Charlie Clark - How a solo founder took a side project from an idea to $300k+ ARR product!

If something keeps coming up, I'll try to address it and sort of weighing how big of an issue does it seem to be versus, you know, like how feasible is it? You know, how much time is it gonna take me? The internet is a naughty place and people will try to like take advantage of platforms, especially when they have a good—

Sure.

Domain reputation. I got a lot of instances of people like using links to try and do like phishing scams. That was one of the reasons I got rid of the free plan because I was like, I don't have sort of the expert, the resources to like moderate this.

Welcome to the Undefeated Underdogs Podcast, where I unpack and narrate stories of ambitious people who turn obstacles into opportunities. My goal for this podcast is to create a platform to narrate underdog stories and maybe play a small teeny tiny role in inspiring you. I intend to highlight the underdog mentality and make authentic conversations with people who play the long game, take action with a chip on their shoulder, and convert obstacles into opportunities. Buckle up as I'll be bringing some authentic founders, VCs, community builders, and content creators who got underestimated their whole lives, and yet they beat all the odds to become insanely successful. Now today, I want to tell you a little bit about our awesome sponsor, acquire.com. Selling a business is as tough as building a business. As someone who went through this process once, selling my own startup, I know the pain it takes to get to the end zone. This is where our sponsor shines. Imagine this, you're a founder who's built a solid SaaS product, acquired customers, and generating consistent monthly revenue. The problem is you're not growing for, for whatever reason— lack of focus, lack of skill, or just plain lack of interest— and you feel stuck. What should you do? The story I'd like to hear is you buckle down, somehow reignited the fire, get past yourself and the clichés, and start working on your business rather than just in the business. You start building an audience, move out of your comfort zone to do sales and marketing, and in 6 months you triple your revenue. The reality isn't as simple. Situations may be different from every founder facing these crossroads, but too many times the story ends up being one of inaction and stagnation until the become business— the business becomes less valuable or worse, worthless. If you find yourself here, Or your story is likely headed down a similar road, I offer you a third option. Consider selling your business on acquire.com. Capitalizing on the value of your time is a smart move. Acquire.com is free to list and they've helped hundreds of founders already. Go to try.acquire.com/sharath and see for yourself if this is the right option for you. Now let's get into today's episode. My next guest is a solo founder of a creator product called Lynxx, with 2 I's, by the way, which is a LinkedIn bio product that started as a side project during COVID time. And now he's making over $300K in annual revenue. That's insane for a solo product. And it's in creator economy. It's insane. You know, I'm excited to like chat about, you know, everything that goes on into this. guy's mind. Charlie previously worked at Squarespace in the engineering team and has built lots of many projects before. A couple of them I want to mention, which is so— the one project is so kind of different, and I don't know how he pulled off building that. It's called The Colors of Motion. It's kind of like an exploration of use of color in movies. There is this stack of lines which kind of represents each color they used in a single frame. That's so weird. I let him explain everything and he's also built called Visual Without an I. What's, what's cool? What's with eyes, Charlie?

Eyes and dogs. Yeah.

Yeah.

It's all a domain, you know, did you try adding an I, try removing an I?

It's a print-on-demand marketplace, which is clothes, which we can dive into. But this is Charlie Clark. Welcome to the show. How are you, man?

Hey, Sharath. Yeah, really glad to be here. Excited to talk about Lynx and about my other projects over the years and kind of, yeah, just what it's like to be a solo founder. The ups and downs, the highs and lows. Yeah.

First of all, what's, what's up with the, with the eyes? I just observed that you have 2 eyes in links and no eyes, no eye in visual, which is kind of like—

I like, I like, um, I like short URLs. Um, and so obviously, you know, the word that I'm going for usually is taken, um, with the sort of popular TLDs. So yeah, visual, I was like, oh, I can remove the eye. Um, and links, I was like, oh, maybe I can add an I. So yeah, I hadn't thought about the fact that it's always I's up until now though.

Why, uh, why do you think, uh, people should go after short links? Is it— do you have any psychological reason that you've experienced before? Because Colors of Motion is a big-ass URL.

Yeah, that's true. Um, I think it depends on the type of product. But I think with, um, Visual and Lynx are both platforms that, you know, users can build to create sort of a shareable URL. And I think for both of those projects, like, it was important to have a pretty short URL that can be shared. Um, so that's kind of like my thinking on that. I think for other projects, it maybe doesn't matter as less. Like, I think the Colors of Motion is actually a good URL because it is like It kind of is easy to remember and there's nothing like weird about it. Like Lynx, sometimes I have to be like, when I'm telling someone about it, it's like, oh yeah, there are 2 I's. Um, so it's harder to like share verbally, but I think it's good for sharing on like your Instagram profile, for example.

Yeah. You know what, now that I'm thinking, if you, I know it's kind of, you know, different people have different take on this maybe, but if you're talking to someone and you're explaining the project you're building and you're kind of explaining a little bit about the name, you're kind of making an impression, you know, links with 2 eyes. And that's what— oh yeah, that's so weird. Like, or is it— it's not too weird per se, but it's like, yeah, that is different, you know. Yeah. So there is some psychological, probably some effect, I would say. Uh, but yeah, let's— I'm very excited. First of all, $25K MRR is no joke. It's so huge in the environment we're living. It's so hard to like build products, scale, and then become profitable and then kind of like, you know, cross that milestone. Right. So I, you know, I read one of your interviews from IndieHackers and you kind of mentioned in that interview that you put a milestone. Yeah. If I hit this, I will go full-time, right? So first of all, I want to understand why $25K. And you recently kind of moved on from your full-time job at Squarespace, and now you're full-time working as a founder on Lynx.

