Speaker 1This is a project that I grew alongside
Speaker 2my full-time job, and I quit to become a full-time solopreneur. I want you to meet Charlie. A few years ago, he was working a full-time job as a software engineer, but on the side, he was building this really simple app. And today, that app makes over $30,000 a month.
Speaker 1I just, at that point, I just felt like I need to do this. Like, I really want to do this, to give myself a shot.
Speaker 2But here's what I think is cool. He wasn't the first person to build this idea. In fact, he built it in a space where there was a competitor with literally millions of users. And yet, he was still successful.
Speaker 1I decided to, like, give myself two weeks to build, like, a Linktree alternative.
Speaker 2So, I asked Charlie to come onto the channel and break everything down. And in this episode, we're going to dive into the crazy simple app he built that now makes over $30,000 a month, how he grew it on nights and weekends on the side, and finally, the story behind how this app replaced his full-time job. Trust me, this one's going to be good. Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story. All right, Charlie, welcome to Starter Story. Super excited to have you on the channel. Can you just share with me who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
Speaker 1So, my name is Charlie Clark, and I'm a software engineer, and I'm the founder of Lynx, which is a simple website and link and bio tool doing about $31,500 in monthly recurring revenue. This is a project that I grew alongside my full-time job initially, and in August of 2024, I quit to become a full-time solopreneur.
Speaker 2That's awesome. Yeah, what is Lynx? Can you just explain to the audience who may not know what it is, just what it is, what it does, who some of your users are? So, let's start there.
Speaker 1So, Lynx is primarily a link and bio tool. It's a way to kind of take all of the different parts of your online presence and put them in like a very simple mobile-first webpage that links out to your different parts of your online identity. So, bring it a little bit closer to like a full website builder with some additional functionality that sort of the typical link and bio tool might not offer, like multiple pages, more powerful blocks, and more customization options. So, here we are on the Lynx landing page. So, what you get is a URL that's lynx.co slash username, and that gives you a page that looks something like this. As you can see, there's quite a bit of variety in what you can build with our tool. So, it is really quite a diverse. There's types of customers, but fundamentally, these are all either people or brands that are trying to make money online.
Speaker 2All right, real quick. What I love about Charlie's story is that he started this as a side project. He grew it alongside his full-time job until he grew it to a point where he could actually quit and go all in. We actually see this a lot with some of the founders we feature on the channel. They build something, they grow it slowly on the side until finally they can go all in. So, naturally, you might be wondering, how can I find a side project idea to build? Well, that's exactly why we put together a free list of side project ideas you could start alongside your 9-to-5. Every idea is backed by a real case study with revenue numbers, pricing models, and how they grew it on the side. So, if you've got a day job and a little bit of free time, I think this list will give you a good place to start. So, just head to the link in the description and grab that 100% for free. All right, let's get back to Charlie. Yeah, Charlie, this is really cool. I think in my past life, I was a photographer. I did like a few weddings. I used to follow a lot of people in that space. And they all had something like this. So, definitely, I see the benefit. Let's talk a little bit about the revenue. Like, can you just pull up your revenue dashboards, just show off to the audience that this thing is legit, and maybe just walk through some of the numbers you look at probably every day.
Speaker 1Yeah, here's my Stripe dashboard. Currently sitting at about $31,500 MRR. There's a big jump here because I actually increased my prices towards the end of June. And I went from $4 a month to $5 a month, which doesn't feel like a big increase. But, you know, because this is a business where it's like a lot of customers paying a small amount that like $1 increase actually translated to nearly $5,000 in additional MRR. And it's actually been sort of on an upwards trend since then. So, very exciting.
Speaker 2Awesome, Charlie. Yeah, thanks for breaking all that down and being so transparent. Let's get into your background a little bit. How did you get to this point? Were you always doing projects like this, you know, technical background? Yeah, tell us about how you got here.
Speaker 1Yeah, so when I was in college, I was studying graphic design. And when I graduated college, you know, I had taught myself a bit of programming. And like the first job that I landed out of school was at an ad agency doing web development. And then I got my first job in tech at Squarespace after a couple of years of doing the advertising stuff. That was really where I learned sort of like the fundamentals of software engineering and also got exposure to, you know, a tool for building websites. And, you know, I was always dabbling with little projects on the side. I got really interested in like the print on demand space. And when I started learning about like print on demand, I was like, oh, this is kind of cool. But these like print on demand websites are not especially interesting or like well designed. So that's where I came up with this idea for visual, which was like my first big side project that I had this idea that I was going to build this print on demand marketplace for artists where they could upload their art and sell their art and have it printed and fulfilled for them. And the first time I quit my job in 2019 was to develop that idea as I was building visual. And interacting with a lot of artists online, I noticed that a lot of them were using link and bio tools and link tree being like the big one at the time. And as I was kind of like struggling a bit with visual and trying to find like some kind of market fit there, I decided to like give myself two weeks to build a link tree alternative. That's how link started.
