13:04Starter Story · Interview
My First SaaS Project Just Hit $11K/Month
A 19-year-old with no coding background explains how a vibe-coded AI clipping app reached $11,200 MRR on a 45-minute daily Instagram routine.
October 11thThe argument in one line.
You can win in a market with a giant incumbent by shipping a simpler, better-looking, cheaper version, then buying high-intent traffic with search ads until the business replaces your salary.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- A developer with a day job who wants a side project that could eventually replace the salary, and wants to see real numbers from someone who did it.
- A solo founder staring at a crowded market with a huge incumbent and wondering if a late entrant can still make money.
- Someone deciding how and when to quit a job to work on their own product, and weighing a leap against a gradual exit.
- A builder choosing between low prices with many customers and higher prices with few, and deciding how to price a small SaaS.
SKIP IF…
- You want a growth plan that avoids paid ads. His main engine for four years has been about $100 a day on Google ads.
- You want a technical deep dive. The stack gets about a minute and the demo about ninety seconds.
The full version, fast.
Charlie Clark built Liinks, a link-in-bio and mini website builder, in two weeks as an alternative to Linktree, then grew it alongside a full-time job to about $31,500 in monthly recurring revenue. He started by personally handing pages to artists, launched on Product Hunt, added a roughly $3 premium plan, rode Instagram ads until they stopped working, then settled on Google search ads at about $100 a day. A price move from $4 to $5 added nearly $5,000 MRR. He quit in 2024 once revenue matched his salary.
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Create a free account →Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:03
01 · Zero to $30K a month
Cold open teasing the story: a side project that outgrew a salary despite a giant competitor.
01:03 – 01:32
02 · Who Charlie is
Software engineer and founder of Liinks, about $31,500 MRR, full time since August 2024.
01:32 – 02:34
03 · What the app is
A link-in-bio tool that behaves more like a small website builder, with multiple pages and richer blocks.
02:34 – 03:30
04 · Side project ideas
Host pitches a free list of side project ideas backed by case studies.
03:30 – 04:15
05 · Business metrics
Stripe dashboard at $31,500 MRR, with the $4 to $5 price rise adding nearly $5,000.
04:15 – 05:47
06 · Founder background
Graphic design, ad agency web work, Squarespace, then the Visual print-on-demand project.
05:47 – 06:59
07 · Finding the idea
Two weeks to build a nicer Linktree alternative, then handing pages to artists for feedback.
06:59 – 08:23
08 · Growth strategies
Manual outreach, Product Hunt, a $3 premium plan, Instagram ads, then Google search ads.
08:23 – 09:40
09 · Pricing strategy
Undercut Linktree with a $5 plan, plus a $12 pro plan for custom domains and many pages.
09:40 – 10:53
10 · Leaving the 9-5
Quit in 2019, went back to work during COVID, quit again in 2024 when MRR matched salary.
10:53 – 12:45
11 · Mindset behind quitting
Why the first quit was loose and the second was timed to a salary-matching goal.
12:45 – 13:32
12 · Tech stack and tools
DigitalOcean VPS, AWS assets, Resend, Tinybird, OpenAI, $100 a day on Google ads.
13:32 – 15:01
13 · App demo
Onboarding a profile by pulling in an Instagram account, themes, forms, QR codes and short links.
15:01 – 15:58
14 · Final advice
Do not give up when the first idea stalls. Pick a validated space and lock in.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- A late entrant can win against an incumbent with millions of users by being simpler and better looking, then undercutting its price.
- Handing a finished page to someone and saying 'I built this for you' is a practical way to get the first users and early feedback.
- Raising the price from $4 to $5 felt tiny but added nearly $5,000 in MRR, because many small payments compound.
- Google search ads work for small SaaS because the traffic is high intent: people searching for a link-in-bio tool want one now.
- Instagram ads brought early growth until the algorithm changed around 2021 or 2022, and the channel stopped being viable.
- A cheap main plan plus a $12 pro plan captures both volume and a few customers paying around $100 a month for many pages.
- His first quit in 2019 had no real plan and made little money. His second came after the product matched his salary.
- Charlie set a somewhat arbitrary goal, matching his salary with MRR, and used it as the permission slip to quit.
