthony Zakaria: To be honest, we don't really get too rattled by it because ultimately, you know, platforms are going to platform, right. They're going to change how they work. They want to get, they want to test things in different markets. They ultimately want to continue to get build engagement on their platform with users and keep them on there longer and find new ways, especially for creators that help them monetize or help advertisers get what advertisers want. So for us it's just continuing to, we know we're going to continue to be platform agnostic and exist wherever users are building their audiences. And that's the main thing for us is continue just to like find ways to empower people even further no matter where they're driving people from. You know, if we are driving more people from Pinterest, we're going to continue to focus on that kind of audience when need be. But our traffic comes from, like I said before, all the social platforms biggest ones being TikTok, Twitter and Instagram. And but you know, LinkedIn is a, is a rising one too now that you can put link in bio there and we also have a lot of people use, a lot of people use linktree as well as a form of digital identity. Right. And so yes, with a connective tissue across social. But we're seeing a big use case for the curator. Right. So I might have a job, I work in marketing, but I'm really, I love going to gigs and I love reading books. I love to podcast and kind of dabble a little bit on the side. But I'm just going to put my link tree in my email signature and in my Twitter handle because I want people to just go to my LinkedIn from there, listen to the playlist. I'm listening to my podcast book recommendation and maybe I do a bit of maybe, maybe get some affiliate revenue from the books I recommend or whatever. So like there's this really interesting use case there. So whatever the platforms do doesn't, you know, we don't really pay too much attention from that front because it's just really focused on the user.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I can definitely see the, when you start explaining it like that, I go, oh yeah, I kind of see where the fear around becoming a MySpace comes from.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, yeah.
Nathan Bush: From an affiliate perspective to do any
Nathan Bush: actual like deep partnerships with affiliate companies, especially from a retailer and E commerce
Anthony Zakaria: perspective, it's on the roadmap. You're only at the moment we're only doing something with Apple so it's a. And we can split that revenue with our creators for music and podcasts. But there's a there's a fair bit coming down the line to, you know, build more affiliate revenue and that being very much a thing for our, for our users as well because that's how they're generating revenue.
Nathan Bush: That makes sense. And you know, I really love. You talked about empowering your creators and collaborators and you recently did a creator report which I thought was fascinating. It's a really good read and we'll put a link to it in the show notes there. But one of the quotes out of it that I thought was was most interesting was that you said the team said working with brands is neither a reliable nor a consistent stream of revenue for most creators. And that really stood out to me.
Nathan Bush: Do you think creators are getting value out of brand partnerships in 2022?
Anthony Zakaria: Yes and no. Probably depends on the type of brand and partnership.
Nathan Bush: Right.
Anthony Zakaria: And what the creator might think of as what's valuable to them. If it's purely revenue, they don't care what they're spruiking. Maybe. But I think creators are putting more and more effort into their brands and they don't want to just be treated like digital billboards. And as soon as brands realize that the better and it's really about building that longevity and long lasting relationship. So the ones that do work, and I've noticed this from my agency days when we would work with, with influencers and creators, there's ones that a little more long lasting and you build that affinity longer term with between a brand and a creator as opposed to just being very transactional and one off. It's very obvious. So if it's when it's that one off campaign moment, you know, as a marketer you kind of want that because you want reach and you want to get into that alignment. But there's always can go, can go either way. You know, it's not always sustainable. I think that's where a lot of it is coming from and I think with the rise of creators and also yes, there's a rising brand money being poured into the market, but it's definitely not sustainable. And that's why in that report there's always there's other things too around other ways creators are making money and a big part is through merch. They're building their own products and selling those because they know if they're building an audience they can monetize them further beyond just, you know, hoping they're going to get some brand money coming as well.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and I think there's something too about taking those online communities and turn them into Physical products as well, that other people who are viewing and using the content can connect with. Offline.
