 So I'm over here. Hello, everyone. Welcome to Slush Day 2. Alex Ikaria over here on my left, the founder of Linktree. Welcome, Alex. So to kick us off, 30 million users, 1.5 billion monthly visits. The Rock, Selena Gomez, and Selena Gomez's ex-boyfriend, Justin Bieber, are all on Linktree. It's honestly, it's quite remarkable what you guys have built in such a short six years. So thank you for having this conversation with me today. Thanks for having me. And I'm really glad to be here. And I'm super excited to be sharing the stage with you. Speaking of scale, obviously, Loom, so Shade is a co-founder at Loom. And you guys are in the same period of time, right? Six years have scaled to 350,000 companies, 18 million users across those 350,000 companies. So yeah, I think although we're very different products, I think the concept is that we actually perceive to be quite simple on the outside. So I think we can have a bit of a chat about that. Yeah, yeah. So this is a very unique format that we're having today. I'm going to be interviewing Alex, and he's going to be interviewing me back. So let's see how this goes. We have a lot of questions, so we're going to get right into it. So Alex, tell us the inspiration behind Linktree and what that first product looked like. Yeah, so Linktree was born out of an agency. My brother, Anthony, our friend, Nick, and I were running a digital strategy agency that specialized in music and entertainment. So we're working on behalf of record labels and festivals and artists, and we're building websites for them as these landing pages. And we realize that actually artists and more broadly creators have a lot of different revenue streams, and it's a very fragmented marketplace. So you've got your streaming on a bunch of different platforms. You've got your touring on a bunch of different platforms. You've got your video content on another platform again, and then you've got your merch on another platform. And so we've only been able to link out of social media from one place, like the link in bio, or not been able to link in posts, when it is really problematic for artists, because you can only link to one of those revenue streams. And so it was really just a problem we'll solve them for ourselves and for our clients that we're dealing with every day. And the amount of content we'll produce with these artists and having to change the link in bio every day was just a quick, simple solution. We built it in about six hours as a quick prototype. And pushed it out with a few of our clients and almost immediately users and verticals way outside of music started signing up. And it was almost immediately apparent to us that this wasn't a problem that just existed in music. It was actually much more than that. The first sign up was the Melbourne City Council in Australia, so that was completely not music. So that was interesting. And we continued running it as a side hustle to the agency for a few years. And up until about 2019, we had about three million users organically. And in that time, what ended up happening if it wasn't just the music industry that was that fragmented, it's actually the entire internet became that fragmented. The amount of different places where you find your audience exploded. There was TikTok and Twitter became more relevant and LinkedIn became more relevant as well as all the different places you need to get your audience to convert them whatever you perceive to be or to consider to be a conversion exploded as well. So all of a sudden now there's all these creator economy companies and sub-stack and medium or this content that you need to drive your audience to. And so Linktree is the way to unify your entire digital ecosystem became more and more necessary. And so in terms of, I mean, back at you Shahid in terms of loom, yeah, what's the impetus behind that? Why did you start it? Yeah, it's actually, you know, it's not as fairytale as most people would think. It actually, so my two co-founders and I, Joe and Vinay, we're really good friends. My background's in product design. Vinay's is in engineering and Joe's was in product and he's the CEO. So we decided, you know, one night we wanted to start a company together and we got up on a whiteboard in Vinay's room and we hopped on a Skype call, Zoom did not exist. This is, you know, 2015. Or at least it wasn't really popularized. And we wrote down six startup ideas. First one was the idea I wrote down which is user testing with experts and we decided that that was the company we wanted to build. So it was a very simple decision. Looking back at it, it's been, you know, seven and a half, almost eight years. And it's actually, you know, looking back at that, right? So Loom came out of two failed pivots. So our first product, the user testing marketplace, you know, we, the end consumer who was actually giving feedback to, you know, whoever that was creating that user test had to install a Chrome extension that recorded their screen, that recorded their video, that recorded their audio so you can kind of see where this is going. And then the output was this very simple video with their face on the bottom left. And the flow was basically you just, you go through a checkout flow or whatever the test was created around and you talk about what you're seeing, what you're feeling, any friction in the checkout flow. So that product we had launched, it didn't really, you know, get as much of a, of a increase in users that we would have had expected on our first launch. And we continued building it for about six months and then realized we weren't getting closer to product market fit. So we ended up pivoting into a SaaS offering where, you know, instead of building a marketplace, we're like, well, what if we just build the intercom for user testing and we can, you know, sell this to companies like Facebook and so forth. And another four months into building that, we realized that there wasn't any product market fit there. No one really wanted to use the product. Joe and I were just sending out 100 emails a day begging people to use our product for free. That