- Life events like COVID, a new child and a mortgage can push back a quit date without killing the goal.
- Building is cheap in the AI era, so the temptation is to jump to the next idea when the first one stalls instead of doing outreach and marketing.
- Pick a validated space, iterate until something sticks, then lock in rather than hopping between ideas.
Small, cheap, and patient beats big and first
WHAT TO LEARN
A late entrant can build real income by shipping a simpler version of a proven product, pricing under the leader, and buying high-intent traffic until revenue replaces the salary.
- Validate by handing a finished page to real people and asking if they want it, before building anything elaborate.
- A crowded market with a giant incumbent is proof of demand. Differentiate on design and simplicity, and anchor your price just under theirs.
- Many small payments compound. A single dollar increase on a $4 plan added nearly $5,000 in monthly revenue.
- Keep a higher tier for the few who need more. A $12 pro plan with extra pages brings in some customers paying around $100 a month.
- Ad channels decay. Instagram ads worked until the algorithm changed, then Google search ads took over because the intent was higher.
- Set a concrete exit goal, such as matching your salary with recurring revenue, so the decision to quit is not just a feeling.
- Going back to a job after a first attempt is not failure. The product kept growing while he worked and made the second quit safer.
- When building is cheap, the hard part is staying. Do the outreach and marketing instead of jumping to the next idea.
Terms worth knowing.
- Link in bio
- A single mobile-first page linked from a social profile that collects all of a person's or brand's important links in one place.
- MRR
- Monthly recurring revenue, the total of all subscription payments a business expects to collect each month.
- Micro-SaaS
- A small software subscription product, usually run by one person or a tiny team, aimed at a narrow need.
- High-intent traffic
- Visitors who arrive already looking for the exact thing you sell, such as people searching for a link-in-bio tool.
- Grandfathering
- Letting early users keep a free or cheaper plan after you introduce paid pricing.
- Tinybird
- A hosted analytics service built on top of the ClickHouse database, used here for product analytics.
Things they pointed at.
13:00toolResend
13:05toolTinybird
13:10toolOpenAI API
12:55toolDigitalOcean
12:55toolAWS
07:00channelProduct Hunt
Lines you could clip.
08:50
“I would much rather have lots of customers paying a small amount than fewer customers paying more.”
15:28
“Pick a space that's validated, iterate until you feel like you got something and then lock in.”
15:20
“It has gotten so cheap to build that it's easy to jump to the next idea instead of doing the hard stuff like outreach and marketing.”
Word for word.
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story
This is a project that I grew alongside my full -time job and I quit to become a full -time solopreneur. I want you to meet Charlie. A few years ago, he was working a full -time job as a software engineer, but on the side, he was building this really simple app.
And today, that app makes over $30 ,000 a month. I just, at that point, I just felt like I need to do this. Like, I really want to do this to give myself a shot.
But here's what I think is cool. He wasn't the first person to build this idea. In fact, he built it in a space where there was a competitor with literally millions of users.
And yet he was still successful. I decided to give myself two weeks to build a Linktree alternative. So I asked Charlie to come onto the channel and break everything down.
And in this episode, we're going to dive into the crazy simple app he built that now makes over $30 ,000 a month. how he grew it on nights and weekends on the side, and finally, the story behind how this app replaced his full -time job. Trust me, this one's going to be good.
Let's dive in. I'm Gus, and this is Starter Story.
All right, Charlie, welcome to Starter Story. Super excited to have you on the channel. Can you just share with me who you are, what you built, and what's your story?
So my name is Charlie Clark and I'm a software engineer and I'm the founder of Lynx which is a simple website and link in bio tool doing about $31 ,500 in monthly recurring revenue. This is a project that I grew alongside my full -time job initially and in August of 2024 I quit to become a full -time solopreneur. that's awesome yeah what is links can you just explain to the audience who may not know what it is just what it is what it does who some of your users are so let's start there so links is primarily a link in bio tools it's a way to kind of take all of the different parts of your online presence and put them in like a very simple mobile -first web page that links out to your different parts of your online identity.