Anthony Zakaria: Exactly. Yeah. It's the biggest thing we see in the report of what creators are doing to monetize.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. So fast, like where we are today, we talked about agency and incredible growth valuation of $1.3 billion. I might be off now. Probably we'll leave it at that. Based on what I've researched.
Nathan Bush: Was there any particular decision or hack,
Nathan Bush: for lack of a better word, that you look back on and go, this was our moment where we got ahead of the game and we secured a huge audience and became the leaders in that LinkedIn bio market.
Anthony Zakaria: I don't think there's any one moment. It's probably a few things along the way that did that. A combination of being first to market, really focus on simplicity and solving a problem and it's really being dedicated to that. I think that was a big thing as well, because other people, we have, you know, most of our growth is, you know, most of the flywheel is because people are seeing people using linktree. Right. And it's a very sort of viral by nature. So that was a big focus. It wasn't like one moment of like, oh, we did this one thing and all of a sudden it grew. Obviously we built a really great team and like I said earlier, building trust in the brand and making sure that that was reliable and that this building is sort of sustainable growth path. A few things along the way where, you know, yes, there was like one moment we had an Instagram band us for about 20 minutes and then about 20,000 users messaged them, you know, straight away, and they reinstated it because it was like, you know, never let us have anything fun, et cetera, et cetera. And so it was a mistake, a mistake banning on the URL because they thought there was some spam link or something. And so like, there's a few shit moments along the way as well where getting banned in some countries for something and then getting reinstated and that's always. You still keep an eye on that sort of stuff. But yeah, there wasn't like one moment. It's like there's really that continued focus on solving problems and listening to users, building that in, but also having a bit of a continued vision. And I think we obviously benefited from, from the tailwinds of the big digital transformation that happened through Covid as well. So a lot of growth through the last few years where we already had a big growth projection already hiring a, you know, a big team and building that team even further but there's definitely a few moments along the way that Covid being one of them. And what else often when there's like times of of crisis which is is often like sound it's really. It's not a don't want to celebrate this but things like Black Lives Matter or even with Ukraine, Russia situation where people want to share resources and share something real very quickly and in free. And so it was a way through Black Lives Matter linkages are being created all over the place as a way to share legitimate resources and also for people to educate themselves. So he's how you can learn about what's going on. Here's how you can help. How you can join a protest is how you can donate and and similar situation with Ukraine and Russia. So we love the fact that we can be a tool that provides that but it's not, you know, it's not something you want to like celebrate to the world because it's their horrible situations.
Speaker E: Fashion retailer Incoo has been introducing customers to new international brands for nearly 20 years. With 10 retail stores, E commerce has been a support player. But in the last year it got really serious. They've upgraded from a custom site to Shopify and now Shopify Plus Incoo sales have grown nearly 300% year on year. Shopify plus features such as Launchpad for automation flow to manage nearly 2,000 SKUs scripts for customization and Shopify plus merchant grant growth model have all had a compounding effect. Not only are sales up 300% year on year, conversion rates are up 80%, average session engagement up 91% and bounce rate down 40%. Incoo more like in.
Anthony Zakaria: Whoa.
Speaker E: To read more of Incu's story and see other case studies, visit the customer sections on shopify.com.
Nathan Bush: That's just an amazing journey. Like to hear that you had this idea for the music community as part of the digital audience and now it's grown into a billion dollar unicorn globally. The name for that service.
Nathan Bush: What have you learned along the way about yourself?
Nathan Bush: Has there any been any moments where you've gone? I've gone from managing a digital agency which has been great.
Nathan Bush: But now I'm in a totally different
Nathan Bush: world here of a global company, billion dollar, huge team, investors, all that. Has it been a realization about yourself along the way?