Yeah.

So talk to me that transition the last few months, you know, hitting the milestone and then First of all, setting the milestone, hitting the milestone, and kind of, you know, going into full-time.

Yeah. So I had set that milestone more or less because it was sort of a round number, but also because it more or less corresponded to my sort of salary at Squarespace. Like when you included my base, you know, comp and and RSUs and all that. So that was kind of like why I had picked that more, because I thought that would be— even though the money I'm taking home isn't necessarily exactly the same, it was just sort of— that was an easy way to sort of think of like, okay, if I can get to that, then it feels like work— going to work on this full-time, um, doesn't feel like irresponsible kind of. I'll be able to pay myself a good salary, um, and Yeah, it feels like a serious— like it's at a serious point now. So that was, I think, how I kind of set that goal. It probably could have been less. You know, I think I maybe set it a little high because I was scared, honestly, to like to take the leap. But, you know, I did reach it eventually. And yeah, I actually reached it before, like a couple months before I like kind of fully decided to go full time on LingQ. And sort of, there were a couple months there of just like wrapping things up, making sure I, I felt like I was at a good, at a good point. Um, I also like had a baby, uh, last year. Oh, nice. Um, so that was kind of another factor, like trying to take that into consideration, um, when would be a good time to, to leave. Um, and also like wanting the flexibility of, of being self-employed. Like, I feel like that became even more sort of important with the baby, just being able to like work from home, take a day off, you know, if I need to. So a bunch of reasons for sort of making the decision to leave and focus full time on Lynx. But yeah, it's been, it's been good. Like, I think the biggest change, obviously, in terms of I have a lot more time to work on Lynx. And I think one really big change is going from like, literally just like fighting fires, kind of, you know, when I was working on this, um, part-time, to really having all this time to, to choose what I want to prioritize. And, and like, that just becomes a very different thing where it's like, now I need to really— yeah, just like, there's all these things I could do. I have so much time. How do I choose what to focus on? So that's been an interesting challenge in the last couple months.

Yeah, I think, you know, for people who don't know you, you should probably— I should have probably started the interview going back to your side projects so that that sets the context for Lynx. But yeah, let's kind of go back. But that's a great logical way of setting goals, you know, meeting your salary and kind of matching the reality where you were in and kind of, you know, not suffering from chasing what you want, right? So that's smart, I would say. But yeah, let's go back to one of the first projects. I think probably it's, you know, talk to me about the Colors of Motion. Did I explain it right? Did I screw it up? It's so weird. I can't, I can't really kind of also understand how did you make that? Like,

yeah,

the color codes of every scene putting in one frame from a movie.

Sure. Yeah. So the Colors of Motion, that was like, A really early project. I actually came up with the idea when I was still, um, in, in school. Um, I went to— Oh. To Parsons, uh, the design school in New York, and I had a project, a data visualization project. And I was like, it would be really cool to visualize the colors of movies. Um, and so at the time, I was actually teaching myself how to code in, uh, an ActionScript, which was like the programming language for Flash. So this is like, you know, 14 years ago. Um, and I wrote a really basic script to basically take a movie file, um, extract frames, and then average out the frame, uh, the colors in the frame, and sort of present it as this, uh, like, it's almost like a barcode, right, of like series of colors. Um, and I did that as this kind of like interactive experience thing. And then a few years later, I was working at an ad agency and I wanted to do a side project, and I kind of revisited that idea and, um, decided to turn them into posters that I could, that I could try and sell. So that's kind of how that started. Um, I started selling them on Etsy, like printing them myself and like actually dealing with like the shipping and all of that, and that was a real pain in the ass. And that got me thinking about print on demand. I learned about like the concept of print on demand, you know, how you can sort of outsource these things. You upload your file and some other company will actually take care of, of, um, printing and shipping them. And so that's kind of what led me to, uh, my other big project, which was Vizual with no I. And, um, that was actually a something I built to sort of make it easy to set up a shop and sell your prints and have them be fulfilled. So that was a big project. I actually, I recently quit my full-time job to focus on Lynx, but 4 years ago I actually did the same thing. In 2019, I quit and actually took a year to sort of develop Visual, which that was the initial idea. I wanted to like build out Visual. Hmm. I had the idea, I thought it would be a cool project, and I had saved up a good amount of money. So I was like, all right, I'm going to do this. And I spent maybe 6 or 7 months building Visual. And then I was finished with my site and I was trying to get users. And I just was spending a lot of time on Instagram, mostly looking for artists and trying to reach out, cold email them and be like, hey, I built this thing. Do you want to try it out? And I noticed that a lot of artists were using Linktree and some other link in bio tools, but like these really simple website builders. And that's when I kind of like decided to take a break from visual and build links. And so I actually did that. I think I got the MVP up in a couple of weeks. Wow. And just kind of for a while I was doing both of those projects on the side. Um, I ended up going back to work full-time, um, when COVID hit because I kind of wasn't making any money off my side projects. And then worked on those side projects, you know, nights and weekends. And gradually Visual kind of like never really took off, but, but Lynx did, um, to an extent. Um, and just kind of grad— really steadily grew over about 4 years now. Um, so That's, that's kind of, I guess, to answer your questions about Colors and Motion and then take it to, to the present day of how those projects kind of like each led to the next.