So bringing it a little bit closer to like a full website builder with some additional functionality that sort of the typical LinkinBio tool might not offer, like multiple pages, more powerful blocks, and more customization options. So here we are on the links landing page. So what you get is a URL that's links .co slash username, and that gives you a page that looks something like this.
a bit of variety in what you can build with our tool so it is really quite a diverse types of customers but fundamentally these are all either people or brands that are trying to make money online all right real quick what i love about charlie's story is that he started this as a side project he grew it alongside his full -time job until he grew it to a point where he could actually quit and go all in we actually see this a lot with some of the founders we feature on the channel they build something they grow it slowly on the side until finally they can go all in so Naturally, you might be wondering, how can I find a side project idea to build?
Well, that's exactly why we put together a free list of side project ideas you could start alongside your 9 to 5. Every idea is backed by a real case study with revenue numbers, pricing models, and how they grew it on the side. So if you've got a day job and a little bit of free time, I think this list will give you a good place to start.
So just head to the link in the description and grab that 100 % for free. All right, let's get back to Charlie. yeah charlie this is really cool i think um in my past life i was a photographer i did like a few weddings i used to follow a lot of people in that space and they all had something like this so definitely i see the like the benefit let's talk a little bit about the revenue like can you just pull up your revenue dashboards just show off to the audience that this thing is legit and maybe just walk through some of your the numbers you look at probably every day Yeah, here's my Stripe dashboard currently sitting at about $31 ,500 MRR.
There's a big jump here because I actually increased my prices towards the end of June. And I went from $4 a month to $5 a month, which doesn't feel like a big increase. But, you know, because this is a business where it's like a lot of customers paying a small amount, that like $1 increase actually translated to nearly $5 ,000 in additional MRR.
And it's actually been sort of... on an upwards trend since then. So very exciting.
Awesome, Charlie. Thanks for breaking all that down and being so transparent. Let's get into your background a little bit.
How did you get to this point? Were you always doing projects like this, you know, technical background? Tell us about how you got here.
Yeah, so when I was in college, I was studying graphic design initially. and when i graduated college you know i had taught myself a bit of programming and like the first job that i landed out of school was at an ad agency doing web development and then i got my first job in tech at squarespace after a couple years of doing the advertising stuff that was really where i learned sort of like the fundamentals of software engineering and also got exposure to you know a tool for building websites and you know i was always dabbling with little projects on the side i got really interested in like the print on demand space and When I started learning about like print on demand, I was like, oh, this is kind of cool.
But these like print on demand websites are not especially interesting or like well -designed. So that's where I came up with this idea for Visual, which was like my first big side project that I had this idea that I was going to build this print on demand marketplace for artists where they could upload their art and sell their art and have it printed and fulfilled for them.
And the first time I quit my job in 2019 was to develop that idea. As I was building Visual, and interacting with a lot of artists online, I'd noticed that a lot of them were using link and bio tools and Linktree being like the big one at the time.
And as I was kind of like struggling a bit with visual and trying to find like some kind of market fit there, I decided to like give myself two weeks to build a Linktree alternative. That's how Link started. I thought it was interesting.
You said you gave yourself two weeks to build Link. So tell us about coming up with that idea, a little bit more about the backstory there. As I mentioned, I had seen that people were using a link tree.
And so I started digging into it. And I was like, oh, you know, it's cool that this exists, but like the pages don't look very good. So that was kind of like how I started thinking about it.
Like, let's try and make a tool like this where you can make your page look nicer. Just to sort of test it out. I was like reaching out to people being like, hey, I built this thing.
And I would like send it to them and be like, I built this for you. Like, do you want to use it? And I have artist friends who are still using links because they set it up.
And I grandfathered them into like a free plan. I'm not making them pay. But that was how I started getting some early feedback, which was really helpful.
One thing I'm really thinking about is like, kind of the manually getting customers, at least that initial thing you mentioned there is like you would build it for someone or you would reach out to like a personal connection and like do it for them kind of thing. I think that's just a really practical first way to start getting customers and validation.
So hopefully someone watching can like learn a little bit from that. And then second quick takeaway there is just like it would have been easy for you to be like, oh, Linktree already exists. I'm out of the market kind of thing.
