The Linktree Paradox: How a 6-Hour MVP Became a $1.3B Infrastructure Company
Sometimes the winning product doesn’t need to be complex
Hi there, today’s post is not about AI, not even about ARR, it is about Linktree, one of my favorite products.
Most people think they understand Linktree. It’s a “link-in-bio tool.” A tiny widget. Something so simple that every engineer believes they could build it in a weekend.
Yet in 2026, as the world races toward AI and billion-parameter models, Linktree quietly crossed 70M users (up from 50M last year), continues growing at high speed, and still sits comfortably at a $1.3B valuation.
How did this happen?
How did a 6-hour MVP turn into one of the most defensible companies in the creator economy — despite hundreds of clones?
To understand Linktree, you have to look beneath the surface. Because Linktree is not a website builder. It is not a SaaS widget. It is not even a creator tool.
Linktree is a data and attribution infrastructure company disguised as a simple landing page.
And that’s the real story.
1. Linktree didn’t win because it was first. It won because it became a default.
In 2016, the three founders were running a digital agency. Their clients — musicians and festivals — constantly needed to update the one link Instagram allowed them to put in their bio. Tour tickets. New merch. New album drops.
So they built a hacky internal landing page that could hold multiple links.
It took 6 hours.
They launched it on a Friday—3,000 signups in a few hours. The server crashed. That was the moment Linktree stopped being a tool and became a behavior.
Everyone copied the product. But no one copied the mindshare.
“Link in bio” gradually evolved into “Linktree in bio.” And at internet scale, default beats features.
2. The secret: Linktree standardized the most valuable traffic on the internet
Here’s the part most people miss:
Creators generate the highest-intent traffic in the modern web.
A follower who clicks a creator’s link is extremely action-prone — they intend to buy, subscribe, register, or consume.
But that traffic is fragmented:
TikTok links behave differently from Instagram
YouTube clickers act differently from Twitter
Some platforms block tracking entirely
Some rewrite outbound URLs
Some kill UTMs
Creators were drowning in chaos. Brands were blind. Platforms refused to share real data.
Linktree solved this chaos by standardizing all outbound creator traffic into one consistent dataset.
A creator may live across 7 platforms — but the conversion path always runs through Linktree. This is why the product looks simple.
Simplicity is a strategic disguise for a very deep moat.
3. The free product is the data engine. The paid product is the intelligence layer.
Most people think Linktree monetizes through templates and design upgrades.
Wrong.