Yeah, I think it's all interlinked. And, you know, that's what I really love about, uh, this pretty famous quote from Steve Jobs, right? Like, you can't really connect the dots going forward. You can only look back and say, oh, okay, I did this because of that. Because of like something I did in like, you know, 2, 3 years ago. So it's all, I think, connected, you know, but so many follow-up questions. So let's talk about like Colors of Motion for a bit. How did you convince people to buy the posters? You know, and I looked at it, it's kind of basically like so many colors in a single sheet, right?

Yeah.

So what was your kind of marketing campaign? Did you do like something that convinced people like, yeah, Let me buy.

I actually really never did much marketing for Colors of Motion. I think I actually don't really know why that project was so successful. I think for a lot of people, like, the idea, like, if they get it, it's just like kind of like there's like this kind of moment of like, oh, that's so cool, I can see this movie, you know, in one, um, print.

One frame.

Um, and I think that That really resonated with some people. Some people are just like, what? I don't understand this. But for some people, they really like it. And, um, yeah, it's cool. Like, I've, I've, I get emails still now from like, um, like sometimes actors or directors of movies that I've seen or like, who are like, hey, can you make this for my movie? Wow. Um, I've actually like stopped the shop for a bit because I didn't really have time, but I still like will sometimes do these one-off requests. for people. So that's kind of fun. And who did you work with?

Like, do you have like any popular movies that you did like on request? I'm curious.

Yeah, well, recently, I don't know if I should share this. Yeah, recently actually, this actor, Domhnall Gleeson, I'm actually not even sure if that's how you pronounce his name. He's Irish and he's in a bunch of movies that I like. And he reached out and asked me if I could make, or actually send him some files of some of the posters that I had made, 'cause I'm not selling them anymore. So that was really cool.

Oh, nice. That's nice. Yeah, go ahead. You were telling about Colors of Motion.

Yeah, yeah. So marketing, you know, it was really early. Like I started doing it on Etsy. I think that was good because, you know, Etsy has like, it's a marketplace that has sort of, SEO built in so people can find stuff, um, without you needing to really actively promote it. Um, I did some like fairs, which was kind of like, you know, like, uh, artist fairs in, in New York where I just like went with posters and sold them physically to people. Uh, I didn't do too many of those because it's a lot of work. Um, but I think, yeah, I think because it was so early also, like, I think there are other companies that do this now, but it has good SEO. Like, if you Google like the colors of movies, it's one of the top results. So lots of reasons. Um, once in a while someone will discover it and post it on Reddit, so I still get like a lot of traffic there. Um, but I need to reopen the shop and start selling those posters again because—

Yeah, yeah, I think there are like some— so many, you know, new ones that came out. I'm sure you'll have a handful of fans like, you know, going great. I think one of the ideas I had when you were explaining, you know, kind of average, the average color of like certain scenes, you know, from the movie, it would be super dope if— because I went to the website and I clicked on it and it actually showed me the color of that particular frame. Yeah. Or a particular bar. It'd be super dope if you actually show the scene.

So that's actually a really funny story. It used to, um, and I spoke to a lawyer and the lawyer was like, you should not do that because it's copyrighted. Um, so yeah, yeah. So basically, you know, I could get into trouble if I did that, but it is possible, but it's not available unfortunately.

Got it, got it, got it. I think it would be dope to actually hover on it and then you show the visual and you can probably, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer, but I think that would be like super cool to see. Oh, the color is picked from the scene. I'm like, oh, I'm so attached to this. Take Dark Knight in, you know, you know, the scene where Batman kind of like stands at the top of one of the buildings in New York. It's like, if you put that scene from the color, I would like— Yeah. That is ridiculous. Let's buy it.

Anyway. Yeah, unfortunately, I'm like kind of risk-averse. Like sometimes I just, I get scared of these things. So like, yeah, probably nothing would ever happen, but I'm just kind of like, I don't know, I don't want to get sued by, you know, Warner Brothers or whatever.

For

sure.

Yeah. It made some money, uh, and you saw an opportunity for print on demand, you built Visual. What do you think that didn't go well with Visual? That's like something that you learned.

Yeah.

That you want to like kind of share with others.

Yeah. So I think one of the big mistakes I made with Visual is I, I spent a lot of time building it without sort of sharing it and getting feedback. Um, I, I just kind of was really set on this idea, and I, I convinced myself that like I can build something that will be better than what's out there. And I think to an extent, like, it was a really cool product. Like, artists really loved it because they could set up their, their store page and it looked really good. And I also was really, um, I wanted the quality of the prints to be really good. So I like you was using printers that, you know, did pretty high quality stuff. So I think there's kind of two things that I did wrong. I think one, I should have probably like earlier on validated that this was something that people wanted, not just that I thought was cool. And I think to an extent, I got lucky in that like one side of it was true, and that like artists liked it. And so they I was able to like get a lot of artists on the platform. I think the part that I didn't validate and that I really should have is make sure that there was like enough demand for like prints at that price point. Um, because I think basically, you know, what I've sort of realized in hindsight is that like, I think art is really interesting and that like you have the sort of like art that you put up in your home that, you know, for the most part, like, you don't want to spend too much money. Like, you want it to look nice, but you don't want to spend too much money on it. And then you have people who, like, are really into art, and they're willing to spend a lot on stuff that's, like, limited editions or, like, signed prints or, like, originals. So I think what I kind of did wrong is I think I positioned myself too much in the middle where I was, like, going for— I was going for quality, but also, like, there was nothing about the prints that was really special and unique, um, because just of the fact that it was print on demand. Like, you couldn't— they weren't signed by artists. There wasn't like a way to really do limited edition. So all of these things, um, I think made it so that it worked a little bit but never really took off. Um, I also like did a really bad job thinking about just the business side of it. And it would've, in order to make money, it would've had to done so much business. The margins are so thin on these things that you need to sell, be doing a lot of GMV to actually make a decent profit. So it just—

And then, yeah, then you got the idea from talking to potential customers, like in this case, artists. One of the questions I had is why the hell LinkedIn At that point during COVID you know, it was like a rise of creator economy wave and so many products were doing the same. And I have, I personally know friends who built, founder friends who actually built, a couple of them, they got shut down. A couple of them, of course, they got kind of acquired by others. And yeah, why? Why Lynx? Like when people are already using Linktree,

you

know, there is Buy Me a Coffee. They did like a product which is also kind of like Link in Bio. There's so many I can go on and on about.

