Charlie Clark: Liinks from Side Project to $31K+ MRR Solo
Brooklyn software engineer who built a better-looking Linktree alternative on nights and weekends, kept his day job for years, and grew a solo bootstrapped SaaS past $30K MRR in a crowded market.
- MRR
- $31K–$31.5K
- ARR
- ~$375K
- Users
- 5,400+ paying / 10,000+ total creators
- Founded
- 2020
- Team
- Solo
- Stack
- React, Node.js, MongoDB (later refactored), Stripe, DigitalOcean
How did Liinks start?
Charlie Clark was a software engineer and creative coder in Brooklyn with more than a decade of professional experience. In 2019 he quit his job to build VSUAL, a print-on-demand marketplace for artists. The product did not take off the way he hoped. While doing outreach to those artists, he noticed something repetitive: almost everyone was using a link-in-bio tool on Instagram, and most of those pages looked mediocre.
The category was already crowded. Linktree and a dozen others existed. Clark’s observation was simple: the core job (a mobile-first page of buttons that link out) is straightforward, the addressable market is large, and the existing tools were either limited in design or expensive relative to what they delivered. He gave himself roughly two weeks to build an alternative that looked better and cost less. Much of the first version reused infrastructure and UX patterns from VSUAL. The stack was React, Node.js, and MongoDB, self-hosted on DigitalOcean with S3 for assets. Server costs started around $50 a month. He formed an LLC through Stripe Atlas for $500.
He soft-launched at the end of January 2020 and put it on Product Hunt on February 26. It received about 300 upvotes and ranked #8 on the homepage. Some people called it “yet another link-in-bio tool.” Enough others tried it that he got useful feedback and the first users.
Early growth and the unscalable work
The first version was free. Clark did not feel he could charge for something that simple yet. He spent time doing the kind of work that does not scale: recreating pages from competing tools with better styling and asking people to switch, building custom pages for people who were not using any tool, and white-glove onboarding for artists he already knew from the VSUAL outreach.
He made his first “internet dollar” roughly two months after launch. That moment mattered. He introduced a Premium plan at $3 a month—deliberately cheaper than Linktree. “Charging less can also be a competitive advantage,” he has noted. Features accumulated. A 14-day trial appeared. Instagram ads helped early. By about four months he crossed $1,000 MRR. A price increase to $3.99 helped push it to $2,000. Growth continued slowly: $15K MRR by December 2022, $20K MRR with around 4,200 paying customers by July 2023.
Instagram ads eventually became less effective after iOS 14 changed targeting. Google Search ads for high-intent “link-in-bio” terms took over and stayed useful for years, at roughly $100 a day in later periods. Organic channels also mattered. Pages often carried a “Made with Liinks” badge. A one-click Linktree import lowered switching costs. Multi-profile management for people running several brands or client pages, built quickly, later accounted for a meaningful share of revenue.
Pricing, the free tier, and staying employed
Two decisions stand out. First, he eventually killed the free tier. Phishing and spam made the freemium model costly and low-quality. Removing it reduced total users but improved the paying base and margins. The messaging became “you’re the customer, not the product.” Second, he stayed in a day job for roughly the first four years of building Liinks. He had quit once before for VSUAL and returned. With Liinks he waited until the numbers roughly matched his salary before quitting again in August 2024. By then the business was around the mid-to-high $20Ks in MRR. He has described the approach as quitting smart rather than fast. A child born in late 2023 also shaped the available hours.
By October 2024 the public numbers were about $25K MRR, 5,300+ paying customers (roughly 4,800 on a $4 Premium plan and 500 on a $10+ Pro plan), 11% year-over-year growth, and 80–90% margins depending on ad spend. Trailing twelve-month revenue was roughly $250K. He later raised the entry plan from $4 to $5. Because the business runs on a large number of small subscriptions, that single-dollar increase added nearly $5,000 in MRR. In the October 2026 Starter Story interview he reported roughly $31,500 MRR on the Stripe dashboard. His X bio lists $31K/mo. TrustMRR (which verifies via Stripe) has shown figures in the low $31K range around the same period, with more than 5,400 active subscriptions. These are founder-reported or processor-verified figures; third-party leaderboards sometimes round or lag.
Pro starts at $12/month (or packs of five profiles) and adds custom domains and multi-page management. A small number of customers pay more because they manage many pages. The entry price stays intentionally low. Clark has said he would rather have lots of customers paying a small amount than fewer paying a lot.
What the work looks like now
The product remains a clean, customizable link-in-bio / mini-website tool. Users add links, images, videos, forms, folders, socials, and more. There is Instagram auto-import of links from captions, analytics, QR codes, and themes. Pro users can connect custom domains and manage multiple profiles from one account. The site claims 10,000+ creators and businesses. Clark still runs it solo. He has experimented with other small products (Thiings, Diiverge, Sliick, Analytiics) and has used modern coding models to help with refactors and side experiments. In early 2026 he described a major backend migration that left the user-facing product unchanged but reduced his dread of the old codebase.
Margins stay high because software distribution costs are low and the team is one person. Ad spend is the main variable expense. Support and feature requests still land on him. He has kept building in public on X, posting product updates, goals (including a $35K MRR target for early November 2026), and occasional numbers.
Lessons that still feel true
Crowded markets are not automatically closed. Differentiation on design quality, customization depth, and price can create room when the core job is simple and the audience is large. The first customers often come from unscalable work: recreating pages by hand, personal outreach, and relationships. Big platforms struggle to replicate that care at the edge.
Pricing leverage matters when you have volume. A one-dollar increase on a large base of $4 plans produced thousands in new MRR. Killing an abused free tier traded vanity metrics for better unit economics.
Keeping a day job for years is not failure. It funds the runway and removes the pressure to force growth before the product and channels are ready. Clark has been open that luck plays a larger role than most founders admit, and that flexibility plus focus both matter.
Finally, the work is ongoing. Growth has slowed at times (including after he cut ad spend and had a child). He continues to ship, market, and experiment with a small portfolio of other tools. The $30K+ MRR mark is real and self-reported, but it took years of nights, weekends, channel shifts, and deliberate pricing choices rather than a single viral moment.
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