Economy Spotlight: Linktree
Spotlight is focused on marketing strategies, growth and the features that make the creator economy startup unique. Today I'm reviewing Linktree the OG link-in-bio startup for creators.
Learn more about "link-in-bio" market with the Deep dive into 3 startups operating in that industry
Economy spotlight is a series where I review one startup in Creator Economy. The review is focused on marketing strategies, growth and the features that make the startup unique.
Today we will be talking about the OG link-in-bio startup Linktree.
Linktree is a startup that is helping creators to build simple landing pages for all their links.
Today let's take a look at:
- Features - identify the killer feature of Linktree.
- Growth - how they got where they are now.
- Passion fund - the program for creators.
The story of Linktree
While I was researching I discovered that Linktree's origin story is very unique.
Linktree is founded by Australian brothers Alex and Anthony Zaccaria. The duo originally started their entrepreneurial journey as founders of Bolster digital agency. Mainly focusing on musical festival organization.
During their cooperation with different musicians and artists they understood the fragmentation of the industry.
Artists have different revenue streams: merch, ticket sales, sponsorships, etc. Each stream has different stakeholder and responsible person. Which means artists are always pushed to share different links on their socials. That's how Linktree was born.
As a place where artists (and currently creators also) are creating their unified social profile.
Linktree is also interesting business as they were bootstrapping the company for the first 3 years, without considering getting VC funding.
Taking into account the agency behind the product always had users. Being on the top of social media and trends as agency the company was able to optimize their product for the conversion and understand the pain of their customers first hand.
Linktree of Linktree.
Features
Linktree is the OG product in the link-in-bio startups. Currently link-in-bio is a hot topic as the creator economy is getting the attention it deserves. Building landing pages, optimising marketing and sales copy is a difficult task even for a seasoned creator.
Linktree and other link-in-bio startups are tossing away unnecessary friction providing a simple landing page with all the links that creator needs (twitter, instagram, patreon, merch, podcast).
Scaling the content and mediums with Linktree means only adding an additional link to the list.
The key feature of Linktree is it's simplicity. The product is a structured landing page with all of the links that creator has. A unified social presence and profile.
The priority of Linktree is to stay simple for both: creators and visitors of creator profiles.
Linktree pages are optimized for the conversion. As the founders of Linktree say, their goal is not to have a lot of traffic on the Linktree page itself, but to successfully redirect visitors to the sources of creators.
In this section I want to talk about the features I think are pretty unique for link-in-bio startup.
Linktree has 3 pricing plans:
Free pricing provides the minimum viable product and information you need as a creator: high level analytics, collection of emails, some integrations with other services suck as YouTube.
I want to highlight a few features of Pro pricing, because they look pretty unique for a link-in-bio startup.
- Link Scheduling
Adding temporary links into your profile for campaigns or limited offers to the fans.
- RSS feed
Ability to integrate with the RSS feed of your blog to showcase the latest articles. Powerful feature for podcasters.
- Collect emails and SMS
Through integrations with Zapier you can collect the emails and phone numbers of your fans for campaigns.
- Deep analytics
"Creators add Linktree in the bio of at least 3.5 social media platforms."
Linktre Pro has deep integrations with social media platforms, not only on the analytics level, but also for showcasing content and redirection to a specific piece of content.
Linktree Enterprise looks like an homage to the agency background of the product.
Enterprise version is created on the top of Pro version specifically to make it easier to manage more then 1 Linktree page at the same time for creative agencies, artist managers and more.
Without any official confirmation, however, there's this 1 tweet where it seems like Linktree is thinking about launching an app.
Great minds think a like. It's something we're working towards. Thanks
— Linktree (@Linktree_) July 11, 2021
The future will show how accurate tweets can be :)
Growth
Important numbers:
- Daily sign-ups - 30,000 new users.
- Unique visitors - 800,000,000 (on creators pages).
Source: Alex Zaccaria, Co-founder & CEO of Linktree
Much of the growth for Linktree comes from a combination of a few factors:
- Deep understanding of the problem that musicians and artists had thanks to the agency experience of the founders.
- Fragmentation of social media experiences. Creators grow audiences and monetize their work on different platforms.
- Growth of creator economy during the pandemic.
Linktree and other link-in-bio products also saw a lot of growth because some social media platforms were banning accounts with OnlyFans in the profile.
Faith
Here are a few growth tactics and things I liked about marketing of Linktree.
- Supporting creators
Linktree is partnering with big creators such as Charli D'Amelio. She's using Linktree to showcase her favorite creators to share spotlight and help them grow as well.
Melissa Katz
- Linktree blog
Sounds very trivial however, Linktree's blog is a great example of a company blog. It's not just for corporate updates. The blog also provides up-to trends strategies on how to grow the audiences. The blog is also used to showcase the creators who use Linktree, share their best practices and updates of different platforms.
Guest Contributor
- Free Linktree Pro accounts for charity and non-profit accounts.
Katie Smith
- Integration with Clubhouse
Linktree launched an integration with clubhouse to directly access the room from the links. And also see all the necessary information about the event in one place.
Passion fund
With the rise of creator economy, creator funds and creator programs also became popular.
Linktree also launched their Passion fund in 2021. The fund is stated in partnership with Square and was coincided with the launch of "Commerce" features on Linktree, to enable sales directly from the page.
Brief information about the Fund:
- Total prize pool - $250,000.
- Prize ranges - $1,ooo - $20,000.
- Other prizes besides the grants are: free Pro account, consultation with Linktree team, no fees on Commerce features.
- Location independent (very unique feature).
- The creator must be a Linktree user.
- The selection is handled by committee, however there's also a People's choice nomination.
Conclusion
With the additional $55,7 million funding Linktree currently is scaling their business growing the team and giving back to the community of creators.
While we will have more and more social media channels where we will grow our audiences Linktree and startups alike are getting us closer to creating our own metaverses. Universes where we share everything that is important to us without losing time on creating new pages on Wordpress (or other website builders).
Learn more about "link-in-bio" market with the Deep dive into 3 startups operating in that industry
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