There are so many. Yeah.

Yeah, so many. So why? And when you said it's kind of your risk-averse, it's kind of taking a risk in a way to go in a very crowded market. So talk to me about your thinking in your mind when you actually kind of talk to, uh, the artists and potential customers during the process?

Yeah, I think in the, in this, in the way that I sort of thought about it at the time, and I think maybe if I were to do it now I would do it differently, but I sort of saw— I kind of was so focused on Linktree as being like the big, the big player in the space that I kind of was like, I think if I can do something that's better and cheaper than Linktree, I can like cut off some of that very large addressable market. And so that was— and I also, it just seemed like a pretty simple project. So I think coming from like having worked on Visual for so long, which was a very complex project, there was like so much, you know, like you had the buyer side, the seller side, like all this sort of stuff around the print quality and the print on demand. And I sort of saw links as like, oh, I can build this maybe in a couple weeks using a lot of the stuff that I'd already figured out for visual, like a lot of the sort of infrastructure and components. I kind of just like use that as a starting point. And I just thought like, I'm going to try this and see what happens. And I think one of the features that I thought that Linktree didn't have, I actually don't know if they have it now, but it was something that I thought was really important at the time was like a way to, um, add links to your Instagram captions and have those like automatically be added to your, to your link in bio. So like there are other products that do that, um, like Later does that and there are a couple others, but I was like, oh, that would be a cool thing to like integrate into like a more traditional link in bio tool.

Hmm.

Um, and I also just thought that I could make it so that you could, um, like customize your page so that it would be kind of more personalized than Linktree. I also, like, initially it was a free product. Like, I started it as a completely free thing. So I was like, okay, maybe I'll just like try this and see what happens. And so I think I got a lot of early users because it was free and the UX was nice. And then I kind of like over time added features, you know, added the paid plan. Eventually got rid of the free plan altogether. So yeah, it just, it kind of happened organically. I think I didn't think about it too much at the time. I was just like, this will be a fun distraction. And yeah, it worked out.

It worked out so well that you're full-time now. Congrats on that. And yeah, so talk to me that there are like so many details you just, you know, kind of kind of casually answered, like, you know.

Yeah.

So was it always— I really like what you said, which is the intention is to not go big, just treat it as an experiment. It's like a side project, put it out and see how it works. And I feel most of these projects, at least the successful ones I know and everybody else knows, they all started like a Like from a, from an area of curiosity or like an experiment, right? But you came out of full-time, you're working on this, you went to, went back to Squarespace. At what point you're like, yeah, I need to like kind of double down. I want to again, go full-time. Was it, was it was like that or was it like, okay, let's roll with it. Let's see how this goes. If it reaches some point at someplace in the future I'll go full time. So talk to me about that working through. And then I want to also ask about the tactical stuff, which is why free plan, transitioning from free to pricing. How did that work? And what are the things that you learned from the whole building of Lynx?

Yeah, so I guess to answer the first question around when did I decide, or when did I know that I wanted to go full-time? I think I always kind of have known that I wanted to do my own thing. And I think that's why I took that initial, like, year off where I, where I tried to develop something. And I think honestly, like, if Lynx had done better, like, I think if either Lynx had done better earlier in that year off, or if COVID hadn't hit, I think I probably would have Like, waited longer and maybe I would never have gone back to work full time. I don't know. I think COVID was pretty impactful because at the time I was— LingQ, I had just launched LingQ. It was like I was still just doing the free thing. It wasn't even making money yet. And so that was kind of when I decided that I wanted to go back, like, have a salary again. Mm-hmm. And I, you know, basically did that, went back to work. And then like, as I was working on Lynx on the side, kind of, it started growing and all of that. But I definitely didn't feel like I could have gone back to Lynx. Like, I guess because I had already done that thing of like, I took my year off, I, you built these projects, I felt like in order to actually do it again, to like leave my job again, I needed to really hit like a point where I felt really confident that I could sort of sustain myself with it. And yeah, for me, it was basically, you know, getting to a point where it was almost my salary. And I think, and I also like, you know, I have my partner and like my, now my baby and all these things that I was thinking about even 4 years ago, I was thinking like, oh, I want to have a kid. Like, so I guess I just, for a lot of reasons, I didn't feel like I could make the leap to like making this my full-time thing until a couple months ago, basically.

Yeah. Yeah. And so it was growing. You said growing. That's, that's one, that's the tactical stuff I want to talk about.

Yeah.

Yeah. There are like a million Linkin.bio products, how did you market it? Like, what is the thing that you did day-to-day basis that actually helped links grow on an organic basis? Was there any kind of like an aha moment in the marketing side? Okay, I have to do this so that I could get more users.

