Aussie content marketing business goes global thanks to a mix of product strategy, social connections and one significant celebrity
What do you do when you know you have a great product, but lack the resources or brand appeal needed to tell the world about it? Maybe get Alicia Keys to do it for you.
This was the good fortune that befell brothers, Alex and Anthony Zaccaria, and colleague, Nick Humphreys, in 2017. The trio had recently launched Linktree, a free service which enables content creators to build a customisable page to house the links they want to share with social followers.
“What this does is enable them to have a shareable link and their own little place on the Internet in under 30 seconds which is quick, simple and optimised,” says Alex Zaccaria. “We built it relatively quickly, with the first MVP created in about six hours.
“We gave it to a few clients and straight away we had 10 to 20 accounts and new users signing up each day, so we pretty quickly realised a lot of people had this problem.”
Initial clients included the Splendour in the Grass music festival and the City of Melbourne, and the service was soon posted on the US-based Product Hunt site. From there it was picked up by Alicia Keys’ digital agency.
“We reached out and said if they signed up the rest of their roster we’d come and do custom profiles and build out features and give it all to them for free,” Zaccaria says. “And off the back of that they signed up Eminem and The Killers and Pearl Jam.”
Soon after, the team noticed marketing influencers and social coaches on YouTube were also talking about Linktree.
“We held back on producing any of our own content and pushing our brand out too much, and continued to drive organic reach and growth through this community of users who were just discovering it for themselves,” Zaccaria says.
Today, Linktree has just over 4 million users and is adding 10,000 to 12,000 sign ups each day, spending almost no money on media.
“We only started spending on outbound marketing in October, and that was really only spent on brand protection for SEO and AdWords and search,” Zaccaria says.
The company makes money by converting a small proportion of users of the free service to a Pro version. Zaccaria says the goal is to never downgrade the functionality of the free version, but rather to continue adding to the Pro version to make it more appealing.
The next phase of development will add features such as machine learning on top of the tool’s existing analytics capabilities to give users insights regarding the performance of options such as colour backgrounds or key words.
Zaccaria sees great potential to continue to grow the uptake of Linktree across different verticals. But he remains certain a large advertising spend is not in the company’s future.
“What it really comes down to is building a great product,” he says. “When you build a great product and you listen to your users and you solve a problem in a way that is affordable for them in a frictionless way, then they will become advocates and share it for you.”
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