But you somehow found a simpler, maybe smaller way to build an alternative. And I imagine that was something that attracted people. the beginning.
So yeah, let's talk about the growth of links. Tell us the story behind how you went from, you know, zero to where it's at today. starting from zero right like i built this thing just warm or cold outreach trying to convince people to try it not scalable but like a good way to just gauge interest that was like the first phase and then i had addressed some feedback made some changes and i i launched on product hunt and i got quite a bit of traffic from it and that's kind of when i started thinking about monetizing it and i was just curious i was like would people be willing to pay for this so i launched like a premium version at the time and i think it was maybe three dollars a month something like that got to like 100 mrr within a couple months and then started looking into how to sort of scale that and my first success that i had was actually with instagram ads got quite a bit of growth early on from that and then they changed their algorithms at some point camera if it was like 2021 or 2022 but that eventually became like not a viable channel for me anymore after the instagram ads started not performing as well i was looking for other channels to scale growth and i discovered that like google search ads
were the sort of easiest because it was high intent traffic, right? People actually looking for a link and bio tool or like a webpage builder. And it was quite easy to just, you know, put money in and get money out.
And that's sort of consistently been what I have been relying on most for growth, I would say over the last four years. I'm just curious. Separately, you said your early on pricing was like $3 a month.
And over the last four or five years now, it's at $5 a month. So you haven't really increased it that much. So maybe just tell us about why that...
pricing it's it seems like really small maybe it's because you think it's a small tool or something else you see in the market just tell us about that piece because i think that's kind of interesting and what that means like maybe for the business a big part of it is sort of anchoring it relative to the other players in the space and lake tree is the biggest competitor in the space so i've always sort of looked at their pricing and tried to at least for my paid version sort of undercut them and i guess for me the way i like to think about it is i would much rather have lots of customers paying like a small amount than fewer customers paying more.
The one thing I do have that sort of counterbalances that is that there's also a pro plan where it starts at $12 a month. And mainly what that gives you is custom domain and the ability to manage multiple pages. So $12 starts you out with five pages and you can then sort of add more and more pages.
So I actually do have a couple of customers that are paying upwards of a hundred a month because they manage a bunch of pages. So there is still like a segment. of higher paying customers.
And that's how I've kind of split it up. Cool. Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah. Thanks for breaking that down. When we were chatting before this interview, you told me a little bit about how, you know, building this helped you quit your job and do this full time.
But then maybe you went back to work and then came back to Lynx. Tell us that story of how working on Lynx has helped you both quit or come back to a full time job. So, yeah, when I first left in 2019, that's when I started building Visual.
I worked on that for almost a year. and towards the end of that year which is kind of like what i had given myself i built links neither product was really like making much money and if you remember that's when covet started and i was self -employed not making a whole lot of money and i just felt like i would be a lot more comfortable not being self -employed at that point and so i went back to spur space mentioned to them that i had been working on these things i didn't want to sort of feel like i was doing something under the table and yeah links continued to grow during that time even though i wasn't spending all that much time on it summer 2024 is when i decided like okay i feel like i'm making enough money now with links i was basically in revenue making my salary more or less i was really wanting more flexibility to look after my kid you know if you get sick and stuff like that it just felt like the right time and now it's been two years and i'm really glad i did it as you're talking i was thinking about how like the first time you
quit to work on your stuff. You did it with what I would interpret as like not really a big plan. And then the second time you said you had built it big enough that it was replacing your whole salary.
You know, sometimes the narrative online with quitting to go full time, it's either like burn all the boats, you know, and just like go all in, move to Bali and then. know live a cheap life and then you grow your product that's like the narrative i see quite a bit at least on like indie hacker twitter could you share like your mindset behind those two different ways that you approached like quitting to go full -time on your project that's a really interesting question so i think When I quit the first time, I had an idea of what I wanted to build, but it was, you know, not super well thought out.
And my partner, she had a full -time job. She was making like, you know, good amount of money. So there was also that support that was really helpful.
And, you know, we were way off from thinking about having kids at that point. The second time was very different because one big thing was COVID. Like COVID really sort of made life feel kind of like scary and, you know, unpredictable.