So I actually wouldn't say that there was an aha moment for me, and I still like— it's still something that I'm not amazing at, I think, the marketing side of things. But I do, I think one thing that I did early on that was a lot of work, but that I think paid off was like really doing a lot of cold outreach and even like spending time. Like I would find, you know, artists or influencers or whatever who either were using Linktree or another service or not using anything. And I would either like try to rebuild their page using Lynx or like build them what I think would be a good page for them and like be like, hey, I did this for you. Like, do you want to start using it? And, you know, a good number of people did end up either switching or starting to use Lynx. And that was really cool, I think, for 2 reasons. One was like just getting like that URL in people's like Instagram bios or TikTok bios or whatever. Like that helps people sort of like know about the brand. And like, then they'll, they'll maybe like click on the little, um, made with, you know, the—

Yeah. Yeah.

Um, or, or just like Google it or whatever. And then I think it also really helped me to get users early on, um, just to like learn more about what people wanted and stuff. And so I think, you know, the growth, I think I, I got growth through that and, and sort of like just the fact that Early on, it was, it was a free product that I think early on it was an easy sell compared to Linktree because first of all, there were a lot fewer sort of tools out there. There was still a good number, but like there were fewer. Mm-hmm. And I think being able to say like, hey, I've got like a free version of this tool that does a lot of the same things and you can like make your page look nicer. that was pretty, like a pretty easy sell. And then I think with time, as like I got more of a user base and shipped more and more functionality, I think it kind of became a different thing where it's less about like, my tool is like more affordable than the alternative and more like, oh, I've found these features that people like that are just different from what some of the other tools have to offer. I think part of it is just like, what sort of user experience do you like? You know, like some of the tools are a little clunkier or just focused on different like aspects of the functionality. And then, yeah, I think as I kind of did less and less of the individual outreach and stuff and tried to figure out how to sort of market it in a more sort of scalable way. I tried, you know, paid ads and doing things with like, I guess one thing I did, or started doing early on was like, trying to feature users who use Lynx a lot, both on social media, but also just like featuring them in like a custom, like a customers page on the website. So like, I'll send them an email. It's all automated, but like, if I see a profile I like, I'll send them an email and be like, hey, you're featured. And like, so then they'll be excited they're featured and they'll often like post about it. So like, I get some good organic traffic that way. And there's just something about these link in bio tools that sort of have this inherent viral loop, I guess, which is like, you see it because it's in people's bio and like the more people have it, you know, because a lot of these tools are pretty similar, I think a big part of it is just like name recognition. And I think that's one of the reasons why Linktree is, is so successful is like, they were the first to market in this like very sort of specific kind of space. And when people think about link in bio, they think about Linktree. So I think like, there's such a— I can't remember what the term is, but like a big part of it is like who came to market earlier, I think. And I think it's, it's harder and harder for new sort of tools to break into the space just because there are so many already and you have to offer something really novel, I guess, or like really undercut the competition to like get in at this point, I think.

Yeah, it's so fascinating. One of the fascinating things I kind of observed is, you know, this was, I think around COVID time, around 2020, you kind of started it as a side project. And I've known many creator products. I've built a creator product myself. called Shoutout, and not many survived today. It's like 2024. Of course, Linktree has become big, so it survived, especially LinkedIn bio products. They just died, right?

Yeah.

So I'm very curious, how did you make it sustainable, profitable, and kind of like going growing, you know? Yeah, this growth is not stopping and you are doing everything as a solo founder.

You

don't have a team if I'm— if I assume it right. So yeah, talk to me about like the growth aspect of it, like putting a dollar point, asking people money,

you

know, when things got really bad. I think 2022 is when I saw so many creator products dying,

like

2022, '23. It's like the market went down.

Yeah.

Creators are like, we can't afford paying. So yeah, talk to me about the whole wave and how you managed still riding the wave.

So I think I don't actually have perfect answers for any of this stuff, but I think one of the big things that played into my sort of advantage was that, like, the fact that I was a solo founder. So I think, you know, the fact that I'm a software engineer, Um, that I'm able to— like, basically, I didn't need a team to keep this thing going. Like, I was able to do everything on my own. I think, you know, a lot of the companies that did struggle are companies that, you know, either raised, um, some VC or, you know, didn't really have the resources to, like, keep building and growing the thing. Luckily, you know, and I think one of the reasons why I've always wanted to build things is, like, because I'm able to, and I, I have— I feel like I can sort of build projects. And I think a lot of the stuff is changing now with AI, like it's becoming a lot more accessible. But, you know, 4 years ago it wasn't as accessible for your average person to just like build a product and, um, all on their own. So I think that was good for me in that like when a lot of companies maybe were running out of runway or, or, you know, trying to figure out how to— keep going, um, they sort of faced the option of either like trying— they needed like hypergrowth, right, to like warrant, um, their investment or, or whatever. And I was able to just kind of like, as you said, sort of ride the wave and be like, oh, you know, this is— at the time it wasn't even like income that I needed, like it was just like a side project thing. So I was like, doesn't really— I don't need to I don't need to grow it like crazy because I can sort of take my time. Um, I think there's a— there's another side to that, which is that like you can maybe grow too slow and like if you're not shipping enough features, like do you lose out to the competition, things like that. But it seemed at least, you know, so far it's, it's, it's gone okay for me in that, um, yeah, I've, I've managed to like keep that sort of steady trickle of growth I will say, in full transparency, like, my growth has sort of plateaued. I've actually been stuck at $25K MRR for like the last couple months. I think part of that is like, I haven't increased my ad spend. So I think it's kind of like, sort of plateaued to this point where my, my growth is basically matching my churn. And that's one of the things I'm trying to figure out, like, how do I How do I get back to growing? Do I need to improve my marketing or my activation or just like ship more features? And that's kind of what I was getting to at the beginning where I was like, it's hard to pick what to prioritize. So I'm trying a bunch of things right now, different things to try and get back.

