How This Founder Makes $25,000/month from A Link in Bio Tool

- Charlie Clark teaches a step by step academy on how to build a link and bio SaaS product. - Speaker A concludes the video on the Lynx SaaS journey. He'll leave a link to the original source for this video and a link for some free microsASS ideas.

You'll be learning this amazing SaaS journey on how this founder makes $25,000 a month with a link and bio SaaS product before I dive into it, I want to say that if you're looking to build your own microsass, I have a step by step academy on how to do so. It's going to show you how to build, scale and profit from your very own microsass product. It has eight plus hours of video and dollar 500 worth of bonuses taught all by me. So make sure you check out the link in the description below or if you just want some free SaaS ideas, I also have a link in the description below as well. So the product featured in this video is called Lynx and it was founded by Charlie Clark and as mentioned, it makes $25,000 a month in what is a very competitive SaaS product space. There are tons of other competitors offering a similar tool and the link and bio product was made very popular on social media platforms such as Instagram, as it makes it really easy to have multiple links from just one link as it was quite restrictive at one point. So in terms of how this product works, it lets you centralize your online presence so you can gather your socials, musics, videos and more in a beautiful LinkedIn bio page that matches your style. It features quite a bit of robust customization and affordability, and that's how Charlie managed to stand out in this crowded space. It wasn't by out innovating the competition. Instead, he focused on keeping costs low and providing a stellar user experience. There's over 10,000 artists, creators, small business owners and more using the Lynx product. Charlie did all of this while avoiding the hustle. He actually built this tool because he didn't want to hustle and grind, but he did want full ownership over something he was working on. He wasn't in it to build a billion dollar company with tons of scale and investors. He wanted the type of ownership that only a solo founder can enjoy, and he wanted to make enough money to support himself. Now that it's happened, he feels incredibly excited. He's also a new dad and is really enjoying the flexibility that comes with being self employed. That's what Charlie's doing now and the status of Lynx. Let's take a step back and look at how he came up with this idea and how it all got started in terms of Charlie's bio. He started by teaching himself to code, first learning HTML, JS and CSS, then later entered into the world of building with react and the backend products for users. One of his first bigger products was a print on demand marketplace called Visual, and it did six figures in GMV, but with razor thin margins. And during the running of this product, he was doing a lot of outreach to artists, and he noticed a bunch of them were using Lincoln biotools to promote their various online channels, and this inspired him to take a stab at building a new tool in this space. And that's how Lynx was born. Charlie wasn't the first one in the market. He didn't invent the idea, but he did execute it very well, and that can be done for just about any SAS niche here, especially if you take a different angle. Maybe you have a different set of features, your pricing model is different, or your marketing method is different, and you're able to reach a certain niche that wasn't targeted before. Shortly after launching links, the pandemic hit. Charlie went and got a nine to five job again. And even though Lynx was slightly profitable, he was living in an expensive city, and he continued to work on links on the side. Fast forward all the way to August of 2024. He quit his job again and started focusing on it full time. After four and a half years after launching, the revenue is sitting at a stable $25,000 a month. One of the main ways Lynx differentiates itself from the competition is the pricing in terms of how Charlie got to the exact pricing plan, what is now dollar four for the premium and ten plus dollars for the pro plan. It started off with a lot of testing, as when he started, he knew the product category was validated. There were other similar tools out there, and he made a bet that he could provide a compelling alternative to existing tools at an undercut price point. And so that's where the $4 premium plan comes in. And initially he did charge $3, and because it was such a lean operation, he was still able to be profitable on that. He did experiment with different prices, such as $5 and up, but he did notice a significant decrease in conversions, and so the final settled price has been $4. Initially it was launched as a freemium or free tool as well, but Charlie did end up dropping it from the product, and the reason wasn't actually financial. His links grew, its domain reputation increased, and he started to notice a lot of bad usage on the free plan. And this was people trying to use the domain authority of links to help with backlinks for their own websites and help boost the SEO there, whether that was from spamming content or anything along the lines of that. But there was also a number of phishing scams as well. Initially Charlie did try to fight this by implementing logic that would detect these nefarious various cases and block them, but they always end up finding workarounds and the logic ended up creating a lot of false positive which required manual reviews of the profiles which were a lot of work and at the time LLMs weren't a thing yet to do this, which could have helped to automate it. So Charlie ended up removing the free tier completely. A nice side effect of this was that it simplified the UI. Instead of gaining premium, users behind a paywall could let the users experiment with the full suite of functionality and simply gate the publishing of their profiles, where they would have to go get the premium plan from there. Financially, the outcome was also interesting as there was a decrease in total new active users, but there was an increase in paid users which increased the overall revenue. In terms of Charlie's perspective on it, it's hard to know the long term network effects of this decision though, but it is possible that in the long term that the network effect of free users could have led to more paid users, and that's a hypothesis there. It is hard to say, but now that LLMs make it relatively easy, he's hoping to implement more robust automatic detection for nefarious usage using AI, and he might test a free theory again, as this could lead to more overall paid users. In terms of the tech stack for the product, it was built using react and node JS and it's hosted on a digital ocean, VPS plus a managed MongoDB instance along with Ado s three and Cloudfront. And although that seems like a basic tech stack, there's really no other reason to complicate it and works quite well. And instead of focusing focusing on the tech stack which the user doesn't interact with, Charlie has focused on differentiating his product in other ways. And that's by providing a clean and intuitive UI, powerful customization options, and some powerful nice functionality, including pages, folders as well as an Instagram scraper. And on top of that, this has allowed him to have an affordable price point in terms of growth for the product and how it's been marketed. There have been several different channels. The first one has been cold outreach, and this was done in the early days. He would target specific folks on Instagram who did have a link in biotool yet and build pages for them. He would then do a cold outreach trying to convince them to give links a try. Product led growth has also been used and it was done by just having the made with links badge at the bottom of links profile which allows for a good amount of organic traffic. We can see from the example here. It just says made with links at the bottom of the page that a person has created for their own link and buy profile. In terms of deciding what features to create for the product, this came from two different channels. The first one was building based on data, so he had full story and amplitude set up on his product so he could really discover the type of pages that people were building. From there, he was able to ship features based on useful insights that he had gleaned from those platforms. He also built features based on user requests. It's one of those things too, where if you're getting a ton of requests from customers to build a specific feature, it's most likely that there are many other people besides them who are also looking for it and for links. One of the biggest feature requests was the ability to manage multiple profiles in one place. In terms of parting advice, Charlie has has three pieces here. The first one is to ship. Early on his first big personal project, he spent six months before he went and got a single user in front of it, whereas for Lynx he shipped it in front of customers two weeks after he started building it, and the product looked very different today from when it was first launched. But that's okay, and getting feedback from real users has been invaluable in shaping the product. The second piece of parting advice is to go with the flow but know when to focus. And thirdly, it's remember that luck plays a much bigger part in success than most successful founders care to admit. So this is going to conclude the video here on the Lynx SaaS journey. I'll leave a link in the description below to the original source for this video. If you enjoyed this video, I would love it so much if you smashed that like and subscribe button below. If you have any questions, leave a comment. Also, make sure you check out the build a microsass academy in the link in the description below. There's also a link for some free microsass ideas. Again, they're both in the description below. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video.