Anthony Zakaria: I think definitely like a level of resilience that I didn't realize I had. I thought like yeah, I used to work pretty hard building the agency and then Covid hit within four or five months of lockdown. My wife and I Had twins who were born premature. We're locked down, working from home with twins without family. And then you know, so like and at the same time raised our first round definitely level of like you can operate on very little sleep and you know, there's a, you know, you can untapped level of adrenaline there. But it's also, it does hit you eventually and I think that's a big thing around is there's. There's no shortage of info out there and talk about, you know, mental health and burnout, particularly through Covid and stuff. So I think recognizing that I just, you know, pre kids and pre pandemic, I'd be like, yeah, I can, I've got heaps of stamina. I can just do what I need to do to work. And it was about celebrating this hustle culture which is like I just love what I do and I just want to build the best team, build the best agency, build the best product. But it does come with like, I think just that. Yeah. Knowing when to not do that and focus on myself took a while to get there. Probably like a few issues of back pain and you know, insomnia and that kind of thing. Like, all right, I 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 gotta have balance in your life. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got it. You don't have it when you. That's all you do is work. I think the other piece around like building a team is we've been able to do this really well. Is growing that self awareness around your blind spots. Speaking of a small business, when we had an agency and we had, you know, 30, 40 people at our agency at the time, you're still doing a bit of everything. But had Linktree's nearly 270 people now and we've got team around the world and a really great leadership team. It's like you can't do everything. It's not sustainable, it's not productive for a business that's scaling like Linktree. So building the best team around you to help complement strengths and weaknesses and helping assemble that team. And that's a. Is, you know, you like to think you've. You like to think you know what your weaknesses are. But when you really lean into a bit of discovery around that and get really aware like oh yeah, I'm not great at that. I need to work on it, but I'm never going to be the best at it. There's other people that are the best at it. So let's bring them into the team.
Nathan Bush: Is there anything that you hang on to that you go, I'm still the best person to make decisions on this.
Anthony Zakaria: It's always a battle between myself, Alex, my brother and Nikki. The three of us are co founders and I think we're always trying to get each other to let go of stuff and be like, stop getting in the weeds on this, stop getting in the weeds on that. We just can't help ourselves when it's probably more on like marketing or creative things. That's the background we came from and that's where we're kind of like, let's just leave it to the team and we try and not get too involved anymore but sometimes can't help ourselves and then we get told off.
Nathan Bush: How do you go being in a business where you co founder with your
Anthony Zakaria: brother, it's actually fine. I think it's actually even better now with Linktree because the team is so big. We're not in each other's hair every day. Like we were, you know, five, six years ago at the agency. But even then we grew up in around family business. We'd have parents. I think they forced us to be friends growing up we had like big Italian family. It was just like family things all the time. It was like, you know, so when we started managing bands together and then running the agency, it was like a natural alignment where we just knew how to riff on each other. We could tell each other how it is, tell each other to get effed but then literally 10 minutes later walk into a meeting and be fine, like be just seamless. And then I think if anything it's like actually if you can have that relationship, it's actually really efficient, like ultimate form of psychological safety. And Nikki, our other co founder is an old friend and the three of us lived together when we're running the agency and building Linktree on the side. And it was like this definitely unhealthy looking back on it, but it was 247 the agency linktree and there was never any all out brawl argument. It was just like a little bit of heated debate about something because it was so passionate and then cool. What do you want for dinner? Get us some tacos. All right, sweet. Cool. You do that thing. See you later on. And just seamless. So I think it's. Yeah. Some people say, you know, couldn't deal with working with my brother or sister or family and you know. Yeah, in some ways you piss each other off. But it's Actually good because we know our pressure points and our weaknesses and, you know, it's actually more productive in the end.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, we get a lot of that. We had a few founders in here with brother, sister founders and very similar responses saying that they were scared to go into the partnership together. But it's actually really good now because they can have the honest conversations that they might not be able to have with someone who's they trust but isn't as close with because they might take it the wrong way.