It looks like it's mostly product-led growth, like because of the embed. Yep. Getting the link in. creator's profile, either Instagram, wherever it is. So the brand is part of it. And I saw the website, it kind of gives me that retro vibe, you know, the colorful retro vibe.

Yeah.

So talk to me about the design, the aspect of— I think you seem like someone who has an artistic kind of like a side of building things, right? Because you probably worked with, you know, couple of projects are on the artist side and you have that knack, it seems like. So yeah, when you design such a product that is so common, how did you approach UX-wise, UI-wise? How did you approach Lynx as a designer?

Yeah, so I do think, yeah, definitely. I think I like to think that compared to, you know, a lot of software engineers, I do have a bit of a design taste. And I think part of that is I actually went to school for design. Like, I didn't study computer science or anything. I studied graphic design. So I do have that kind of in my, at least educational background. I never have worked as a designer, but I did always try to, like, when I'm building something, make sure it looks good. And so, yeah, I think one thing that I sort of got at a bit before was that, like, I reused a lot of the stuff I did for visual with Lynx, like a lot of the components, a lot of the way of thinking about, like, personalizing your page. And so I think just even from, like, tools for the user, like, I was thinking about, you know, how can they make sure— make their page look good? And so I think that was— that's, that's for some users, that's really important, right? Like, they want, they want to really customize their page. And then in terms of the actual, like, design of the site. I usually, I usually like just sort of design as I'm coding and, and try to create components that, that look good and that are sort of functional. The actual, the landing page for Lynx is not something that I designed. That was like one of the times I did outsource some work. So I actually hired a Ukrainian agency to just like redesign the landing page, and then I built it out. But That was like one instance where I felt like my design skills from like a sort of marketing design are not so good. I think from like a more functional UX perspective, I'm okay at doing that kind of stuff. But yeah, for the, for the landing page, I was actually like, oh, I'm gonna see what an agency could do. I did end up reworking it quite a bit because, um, there were some things that I didn't love. But yeah, kind of like got to a a point with that where I'm happy with how it feels. And even though it's actually quite a different design language from the actual app admin, I feel like there's enough cohesion that it's not super jarring when you create your account and land in the dashboard. So yeah, I think definitely want to make sure the users have a good experience both when they land on the site and also when they're building their page. Like, that's, that's, I think, very important, especially when there is, as you said, so much competition in that space. Like, I think trying to have it be a pleasant experience is one of the things that keeps users sort of coming back.

Yeah, for sure. And you were doing links, you're building links while you're working at Squarespace. You mentioned that you worked at like weekends, you know, late nights. What's it like to kind of work at a design-first company like Squarespace? It's, you know, I'm a big fan of Squarespace. I think, as a matter of fact, one of the first few websites I've created as a non-technical person, I use Squarespace. It's, you know, it's like so cool to like build like something out of nowhere, right? Yeah. So yeah, talk to me about the influence of Squarespace, meaning the processes, the things that you learned building something like bigger for a bigger market and taking those lessons and kind of doing something for yourself on the side project for Lynx. Like, what are the lessons or at least the inspiration, you know, from your working at full-time and moving on building that side project?

Yeah, I think, you know, there's, there's kind of a couple different things. One, Just from an engineering standpoint, like, I learned so much at Squarespace about like how to build an app that I wouldn't have been able to do before. You know, before Squarespace, I worked at ad agencies and it was, it was very different. We were building like kind of flashy microsites that didn't really have much functionality. So that was super important for me. Like the first time I coded with React was at Squarespace. Like, I learned a lot of stuff about just building products. So that, that's super important. Although that I think I probably could have learned in, in, you know, other tech companies. But I would say, you know, the big sort of influence I think from, from working at Squarespace is, is in kind of the, the importance of like having your app feel good and have like a good, you know, experience and, and trying to make sure that the users really, yeah, like enjoy interacting with the product. I think that's— it's more than just like fulfilling a function of like, I want to, I want to build my, my website or my, my link in bio. It's like, you want it to, to feel sort of smooth and have a good experience. And I think one other thing that was cool about working at Squarespace. And one of my teams specifically was really focused on activation and like how to, you know, get users to discover how to learn more about the product and get started. And I definitely feel like I've incorporated a lot of those things into, or tried to incorporate some of those things into Lynx in terms of like, how do I make sure— how do I get users to go from like signing up to discovering how to use the product. Lynx is a much simpler product than Squarespace, so it's a lot easier to do that. But I think that's still something that I've taken a lot from what I learned at Squarespace.

Any frameworks that you want to share with us about, especially related to product like retention, activation, you know, And also handling churn, like how do you bring back, you know, people? Did you use— not from a— again, there is a marketing side of things for everything that we talked about, but there is also like a product influence, right? Making the product sticky, for example. So yeah, talk to me about how you kind of managed user activation, you know, user retention, the growth, everything from a Really purely from a product standpoint, anything that you've implemented that sticked out and you want to share with us so that people can learn?