Speaker 2I thought it was interesting. You said you gave yourself two weeks to build link. So tell us about coming up with that idea a little bit more about the backstory there.
Speaker 1As I mentioned, I had seen that people were using a link tree. And so I started digging into it and I was like, oh, you know, it's cool that this exists, but like the pages don't look very good. So that was kind of like how I started thinking about it. Like, let's try and make a tool like this where you can make your page look nicer just to sort of test it out. I was like reaching out to people being like, hey, I built this thing and I would like to send it to them and be like, I built this for you. Like, do you want to use it? And I have artist friends who are still using links because they set it up and I grandfathered them into like a free plan. I'm not making them pay, but that was how I started getting some early feedback, which was really helpful.
Speaker 2One thing. I'm really thinking about is like kind of the manually getting customers, at least that initial thing you mentioned there is like you would build it for someone or you would reach out to like a personal connection and like do it for them kind of thing. I think that's just a really practical first way to start getting customers and validation. So hopefully someone watching can like learn a little bit from that. And then second quick takeaway there is just like it would have been easy for you to be like, oh, link tree already exists. I'm out of the market kind of thing. But you somehow found a simpler, maybe smaller way to build an alternative. And I imagine that was something that attracted. You know, people at the beginning. So, yeah, let's talk about the growth of links. Tell us the story behind how you went from, you know, zero to where it's at today.
Speaker 1Starting from zero, right? Like I built this thing, just warm or cold outreach, trying to convince people to try it. Not scalable, but like a good way to just gauge interest. That was like the first phase. And then I had addressed some feedback, made some changes and I launched on Product Hunt and I got quite a bit of traffic from it. And that's kind of when I started thinking about monetizing it. And I was. Just curious is like, would people be willing to pay for this? So I launched like a premium version at the time and think it was maybe three dollars a month, something like that got to like one hundred MRR within a couple of months and then started looking into how to sort of scale that. And my first success that I had was actually with Instagram ads got quite a bit of growth early on from that. And then they changed their algorithms at some point. I can't remember if it was like twenty, twenty one or twenty, twenty two, but that eventually became like not a viable channel for me anymore after the Instagram. Ads started not performing as well. I was looking for other channels to scale growth and I discovered that like Google search ads were the sort of easiest because it was high intent traffic, right? People actually looking for a link and buy a tool or like a web page builder and it was quite easy to just, you know, put money in and get money out. And that's sort of consistently been what I have been relying on most for growth, I would say, over the last four years.
Speaker 2I'm just curious separately, you know, you said you're early on pricing. What was like three dollars a month and, you know, over the last four or five years now it's at five dollars a month. So you haven't really increased it like that much. So maybe just tell us about like why that pricing it's it seems like really small. Maybe it's because you think it's a small tool or something else you see in the market. Just tell us about that piece, because I think that's kind of interesting and what that means, like maybe for the business.
Speaker 1A big part of it is sort of anchoring it relative to the other players in the space. And Linktree is the biggest competitor in the space. They've always sort of looked at their pricing and tried to, at least for my paid version, sort of undercut them. And I guess for me, the way I like to think about it is I would much rather have lots of customers paying like a small amount than fewer customers paying more. The one thing I do have that sort of counterbalances that is that there's also a pro plan where it starts at twelve dollars a month. And mainly what that gives you is custom domain and the ability to manage multiple pages. So twelve dollars starts you out with five pages. And then you can sort of add more and more pages. So I actually do have a couple of customers that are paying upwards of a hundred a month because they manage a bunch of pages. So there is still like a segment of higher paying customers. And that's how I've kind of split it up.
Speaker 2Cool. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Thanks for breaking that down. When we were chatting before this interview, you told me a little bit about how, you know, building this helped you quit your job and do this full time. But then maybe you went back to work and then came back to links. Tell us that story of how working on links has helped you. or come back to a full-time job so
Speaker 1yeah when i first left in 2019 that's when i started started building visual. I worked on that for almost a year and towards the end of that year, which is kind of like what I had given myself, I built links. Neither product was really like making much money. And if you remember, that's when COVID started and I was self-employed, not making a whole lot of money. And I just felt like I would be a lot more comfortable not being self-employed at that point. And so I went back to Spurspace, mentioned to them that I had been working on these things. I didn't want to sort of feel like I was doing something under the table. And yeah, links continued to grow during that time, even though I wasn't spending all that much time on it. Summer of 2024 is when I decided like, okay, I feel like I'm making enough money now with links. I was basically in revenue, making my salary more or less. I was really wanting more flexibility to look after my kid, you know, if he would get sick and stuff like that. It just felt like the right time. And now it's been two years and I'm really glad I did it.