was, that should have been a signal in and of itself that it wasn't going to work. But through that, we kind of had this, what I like to call like a Hail Mary, we're like, okay, we're starting to see a glimpse of how people are using the product. And there's, I think it was Stanford's research lab was recording a summary of all the videos they received back from their user test. And that was kind of an aha moment for us where people wanted to use this screen recording product as a general communication tool. So we had launched in 2016 on Product Hunt. Within 24 hours, we had about 3,000 people who had installed the extension and more or less, you know, kind of kept the simplicity of that recording experience the same. Right, yeah, and I think, you know, through that journey, you've built this amazing product that is perceived to be very simple on the outside, right? And actually, I'm like, I should say as well, I'm a very happy user of Loom. So thank you, it saved me many hours of meetings. But it does look simple on the outside. And I think that's what we're here really to talk about today is that, you know, what actually is under the surface happening at Loom? Why isn't it just a simple video recording? Why isn't it just as simple when I'm sure you heard this a lot of I could just record this on QuickTime and upload it or isn't Slack gonna do this? What, you know, why is it not a feature? Yeah, it's actually, it's a really good question because, you know, screen recorders have been around for a long time, like you mentioned. There's Camtasia in the early 2000s. So, you know, there wasn't anything novel that we were building. People were used to screen recorders or used to QuickTime, like you mentioned. But for us, you know, it came at a time where remote work was just starting to become a common phrase. And looking at the, you know, people were inundated with meetings, so there was like this cycle, excuse me, there was this cycle in time where people wanted to have fewer meetings. And of course, you know, there's the whole trend of remote work and through COVID and through other tailwind effects that kind of really propelled the loom. But I think it kind of comes back to like this day one mentality of how do we keep the most important function, the area where our users will likely spend the most time, which is creating that recording. How do we keep that super simple? So, if you look at what the first version of the product looked like to now, it has, the recorder itself has changed very little. But what has changed a lot is the technology that kind of powers that recording. So whether you record a 30 second video, whether you record an hour long video, it all uploads instantaneously and you know, there's a lot of, we have several patents around our recording infrastructure. So there's a lot that happens under the hood in this kind of analogy that I like to use, which is called this effective iceberg effect, right? So the consumer should only really see the tip of the iceberg and it should be a very seamless experience for them. And below the surface you have, you know, the greater part of the iceberg, which is what allows for that surface to be so small and so functional and so delightful. And I think the ethos of the company was always centered around simplicity and design. And it's kind of like, you know, it's kind of continued through the years. But, you know, similar for Linktree, I think what's really fascinating is, you know, a lot of people see Linktree as, it's a way for creators to share all of, you know, their links to various profiles. But obviously it's, Linktree is so much more than that. And a lot of competitors have come up since you guys have started. You guys kind of created the link in bio, every TikToker pointing down and being like, tap on the link in my bio. And yet it is very simple, but I, you know, how true is that for you? How is it actually as simple as people claim it to be? Or what is beneath that surface for you guys? I mean, we hear all the time, like, isn't it just a simple list of links? Why is this a product? And I think, you know, when I hear that, actually it's quite flattering to me because actually that's all it should feel like. And it's actually incredibly complex to make something feel that simple and work that seamlessly, especially at scale. And, you know, so in terms of our users, we've got 30 million users, about 40,000 signups a day. And that's spread across 160 verticals and spread on like, we like to think of this like digital literacy scale. There's users very much in the low end of the digital literacy spectrum where, you know, they really don't even understand what a browser is. And in that regard, we really think about that big part of our mission is to democratize digital presence and really enable anyone to have their own place on the internet. And so, and then we've got users on the complete opposite end of the spectrum where they are working on behalf of the biggest brands, biggest celebrities in the world and they're trusting Linktree to be the driving source of their revenue for their biggest hype moments. They launch of an album or they launch of their book. And so it needs to be incredibly powerful for that audience. And to be able to meet, to be able to build something that feels that simple, works that seamlessly and is that powerful for that in the spectrum but also your grandma can use it and it's really simple to sign up and get that link in minutes. Actually takes a lot of very deliberate, a lot of deliberate and intentional decisions. Every, you know, just seems like a list of links but everything down to like the gap between the links, the colors we allow, we allow the Linktree to be, the speed that it loads, it transitions is all finally researched around driving absolute conversion for the user. And that's our end goal. Yeah. And how do you feel that complexity has kind of changed over time? You know, you guys have done a great job, you know, keeping that product simple, but you know, like where has that complexity changed and how has that looked over the last