Yeah, I think, again, like this, some of this stuff is probably pretty standard, but just stuff that I've done that I've enjoyed doing and I feel like is useful is, you know, A/B testing, especially activation stuff. Like I use Amplitude, which has like a free tier. And so I've Whenever I like make a significant change to either like the landing page or the onboarding experience, you know, I always run that as an A/B test just to make sure that it's not actually doing more harm than good. So that I think is something that if you have enough traffic to like be able to get meaningful like data, it's definitely like a valuable thing to do, I think. Also sort of taking that with a grain of salt of like, if you think it's good for your users and maybe the data isn't exactly showing you what you want to see, like don't be too focused on the A/B test. But I think when what you're trying to do is really optimize like a specific thing, yeah, A/B testing is really great. And then in terms of churn, I think one thing that I've tried to do a lot is make it easy for customers to like suggest, uh, like improvements. So like one of the things in the Lynx dashboard is like I've got like a suggestion box where people can just suggest new ideas, and I try to prioritize those things because I feel like one, maybe it'll stop people from churning, like active users. And then often the things that people want are things other users want. So I do like not only shipping the features that users ask for, but, but trying to like do enough of that to, to keep them happy. Um, and then another thing that I've found useful that there's a lot of different ways to implement it. I did it in a very simple way, but like when users go to downgrade, I just like in a new tab, open a Google Form, like, you know, that, that, um, with some questions about, about the product and why they're, they're leaving. And actually get like a lot of good responses there that are often very actionable. So, you know, not actually— I know some products have these really involved like cancellation flows, like, are you sure you want to downgrade? Like, I don't— I try to not make it hard for users to downgrade because I feel like that's kind of a bit of a dark pattern. But I do like think it's a good opportunity to learn why they left. And actually one thing I want to start doing is Um, like emailing users that have downgraded, um, and trying to, to actually have conversations with them now that I have more time. Like, I feel like it would be a good thing to actually try and talk to some of these people and, and see, um, yeah.

And, uh, yeah, talk to me about the last piece, which is, uh, churn happened, you got some feedback. How do you decide, prioritize? Because, you know, a lot of times Well, I mean, again, it's like different people, different answers.

Yeah.

I want to understand your approach of if you get like 10 to 20 new requests and you also have a roadmap of your own, balance it out, like what people want, measure. Do you use data or like, what is it like to kind of, you know, do that?

Yeah, it's kind of I, like, I don't have a super specific framework. I would say, like, if something keeps coming up, I'll, I'll try to address it. Um, if— and sort of weighing how big of an issue does it seem to be versus, you know, like, how feasible is it, you know, how much time is it going to take me. Um, there are a few things that have been sort of recurring requests that I've just never dealt with because I felt like I didn't have enough time to build a good solution. Like one thing that comes up a lot is custom forms, like users want a way to just like build a custom form on their page so that they can collect sort of arbitrary data. And that's something that's always, I've never done, or like a way to sell products. Like I haven't actually, there's no way to just like sell digital products on, on Lynx. And part of my re— part of my reasoning for not doing those things is Going back to my risk aversion, like, I've, I've experienced a lot of, like, people doing bad stuff, both on visual and links. You know, like, the internet is like a naughty place, and people will, will try to, to, like, take advantage of platforms, especially when they have, like, a good—

Sure.

Domain reputation. So one thing that, like, has always— actually, this is one— this is the reason why I got rid of the free plan. Um, a lot of— I got a lot of instances of people like using links to try and do like phishing scams. And so like they would create a page that looks like, you know, like a login page to your bank account or whatever. Some celebrity. Um, it wouldn't actually collect any information because I didn't have custom forms, but it would like link out to some form they had hosted on like Wix or something. And, you know, that way, I think the idea is that like, if you send that in an email or something, like, you know, Gmail won't think it's, it's bad because the domain has a good reputation. So yeah, that was one of the reasons I got rid of the free plan because I was like, I don't have sort of the expert, the resources to like moderate this. I do think now it probably would be easier with AI to sort of like set up some kind of You know, just use like LLMs to like look at the information you have about the user and determine if it's, if it's bad or not. Um, but at this point, I think I'm— I've kind of boxed myself out of bringing back a free plan because I have users who are paying for what could now be a free feature. So I don't know, it gets complicated. Um, so I don't think I'll do that anytime soon, but it is kind of an interesting— situation where like I ended up getting rid of functionality because of the way people were abusing it, which is kind of fucked. But I don't know, I, it might've been better for business. I don't, I don't really know. I don't have a way of knowing for sure. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Makes sense. Yeah. I'm curious now that we have, you know, we have another wave, you know, everybody's riding the AI wave.

Yeah.

How are you thinking the future of Lynx? What kind of— if you want to share, of course, like, you know, I wouldn't put pressure on you— the features you want to build next using AI? Are you— do you want to bring AI into the picture? Like, you know, what's your take on the next few years for Lynx?

It's a really good question. Yeah, I feel like right now I had a bunch of stuff that I wanted to get done, and I'm kind of like almost there of just like Some refreshing of my codebase and some sort of improvements to my activation flow, some stuff like that. I'm just now starting to think about what are the next big features that I want to build. I don't have anything sort of in the near term that is super AI enabled. I think some of the big things that I do want to add are the custom forms, as you said. As I said earlier, and potentially sort of a way to buy products. I think I want to use AI on the moderation side of those. Like, I want to be able to, like, automatically detect if someone is trying to do a phishing scam with custom forms, like stuff like that. So I do want to use AI in the sort of near term as like a moderation tool. I played around a bit with like using AI as part of the onboarding experience, like you know, trying to make it so you could automatically generate a page based on some, like either an existing URL or stuff like that. But I think the big sort of question mark for me is like, am I going to start using AI in my coding? I haven't. I was, I've been using

it. I was literally about to ask you that, like how much of your day-to-day is basically relying on AI? It's like one of the things I've been kind of asking my guests, my My previous guest said the same thing. I think he's— they're kind of putting some code, uh, you know, built by AI into their codebase. So yeah, curious on that, like, you know, on a day-to-day basis, how much are you using AI?