And it kind of just like, it kept sort of pushing back. I like I was always talking about like I want to go and like focus on this whole time but like things kept happening that kept sort of pushing that back and then we decided we're gonna have a kid and that pushed it back even more and so by the time that that was all in place and also I had had sort of this like somewhat arbitrary goal of like matching my salary with the MRR I think I could have gone either way with that a little bit but that was just like a nice secondary goal kind of I love that because I think sometimes the big narrative is go all in, but I really like that you did it slowly and you know, life does happen.
I get that personally. Like you have a kid, you get married, you buy a house and responsibility starts to pile up a little bit, not in a bad way, but just like. Life happens.
And so I really like that different mindset the second time, which hopefully someone watching can relate to a little bit. Let's talk about the tech stack behind Lynx. What are the tools you use on a day -to -day basis to run the business?
Tech stack wise, I host on a VPS on DigitalOcean and I use AWS just for hosting assets. So whenever people upload. images that's where that goes and a couple other tools that i use resend for email notifications and also sending out marketing emails and then i use tiny bird which is a wrapper over click house that's for analytics i have some ai integrations throughout the product i use openai for that their api and then my biggest spend is google ads i spend about 100 a day on google ads then as of a year or so ago i've been also spending 100 to 200 a month on a coding agent that's basically it all right so i want to see how links work so could you just give us a little one minute demo of how links works let's onboard starter story so when you first create your account you're given the choice between starting from your instagram from a link or starting from scratch Instagram's the best just because it's a little more structured.
So let's just go through that. We're basically scraping in your Instagram profile, pulling in your profile picture and any information that is sort of publicly accessible. It got the profile picture and the name and it put together a little banner here.
And then this is where you can sort of quickly kind of build out what your profile template could look like. And then you can pick a theme. These are just starting points basically.
You can customize everything once you finish. And then a little celebration. Easy.
I mean, obviously, it would take someone time to design it and tweak it, etc. Say what they want to say, but relatively simple to get started. That's cool.
yeah so now you've got your link links .co starter story and from there you can actually go into the like full -fledged editing experience we have you know a bunch of other features like you can build forms that you can share standalone forms qr codes short links i recently just put in like a fun little like mock -up builder that I sort of built as like a separate project, but like pulled it into links just so you can kind of, you know, create like a shareable asset with your profile.
Very cool. Yeah. Cool.
Yeah. Thanks for sharing. That's awesome.
Final question that we ask everyone who comes on Starter Story, if you were standing on your shoulders six years ago, or for a lot of people watching who are just getting started now, what kind of advice would you give yourself or give to them? One thing that is so easy now is like to just give up as soon as your thing doesn't immediately work because it has gotten so cheap to build and it's so much easier in a way to jump to the next idea you have rather than like actually spending the time trying to do the hard stuff like reaching out to customers, you know, marketing, doing outreach, like stuff like that, which I think is still valuable.
So that would be my sort of like adapted advice for the AI era is pick a space that's validated, iterate until you feel like you got something and then lock in if you feel like it's what you want to be working on. Well, Charlie, that's great advice. And thank you so much for coming to Star Story.
Cool. Thanks, guys.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
A simple app built in two weeks, in a space where a competitor already had millions of users, now makes over $30,000 a month. Charlie Clark walks through the pricing, the ad channel, and the two very different times he quit his job.
Named ideas worth stealing.
11:40concept
Salary-match quit rule
Charlie used matching his salary with MRR as a secondary goal that made quitting feel safe, after a first quit with no plan made little money.
Steal forany founder deciding when to leave a job
06:20list
Early traction ladder
- Hand-built pages for friends
- Product Hunt launch
- Premium plan at about $3
- Instagram ads
- Google search ads
The order of channels Charlie used to go from zero to $100 MRR and then to $30K.
Steal forany first-time SaaS launch
How they asked for the click.
VERBAL ASK
02:34link
“Head to the link in the description and grab that 100% for free.”
A mid-roll pitch for a free side project ideas list, placed right after the host frames the 'quit while growing on the side' pattern, so the offer feels like the logical next step.
MENTIONED ON CAMERA
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Visual structure at a glance.