six years? Yeah, that's, you know, obviously it started as just to solve a really simple problem for ourselves and over time as we've been really listening to users we were the users ourselves and we continue to be able to build the functionality in that we needed. But obviously as we've scaled, there's been more and more functionality we've built in. And something I'm very cognizant of is what I refer to as the complexity convection, which is like your, you know, you're continuing to add functionality and features for your current user base and they're growing with you. So as you add these features, they know that UI, they know all the previous features. It's really simple for them to understand the next feature you add. But all of a sudden you're just getting more and more complex. Do your users are growing with you? But the new users that enter the bottom, they're completely confused because it's very complex all of a sudden and that just opens up the market for a new competitor to come in and drive that simplicity and you actually see these in many products. And so some of the ways we combat that, we make sure our product, in anyone in our product team has to sign up from scratch all the way through to the product activation every single week and make sure that they're completely understanding and feeling it rather than just like jumping into tests in the part of the product that they're building, they actually understand the way it feels all the way through for a new user. And obviously as we've built much more complex technology into the way LinkTree works, it used to just be you click on a link and on LinkTree loads and it's a classic link, like you just link out. And our key to success metric was actually reducing time spent on page including increasing click through rate. Now we've built more functionality into each of the links so when you click a link and it'll drop down it'll do something and we've launched that into a platform so partners can build their own link ups into LinkTree and that's a really big part of our model. I'll give one example of one where it's actually a lot of proprietary take under the hood, which is like a music link. So an artist or someone with a music link they can put a link to their music from any streaming platform into their LinkTree. It'll pop up and say, hey, we just found your song and 50 other platforms. And to a visitor when they click and it loads, it drops down, it shows a link to all the streaming platforms to the song where the song's available to them in the country that they're in. So it's doing content matching across the globe and understand whether your audience is. And it's a really big problem for the music industry because they can't just share one link globally, it's different licenses in different markets with different streaming platforms and it's completely free. Obviously that could have been very complex for a user to set up. They have to go and add those different links but we've done everything to make it as automated and contextual as possible. We only surface it to the user when they add the link rather than having to add a link and be presented with all this functionality that they have to choose from. And so it's really about reducing that decision fatigue wherever possible, make it so the user doesn't have to make a decision that we're helping to make the decision for them is really how we continue to maintain that simplicity as we continue to add more complex functionality. I've seen similar things with William Wright. Obviously, I think one of the things you guys do incredibly well is really making sure that the user always understands the value proposition and there's been more and more functionality being built into the way you record. Is that the same case for you? Yeah, I would say more or less the recording experience while it has gone significantly better in terms of speed and quality, that has kind of maintained and it's kind of stayed as a similar product experience but I think what has changed has been the various things around the product. So when you record a Loom video and it gets uploaded, you now have your transcription. And because we give you your transcription almost instantly, we also realize when you say ums and uhs and your buts and all your filler words, which I use a lot of, there's one right there. So we realize that I can sound a lot smarter if I remove my ums and us and buts. So how do we just go through the transcription and remove the actual ums and us from your audio and making that experience much better, right? So another fascinating psychological thing we realized early on with Loom is there's this whole concept of the mirror face. So like what you see, when you look in the mirror, the face that you see is the face that you recognize. But when you open up your iPhone camera and you take a photo, it flips your face. And people are like, I don't know who this person is. So by default, when we had started the product or when we started building the product, the very initial version would flip your face at the end of the recording when you're consuming the video back. And a very simple change of flipping that to your mirror face resulted in people keeping the camera on more often. And we realized by looking at our data that if the recorder has their camera on, the propensity and the likelihood of them, of the receiving and so the recipient, the likelihood of them watching the video all the way through is much higher. Wow. So it kind of comes back to the idea around all of the things surrounding the video, like the collaboration aspect. We recently launched this feature within the platform where it tells you exactly how much time you've saved and how many meetings you've saved. And people take screenshots of that and they put it on Twitter. And it's really awesome to see that value prop kind of come to life. So I think while the recorder has a lot of, what I've witnessed is a lot of products will kind of just build features on top of one another. And I'm actually really curious, I'd love to hear how many different personas use Linktree