Ep141 – Alex Zaccaria (Co-founder & CEO – Linktree) on viral growth, customer focus and intuition

March 4, 2021
rohitbhargava
Podcast

My guest for Ep141 of The Startup Playbook Podcast was the Co-founder & CEO of Linktree, Alex Zaccaria.

Alex started his career in the music industry. With his brother Anthony, he co-founded Bolster, an agency that specialises in running digital and creative campaigns for music festivals and events.

Through the agency, they identified a problem they kept facing on behalf of their clients, how to effectively share multiple links on social media.

They built a tool to help solve that problem for their clients.

That tool is called Linktree and is now used by over 10M users globally including celebrities such as Selena Gomez and Jamie Oliver and brands like Redbull and HBO

At the end of last year, Linktree announced they had raised their first round of external funding, raising $10.7M in a round led by AirTree and Insight Partners.

In this interview we covered a range of topics including:

The importance of understanding why users are using your products
How they achieved viral growth to 10M users
How Alex developed a partnership with Facebook during the early days of Bolster
Managing engineering teams as a non-technical founder
Their journey to raising $10M and deciding which investors to raise from
& much more!

Show notes:

1.57 – Where Alex’s desire to become an entrepreneur came from
3.48 – The influence Alex’s family and upbringing had on his career journey and what he learned from them
5.38 – Launching Bolster with some of the largest festivals in Australia as clients
9.45 – How they secured a partnership with Facebook through working around the existing system
11.53 – Alex’s approach to learning quickly and continuously
13.15 – Why meeting a customers needs is the most important step when building a platform
16.36 – How Linktree has changed from the first version and how the idea began
19.14 – Welcoming and utilising big name, early customers of Linktree
21.10 – How linktree was started as a side hustle and what it would be today if it was started differently
24.45 – The importance of listening to consumers and having conversations to determine their needs
26.32 – Building vitality for a ready to market product
30.35 – Why Linktree prioritises simplicity in product design
33.38 – Utilising product managers as a non-technical founder to prioritise features
36.39 – Intuitive decision making and having the right people around you
39.40 – Working with a technical lead and development team effectively
43.01 – The challenges of scale
46.04 – The process to raising $10M
49.09 – How to pick the right VC partner when raising
52.29 – What Alex would do differently when raising capital again
54.51 – The importance of developing a product naturally and authentically
57.51 – Staying ahead of the competition as a market leader
58.49 – Maintaining culture whilst growing team size