Yeah, I use it a lot. I, I'm still for now just using ChatGPT as in a more sort of like conversational code technique. Like I'll, I'll, if there's something I'm— I want to use, you know, some third, some library or something, I can— I'll use ChatGPT to like help me avoid reading documentation. Like, I'll be like, oh, how would I do this with this library? And it often gets it right, um, or at least gets me in the right direction. Um, stuff with like, uh, like DevOps stuff, like doing anything, um, sort of in my— on my server where I run links. Like, I find it really useful because I can, instead of just going through a bunch of Google, you know, whatever, Stack Overflow stuff, I can just get answers a lot quicker. I haven't yet started using it like with integrated in an IDE. Like I briefly took a look at, I think it's Cursor, right? Cursor. Yeah. That sort of is almost like an AI-first editor. And I didn't—

Yeah.

I didn't, I don't know, I wasn't ready. So I think in a way it's probably easier for people who don't know how to code who haven't coded as much as I have to like start using those tools. But for me, it's like, I don't know, I've been coding for 12 years, you know, 14 years. Wow. And I think that it's gonna be a bit harder for me to like take my foot off the pedal of like liking to write code and sort of relying more on AI. But I'm definitely, I think at some point I'm gonna do it and I think I'll probably do it on a new project as opposed to like with Lynx. Part of it is just because like the Lynx codebase is probably not the best. Um, you know, like I think a lot of these, these AI tools, like they work really well if you're using a very standard sort of like Next.js kind of boilerplate framework thing, cuz it can understand how it's structured and everything. Lynx is like definitely non-standard, um, in terms of the way it was built. A

couple of more questions before we wrap up. One is, uh, You've done everything solo.

Yeah.

Why have you, have you looked at like collaborating with others? Why, why going solo?

Yeah,

every time.

I, I, I have like partnered with people once in a while. Like I've, I've worked with people on, on a few of, on like visual. I worked with someone a bit, um, on links. I, I worked with someone who, who helped me with some sort of growth stuff early on. I think it's challenging for me because I struggle with delegating. I think part of it is that I often feel like I could do it myself. Whether or not that's true, I don't know, but that's kind of how I feel. And I'm also a bit of a perfectionist, so I think I often have trouble letting someone really Take on a lot of the stuff I work on. I think part of it is also that, yeah, like the stuff that I could delegate, it's kind of like different stuff than I think that like your sort of average CEO would delegate. Like, I think your average CEO might delegate like the code part of the project or, you know, like the design part. And I guess because I like doing that stuff, that's not what I like to delegate, except some, some design aspects. But yeah, I probably should more, especially now that I have more time to, to sort of like be involved in that. I think when I, especially when I was, you know, only working a few hours a week on Lynx, it was really hard to delegate because I just didn't have much time to like partner with whoever I was delegating to. Yeah.

Founder mode.

Yeah, yeah, right. It is. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's hard to delegate. Um, and I guess part of it also just selfishly, I'm like, the more I delegate, the more, the less sort of like money I have to keep, you know, or, or whatever. Like, am I either I'm giving away sort of ownership or, or money and like, you know, right now this is sort of my source of income. So I'm It's sometimes hard to sort of like make the investment of, I'm going to delegate and like have less sort of income or profit upfront, and then that'll pay off like in a couple months or whatever. I find it easier when it's like one-off like expenses, like, um, the redesign of the landing page, that was like a one-off, you know, a couple thousand dollars. Like that's, whereas like hiring someone, I don't know if that seems daunting.

Yeah, yeah,

yeah.

And speaking about like equity ownership, is that— is this why you want to pick or you're doing bootstrapping over raising money? Was that always your, you know, game plan? Was like, what is your take on VC?

I don't— yeah, I wouldn't say that like the ownership is the main reason for me not Trying to raise VC. I think for me, I sort of thought about what raising VC would mean in terms of like how it would affect the way I am building this product. And I guess it just, to me, it sounded like what that would mean is basically needing to go after growth, like at all costs, kind of. And I think what I've really enjoyed about Lynx is like, it's allowed me to have a really nice sort of work-life balance with, with regards to this project. Like, I had, I had a, like, we had a baby last year in October. I didn't basically touch Lynx for 5 months. And, you know, like, the occasional customer support request, but like, I didn't ship any new functionality. Like, I didn't really do anything meaningful. Um, and like, that was fine. That wouldn't be fine if I had, you know, investors, um, breathing down my neck. So I think that that's just been a personal choice of like, I don't really want to do the go big or go home thing. And I'm happy to just try and kind of keep growing this, see where it goes, and do it on my own terms.

Got it. And it's been like awesome talking to you in the last 1 hour. So many interesting takes and appreciate you for sharing your story. Any closing thoughts before we wrap up?

I think my main thought and sort of advice and takeaway from all of this is just that, you know, like, just build, build stuff. It's, it's fun. You learn a lot, and you never know where it's gonna go. And it's getting easier and easier. So, you know, if you're someone who's sort of like interested in this space and I think, you know, also not overthinking it and just kind of going for it and see what happens.

Perfect. That's, you know, that's the best way. Build and learn, you know, kind of, you know, and repeat. Charlie, appreciate you for joining the show and, you know, sharing everything. But that's it, folks. That's like another banger for you. Ship. Go build, go ship, and repeat. And stay tuned for more founders hopping on the show. Until then, cheers.