because for us, it all started with like, we classified ourselves as an onboarding company. So we're continuously iterating our onboarding, making it easier for the user to self-onboard but how much of the information, and how can we make that experience a bit more magical where once you owe off from Google, we're able to pull your first name, your last name, potentially where you work. And then we early on used Clearbit to enrich that data. So we're like, now we know that by simply Alex clicking on sign up, he owe off with Gmail. We have his first name, we have his last name. We know that he's a CEO and we know he's at Linktree. And we know how many people work at Linktree. And all he has to do is click next. So it's just continuously making that experience a lot easier, removing the friction. And I think constraints breed innovation. You kind of have to think about it through that lens. But I'm curious like, of all the various creators on Linktree, how many different personas and profiles are using the product and how do you kind of solve that onboarding problem and make it really simple? Yeah, that's a constant challenge for us. We've really started to try and start nailing in. And we're talking about scaling and how you scale these products. Ultimately, we see about 150 different self-assigned verticals. And that would normally be fine for marketing, onboarding perspective, if they're using the product in the same way. But we see every vertical user product entirely differently. The way an artist uses it, the way the Rock uses it compared to the way Tony Robbins uses it compared to, you know, like a mom-of-pop store selling candles on Etsy or an emerging podcaster. All need complete and functionality. And so we still haven't quite nailed that. That's definitely something we're continuing to iterate on the onboarding and building better amount of automations into solving that cold start problem. And when you land in a Linktree, it's like, everyone else has got a Linktree. I want a Linktree too. And you jump into the product and it's like, what do I share? And so that's something we're working on. Use this MAI now to help build that Linktree out for them immediately. You know, if we know you're a musician, we'll put a music link in, a Spotify link to your merch store automatically because we can scrape that. So just doing those kinds of things to make it easier at scale. And I mean, so speaking of scale, I think that's super interesting. Obviously, things that are perceived to be like both women Linktree seems to have been perceived as a feature upfront. And I think I'm sure we both got told this often of like, why does this scale? Why there's no defensibility, there's no mode. What are some things that you guys have done to build that mode into the product and make sure that, you know, I've seen plenty of clones of loom. I've seen plenty, there's literally thousands of clones of Linktree that, you know, actually again, it's kind of flattering when they clone it because they're only doing it because they think it's so simple. And then they fold month later because actually it's not that simple and they're not able to innovate. Is that something you see as well? You see these kind of clones and what do you see perceived to be simple and how have you really built that mode to make sure that you can stay ahead? Yeah, we certainly have a lot of, you know, competitive products, you know, a lot that look very similar to loom, but I think, you know, very similar to what you just said. There's, you know, the actual challenge is the technical aspect of it. It's, you know, it's really easy. I mean, there's a lot of APIs you can, I'm sure you can, in similar, the way it took you guys six hours to build the first version of Linktree, I'm sure someone can get a screen recorder up in six hours just based on the pure APIs that exist today. But I think the strength in loom early on was a couple of key decisions we made. We really analyzed, for example, where do a lot of these loom videos get shared? And we saw a couple of things. One, they get sent in emails, we realized they get sent in Slack, and we happened to be raising our seed round around 2017 and we approached Slack. Slack had their own venture fund and we're like, you know, we would love to take money from you and kind of do this partnership where we can natively unfurl loom videos within Slack. And we realized that that basically really put us on the map in terms of just pure, like, you know, consistency, because people, when a loom link was being shared in Slack, people didn't know if it was a document or if it was an article, for at least those that are unfamiliar with the product. But over time, I think, you know, it was also a challenge because even with fundraising, people are like, well, a lot of investors said that, you know, this is a feature, like, I don't see how this could really become a platform. And, you know, for us, all we really had to make sure we do was to keep that experience as simple, remove, you know, if we could, remove more than we end up introducing into the product. And I think that was really helpful and kind of the journey of, like, familiarizing everyone with this idea and concept of quick videos as a generalized communication tool and Slack really kind of harnessed us. And, you know, like, now a loom is widely known, like you mentioned, 18 million people using the product. So that's kind of like how we've effectively scaled. 30 seconds to go. First 1000 users, how'd you do it? We were very lucky we launched our product tent. We had 3,000 people. How about you? We got some big artists to use it. And lots of people started seeing it. It's inherently a very viral product. You see it, you know, an artist will share it to drive people there for their music. Still, 75% of our signups come from our self-affirmed to visitors landing on a link tree, clicking the logo and signing up. So it's very organically viral, but we just seeded it top down. Yeah. Great to be here with you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, everyone. Really appreciate it. Thank you.