The night before his sister's wedding, Alex Zaccaria's phone would not stop. A user in the United States had posted his little side project on Product Hunt, and sign-ups were flooding in. Over that day, roughly three to four thousand people joined. The servers struggled. Nobody had planned for this.
The product was small. Alex, his brother Anthony and their friend Nick Humphreys ran a Melbourne digital agency that looked after musicians and entertainers. They posted announcements on Instagram, which allowed only one link in a bio. They were tired of changing it. So they asked a developer who had recently joined the agency, and who had little work at the time, to build a page that held several links. The prototype took about six hours.
Alicia Keys became the first major celebrity user, and her agency brought in Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Killers.
They gave it to the agency's own clients first. About ten people a day signed up. It was a feature, not a company, and they rebuilt it properly before any real attention arrived. Nick, who has been described as the creative guy, shaped how it looked. Anthony later took the commercial side.
Then the wedding week. After that day, sign-ups stayed above 800 a day. The company spent nothing on marketing. People just left the link in their bios, and creators made about 45,000 YouTube videos explaining it. Alicia Keys became the first major celebrity user, and her agency brought in Pearl Jam, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and The Killers. Qantas and Red Bull arrived without a sales call.
The near-death moment came in 2018, when Instagram flagged the links as spam and banned them. Users rallied, and Instagram reversed course and apologised. Alex has since admitted that early on they worried about Instagram copying or blocking them. Later, infrastructure and scaling problems kept coming, in his words, in all kinds.
By August 2019 they reported about US$3 million in annual recurring revenue, 2.8 million users, and no outside money. Then came investors. A US$10.7 million Series A in 2020, US$45 million in 2021, and a 2022 round at a reported US$1.7 billion valuation. The user count had passed 8 million by October 2020 and neared 16 million by March 2021.
What stands out is how ordinary the origin was. Nobody set out to build a platform. They fixed an annoyance for their own clients, and then stayed ready when strangers noticed.