Speaker 2As you're talking, I was thinking about how like the first time you quit to work on your stuff, with what I would interpret as like not really a big plan. And then the second time you said you had built it big enough that it was replacing your whole salary. You know, sometimes the narrative online with quitting to go full time, it's either like burn all the boats, you know, and just like go all in, move to Bali and then, you know, live a cheap life and then grow your product. That's like the narrative I see quite a bit, at least on like IndieHack or Twitter. Could you share like your mindset behind those two different ways that you approached like quitting to go full time on
Speaker 1your project? That's a really interesting question. So I think when I quit the first time, I had an idea of what I wanted to build, but it was, you know, not super well thought out. And my partner, she had a full time job. She was making like, you know, a good amount of money. So there was also that support that was really helpful. And, you know, we were way off from thinking about having kids at that point. The second time was very different because one big thing was COVID. Like COVID really sort of made life feel kind of like scary and, you know, unpredictable. And it kind of just like, it kept sort of pushing back. Like I was always talking about like, I want to go and like focus on like full time, but like things kept happening that kept sort of pushing that back. And then we decided we're going to have a kid and that pushed it back even more. And so by the time that that was all in place, and also I had sort of this like somewhat arbitrary goal of like matching my salary with the MRR. I think I could have gone either way with that a little bit, but that was just like a nice secondary goal kind of.
Speaker 2I love that because I think sometimes the big narrative is go all in, but I really like that you did it slowly. And, you know, life does happen. I get that personally. Like you have a kid, you get married, you buy a house and responsibility starts to pile up a little bit, not in a bad way, but just like, you know, life happens. And so I really liked that different mindset the second time, which hopefully someone watching, you know, can relate to a little bit. Let's talk about the tech stack behind Lynx. What are the tools you use on a day-to-day basis to run the business?
Speaker 1Tech stack wise, I host on a VPS on DigitalOcean and I use AWS just for hosting assets. So whenever people upload images, that's where that goes. And a couple other tools that I use, Resend for email notifications and also sending out marketing emails. And then I use TinyBird, which is a wrapper over ClickHouse. That's for analytics. I have some AI integrations throughout the product. I use OpenAI for that, their API. And then my biggest spend is Google Ads. I spend about a hundred dollars a day on Google Ads. Then as of a year or so ago, I've been also spending a hundred to $200 a month on a coding agent. That's basically it.
Speaker 2All right. So I want to see how Lynx works. So could you just give us a little one minute demo of how Lynx works?
Speaker 1Let's onboard Starter Story. So when you first create your account, you're given the choice between starting from your Instagram, from a link or starting from scratch. Instagram's the best just because it's, it's a little more structured. So let's just go through that. We're basically scraping in your Instagram profile, pulling in your profile picture and any information that is sort of publicly accessible. It got the profile picture and the name, and it put together a little banner here. And then this is where you can sort of quickly kind of build out what your profile template could look like. And then you can pick a theme. These are just starting points, basically. You know, you can customize everything once you finish. And then a little celebration.
Speaker 2Easy. I mean, obviously the, like, it would take someone time to design it and tweak it, et cetera, say what they want to say, but. Yeah. Relatively simple to get started. That's cool. Yeah.
Speaker 1So now you've got your Lynx, lynx.co/starterstory. And from there you can actually go into the like full-fledged editing experience. We have, you know, a bunch of other features, like you can build forms that you can share with standalone forms, QR codes, short links. I recently just put in like a fun little, like mock-up builder that I had sort of built as like a separate project, but like pulled it into Lynx just so you can kind of create like a, a shareable asset with your profile. Very cool. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Thanks for sharing.
Speaker 2That's awesome. Final question that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story, if you were standing on your shoulders six years ago, or for a lot of people watching or just getting started, you know, what kind of advice would you give yourself or give to them?
Speaker 1One thing that is so easy now is like to just give up as soon as your thing doesn't immediately work because it has gotten so cheap to build and it's so much easier in a way to jump to the next idea you have, rather than like actually spending the time trying to do the hard stuff, like reaching out to customers, you know, marketing, doing outreach, like stuff like that, which I think is still valuable. So that would be my sort of like adapted advice for the AI era is pick a space that's validated, iterate until you feel like you got something and then lock in if you feel like it's what you want to be working on.
Speaker 2Well, Charlie, that's great advice. And thank you so much for coming to Starter Story. Cool. Thanks guys. Thank you.
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