Linkkle
A pain point a lot of social media users have is how social media platforms such as Instagram, Twitter and Facebook only allow for a single website URL in your profile.
Enter maker Paul Maloney‘s latest make, Linkkle.
After a very busy launch week where Linkkle shot up to the #3 product on Product Hunt and had an article written about it on TechCrunch, Paul was able to step away from coding and give us some insights on his make process for Linkkle.
In 100 words or less, what exactly is Linkkle?
Most of us use social media in our daily lives, we all have multiple profiles and share urls almost daily. Sadly the majority of social media sites only offer one url per profile. Using linkkle you can add upto 10 links and replace your social media profile url to your linkkle profile and have all your important links in one place.
How did you come up with the idea for Linkkle?
It grew from a very basic link sharing tool I made to share links to work with my clients and I showed a few of my developer friends and it grew from there.
How long did it take you to go from the idea to actually building your first version?
The initial version was very crude and I started using it in late 2016, after sharing with friends the feature requests came flooding in and linkkle was officially born in Jan 2018.
How did you go about building the first version of Linkkle?
The first version was a poorly put together custom CMS with a login and a few text fields. As it wasn’t a public site I spent little time on the design and development.
Did you run into any challenges along the way in building Linkkle?
Initially no but as the requests came in and I needed to allow it to scale I had to employ new technologies I wasn’t totally comfortable with so had to learn on the fly and really test myself.
How did your launch day go?
Launch day was a little weird being totally honest! I’m a designer/developer so marketing and such isn’t my niche. I did the usual “hey I made this” on social media and submitted to a few places. One of which was Product Hunt. The feedback and traffic from there was insane and it was #3 product of the day. Techcrunch ran a piece about it the day after and the user base really jumped from the get go.
Looking back at Linkkle’s launch day, would you do anything different?
Definitely! When I pushed linkkle I felt it was ready and I’d added so many featured and worked on it for so long. When it went live there was a whole bunch of new requests and things I’d “missed” or perhaps hadn’t fully thought through. Being a one man band and bootstrapping it myself was no easy task but in hindsight maybe more user testing and feedback might have made it go smoother?
What are some milestones that Linkkle has hit since launch that blow your mind?
Probably the initial reaction to it, it was mostly positive which was nice. Then probably hitting 500, 1000, 1500 users and seeing that pattern of growth and people using it and sharing it online.
Now that you have officially launched Linkkle, what are some short term goals you are working towards?
The long term and short term goals are pretty much the same. I want the service to keep growing and to keep pushing it as much as I can. Perhaps some investment or marketing assistance from an expert would be of great benefit too.
What is one website or resource you used during making Linkkle that made the process 100 times easier?
Typically developer answer here so I apologize in advance … StackOverflow. It helped my a great deal whilst learning to work with the yii framework.
Other than Linkkle, have you launched any other projects?
Currently I’m pushing wllt.me which is built off the linkkle codebase that allows you to quickly share crypto wallet addresses. It’s not had the same impact as linkkle thus far but I will keep on at it!
