Linktree has millions of users and a billion-dollar valuation.
So you shouldn't build a link in bio tool, right? Market's taken. Move on.
Charlie Clark ignored that logic. He gave himself 2 weeks to build a Linktree alternative, grew it on nights and weekends next to his job at Squarespace, and today his link in bio business, Liinks, does $31,500 in monthly recurring revenue.
He works alone. The product costs $5 a month. And he quit his job twice to get here (only one of those quits was a good idea).
Charlie broke the whole thing down with Gus on Starter Story. I pulled out the playbook, with every number he shared.
A $31,500 a Month Business Built on $5 Subscriptions
Liinks is a link in bio tool. You get a mobile-first page at liinks.co/yourname that pulls your whole online presence into one place, then pushes further than the typical bio link: multiple pages, forms, QR codes, short links, more customization.
Charlie pulled up his Stripe dashboard on camera: $31,500 MRR.
The part that made me rewind: at the end of June he raised his price from $4 a month to $5 a month.
One dollar.
That single dollar added nearly $5,000 in MRR, because this is a business where thousands of customers each pay a small amount. And the trend kept climbing after the increase.
→ When volume carries your business, tiny pricing moves compound into real money. Most founders at this scale are too scared to touch the price at all.
He Quit His Job Twice. Only One Quit Was Planned.
Charlie studied graphic design, taught himself to code, did agency web dev, then landed at Squarespace. That job gave him two things: real software engineering fundamentals, and daily exposure to a website builder.
In 2019 he quit for the first time, to build VSUAL, a print-on-demand marketplace for artists. He gave himself about a year.
It didn't find market fit. (VSUAL has since shut down.)
But while talking to artists every day, he noticed almost all of them had a Linktree in their bio. The pages didn't look good. So near the end of his runway, he gave himself 2 weeks to build a nicer alternative.
That throwaway side quest became the actual business.
Then COVID hit. Neither product was paying the bills, being self-employed suddenly felt scary, and Charlie did the thing Twitter tells you never to do: he went back to his old job at Squarespace. He even told them about his side projects upfront, so nothing felt under the table.
Liinks kept growing anyway, with barely any attention.
By summer 2024 the MRR roughly matched his salary. He had a kid by then and wanted the flexibility to be around when his son got sick. So he quit again, in August 2024, this time with revenue already replacing his paycheck.
Two years later he's still glad he did it.
Look at the difference between the two exits. Quit number one: a loose idea, a supportive partner with a good salary, no revenue. Quit number two: a rule (match my salary with MRR), a working product, and years of patience. If you're weighing that same jump, I wrote about when quitting your job to build a startup actually makes sense.
First Customers: "I Built This for You"
Charlie started with no customers and no audience, and his first move wasn't ads or SEO.
He messaged people directly: "Hey, I built this for you. Do you want to use it?" He'd set up the page himself and send it over.
Some of those friends still use Liinks today, grandfathered into a free plan.
Not scalable, and that was fine. It got him honest feedback and proof that strangers would actually set up a page.
After shipping fixes from that feedback, he launched on Product Hunt and got a real traffic bump. That's when he tested monetization with a premium plan around $3 a month.
A couple of months later: $100 MRR.
Laugh at $100 MRR if you want. It answered the only question that mattered: will people pay for this? Everything after that was scaling.
The Growth Engine: $100 a Day on Google Ads
Charlie's first scalable channel was Instagram ads. They worked well early, then the algorithm changed around 2021 or 2022 and the channel died on him.
So he went looking for another one and found the engine he still runs on today: Google Search ads.
His logic is simple. Someone typing "link in bio tool" into Google is high-intent traffic. They already want the product, they just haven't picked a brand. In his words, it was quite easy to put money in and get money out.
That's been his main growth channel for the last 4 years, at about $100 a day.
Notice what's missing: he never built an audience or posted viral threads. He runs a one-person company that quietly converts search intent on a $5 product, and has for years.
Pricing Against a Giant
How do you price when your competitor has millions of users?
Charlie anchors directly against Linktree and undercuts their paid plan on purpose. His philosophy: he would much rather have lots of customers paying a small amount than fewer customers paying more.
The structure today (live on liinks.co):
- Starter at $5 a month (or $48 a year): unlimited blocks, analytics, QR codes
- Pro at $12 a month (or $120 a year): custom domains plus 5 managed pages, with room to add more
- No free plan, just a 14-day trial
The Pro tier quietly counterbalances the cheap anchor. Agencies and brands managing many pages stack those packs, and a couple of customers pay him upwards of $100 a month.
The $5 plan brings people in. The Pro packs are what push some accounts past $100 a month.
The Whole Company Runs on 7 Tools
Charlie is a solo founder with a kid. The stack reflects it:
- A VPS on DigitalOcean for hosting
- AWS for user-uploaded assets
- Resend for notifications and marketing emails
- Tinybird (a ClickHouse wrapper) for analytics
- OpenAI's API for the AI features
- Google Ads at ~$100 a day, his biggest line item
- A coding agent at $100 to $200 a month, for about a year now
That's it. That's the infrastructure behind $31,500 a month.
If you collect businesses like this the way I do, my roundup of micro SaaS examples with real revenue numbers has a dozen more in the same weight class.
His Advice for the AI Era: It's Never Been Easier to Give Up
Gus closed with the classic Starter Story question: what would you tell yourself 6 years ago?
Charlie's answer surprised me, because it's the opposite of the usual "ship faster" take.
Building has gotten so cheap that quitting has gotten cheap too. The moment your thing doesn't immediately work, jumping to the next idea is easier than doing the hard stuff: reaching out to customers, marketing, outreach.
His adapted advice: pick a space that's already validated, iterate until you feel like you've got something, then lock in.
Liinks is that advice in action. Link in bio was a proven market with a giant incumbent. He iterated on nights and weekends for years. Then he locked in.
The playbook is boring and patient. It also bought back his time with his kid, which was the whole point.
FAQ
What is a link in bio business?
A link in bio business sells a tool that turns the single link in a social media bio into a small landing page holding all of someone's links, content, and products. Customers pay a monthly subscription (usually $3 to $12). Linktree is the biggest player; Liinks competes by offering better-looking, more customizable pages.
How much money does Liinks make?
Liinks does about $31,500 in monthly recurring revenue as of the Starter Story interview, shown live on Charlie's Stripe dashboard. A $1 price increase (from $4 to $5 a month) at the end of June added nearly $5,000 of that MRR on its own.
How can a solo founder compete with Linktree?
Charlie didn't try to beat Linktree everywhere. He picked one wedge (pages that look better, with more customization), priced slightly under Linktree's paid plan, and bought high-intent Google search traffic instead of fighting for attention on social. A giant competitor validates the market and sets a price anchor you can position against.
Should you quit your job to build a micro SaaS?
Charlie's answer after doing it both ways: not until the numbers work. His first quit, with no plan and no revenue, ended with him back at Squarespace. His second quit came after Liinks matched his salary in MRR. The product grew fine on nights and weekends; the job was the safety net, not the obstacle.
Steal the Playbook, Not Just the Story
A $1 price change worth $5K a month, and a salary-match rule that tells you exactly when to quit. These are the details that move a business, and they only come out when founders open their dashboards.
That's what I do every week on the Profitable Founder Podcast: bootstrapped founders walking through their real numbers, the same way Charlie just did.