Anthony Zakaria: There's no dancing around, there's no political correctness. There's no just like, you know, having to sugarcoat anything. It's just straight to the point and it's good.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, yeah, that's awesome. And so with your team now being out, was it 2:70, that 270 team
Nathan Bush: members, what have you put in place
Nathan Bush: then to help empower them and keep your team focused? I did a little bit of reading and saw that, you know, you have a big focus on employee happiness at Linktree and I'd love to hear more about what you put in place there.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, it's always been a big focus for us. Just like building a great culture. I feel like if you can build a business and a team where people want to work for you and with you on both sides from a supplier side as well, it just breeds greatness. You just feel good about the work you're doing and you kind of want to have it happen from both sides. And great culture also builds a great brand and so forth. And so we've always built this remote. It's always been remote first. So all the tools set up from the beginning was never this like having to shift to remote. Yes, we had an office early days, but you know, all our tools are always remote. And so that's the first thing is that flexibility for people around the world and even in Australia. So things like a work from home allowance and people around the world can go into co working spaces if they're not in a city where we do have an office, which is just Melbourne and Sydney at the moment. But our benefits program we launched about six months ago now, which is, we figured that it's all well and good to have a benefits program where you might supply things like a gym membership or whatever, but not everyone cares about that. You want to service the think about the whole individual. And for some people, they really want to focus on growth and learning, whereas others really want to focus on wellness. And other people have other desires. They want to get out of things. So rather than Just a blanket approach to benefits. We give everyone $6,000 Australian a year to go towards the things that they care about. It's going to help them build the best sales for themselves. So that could be things like people want to do short courses and upskilling and that's really important to them. They do that. But other people like myself who've got young family, but they might go towards more things to do with help at home or other personal wellness and that kind of stuff. So might be fitness subscription or personal training or buying a bike with part of it. Right. Because I want to. That's the only way I'm going to get some fitness done. So basically finding ways that help empower people to be their best selves as opposed to just blanket approach to things. We've got other features as well. That program is that everyone gets 20 hours of volunteer leave. Big focus on social good. And also our parental leave policy is one of the best in class. We're really proud of. It's 18 weeks parental leave for both caregivers, no matter where you are in the journey and a really great return to work focus as well for returning parents. So, yeah, a few things like that that make people feel really welcome and you know that there's, there's more to just building linktreets also building themselves in their own careers.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that's brilliant. And they can obviously share in the success and the, and the growth stories because they're feeling the love from it now. We spoke about balance before, but you've recently launched a new venture in side Stage Ventures. What inspired that? Was that your desire to get back into the music world?
Anthony Zakaria: It was a few things. So yeah, Sidestage is a investment syndicate, myself, Alex, a few other partners and all of us are founders in that there's five or six of us. And it started when Jad, who's one of the other partners, is a good friend of mine from school and he's an artist manager in Australia, runs a really fantastic independent music business called Unified. He manages artists like Vance Joy and Tash Sultana and has a fantastic business. And the three of us speaking were doing some angel investing in music tech products and just, we, we just founders that we believed in and products were really cool. We thought we're in the industry, we're founders, we're involved in digital and tech. We feel like we can help them out. And that's. It started from there and then it kept. Other opportunities were coming to us being in the world that we were in and we were also able to connect investment opportunities to people in our network, in the entertainment space or other. Other founders that also were looking to do some investing and as a startup you don't want to have hundreds of people on your cap table. And also some of the people we're working with didn't have hundreds of millions to invest and it made sense to do the investments as a syndicate and bring deals to each other. And it's just like this really organic approach. It wasn't I think, similar. It wasn't like let's take over the world with the venture capital firm. It was a genuine place of founders helping founders and building that connection and community around that. And so yeah, we recently launched Side Stage Ventures about a few weeks ago and we've made some really great investments. Mr. Yum. QR. QR code ordering systems. One of our investments in Heaps Normal, the non alcoholic beer brand. So yeah, it's really about this, founders helping founders, bringing great people together to invest and help each other out and ultimately build more great brands.
Nathan Bush: That's so cool. I just love those couple of stories that you've given around how you've created these ventures in that it hasn't been this big, pre planned, get a big consultancy in, map the market, all that sort of stuff. It's like now we'll see if this works, we'll give it a go because we're genuinely interested.
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, very much that comes from ultimately comes from our passions and the world that we operate in. And yes, there's an opportunity in it ultimately but it's really curiosity and comes from our passion point. So I think that's enough work on the go for now.
Nathan Bush: And does Side stage give you an excuse to go out and see gigs and like escape the family for a little while?
Anthony Zakaria: Is that your excuse now that gigs are back on? Yeah, but the problem is no one's been out in two years and I've had kids since and having one drink past 10pm Now I'm done. So I'm not really sure you've come
Nathan Bush: out the other side a different person. The music community goes, who is this guy?
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, basically no one wants to invite me anymore. No fun.
Nathan Bush: Anthony, we've got to wrap up. Thank you so much for your time. Before we do, can you share what's next for yourself and the team at Linktree?
Anthony Zakaria: Yeah, we've got a. Like I said before, the roadmap is miles long but we've got a heap of really cool stuff coming. We're got a rebrand coming out in a few weeks. Which bloody excited for. It's been about a year in the making and it's kind of like everyone to see it. It's, it's. I mean we created the business and the brand, it was as it was, it served, served us well. And it hasn't evolved a whole lot like few iterations on it, but we've stretched as far as we can. And so now we've this really great, bold, bright, you know, consumer brand, visual identity and tone of voice that's going to really put us on the map as to the brand, the global brand that we are. Right. And that's everything from logo and all that kind of stuff changing ever so slightly. So that's really exciting. We've got a whole bunch more partnerships and integrations coming out soon. We announced in the coming months, which you'll see. Which again, talking to that empowerment piece, just helping our creators really go further and grow more with what we're building. So yeah, we'll keep you posted.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. And plug time. So if people got retailers or we've got content creators listening to this and go, I've really got to get on top of my linktree game and get that up to speed. What's the best way for them to get started?
Anthony Zakaria: Just go to linktree sign up. Takes under a minute to sign up and it's free and you can go from there. All the how to's and tips are embedded, but ultimately just get started. Create a list of links, chuck it in your bios and you'll see how it works.
Nathan Bush: Beautiful. Anthony, thank you so much for sharing your story and telling us more about linktree. It is one of the best Australian startups going around and we'd love seeing you guys continue to kick goals. So thank you for sharing with us today.
Anthony Zakaria: Thank you, mate, appreciate it.
Nathan Bush: What a bloody wild ride so far. It's amazing to see a simple idea go from a client request to a billion requests dollar business and all from
Nathan Bush: our own backyard, which is great.
Nathan Bush: Finally, all client requests were so lucrative. Now if you're after that, create a report, head on over to linktree Creator Report. It's L I N K T R EE forward slash creator report linked by link in show notes. If you're looking for some research to help you develop deeper relationships with your
Nathan Bush: content partners, this is a brilliant place to start.
Nathan Bush: Now, we covered a lot of ground in this chat, but here are three tips that stayed with me. Number one, the power of simplicity. Just like art in galleries, I've heard a fair share of people looking at linktree and saying, I could have built that. But it's not the building, it's the serving of its customers that comes through simplicity. As Anthony said, no one wants to be the next MySpace 2.0, right? Sometimes discipline and refinement is actually more difficult than innovation and progress. Number two, Maximizing the single link. As Eminem would say, you get one shot, one opportunity to click that link. You've got to make the most of it. Anthony shared how brands and content creators were sharing links on linktree, but also embedding videos, signing up for emails, selling merch and raising money for partners. Are you making the most of that one click opportunity? And the third one I had was you can be happy and still burn out. I think we definitely got that. Anthony wasn't those typical hustle bro types, but that doesn't mean he didn't suffer from burnout. You can also get burnout if you love what you do. Long hours, back pain, insomnia. That was what Anthony was feeling. Does it sound familiar? It is so important to schedule regular breaks and relaxation even if you're on a roll and loving what you're doing. To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next ecommerce opportunity, come and Visit us at eSweet. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com where you can download the free E Commerce Salary Guide and sign up to our weekly ecommerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding the card.
