How a dad with a day job built a $300k/year boring business

Business summary

Charlie Clark built Liinks, a customizable, mobile-optimized link-in-bio tool, largely as a side project while working full-time. After nearly four years of nights-and-weekends work, the business reached about $25K in monthly recurring revenue (MRR). Charlie then left his job for the second time, in August 2024.

At the time of the interview, Liinks had $27K MRR—roughly $324K in annualized recurring revenue—with no employees and relatively little day-to-day attention from Charlie.

The idea grew from Charlie’s observation that artists he contacted for an earlier project were already using Linktree. He saw an established need and believed he could offer more customization and stronger free-plan features. His earlier print-on-demand art project reached nearly 1,000 artists and generated high five-figure revenue, but had very thin profit margins and was eventually shut down.

Playbooks and operating tactics

• Validate the opportunity before going all in. Charlie said he would do more upfront research today: confirm that a market exists, examine competitors, and assess whether the product has a real business opportunity.
• Build while employed. He recommends using mornings, evenings, and weekends to develop a business, and leaving a job only when it is genuinely holding the business back. Charlie himself returned to his previous full-time job and continued building Liinks on the side.
• Start with a narrow, accessible customer group. Liinks’ first users came from artists Charlie had already contacted through his art marketplace project. He personally reached out to people using Linktree and offered to help set up their pages.
• Use hands-on onboarding to learn. Early outreach was personalized and “white glove.” Charlie helped users get started and used their feedback to understand what they wanted.
• Begin free, then charge for added value. Liinks initially launched as a free alternative with more functionality in its free plan. About two to three months after the initial version, Charlie moved advanced features behind a paid subscription while grandfathering existing users into their original access.
• Test several acquisition channels. Charlie used Product Hunt, social posts, a small number of Instagram ads, and later Google Search ads. Google Search ads delivered the best ROI during the period when he focused on more scalable growth.
• Build from customer requests, then prioritize selectively. In the early days, Charlie often built requested features quickly. As requests increased, he became more selective, prioritizing features likely to matter to other customers—not just one user.
• Look for adjacent monetization. Customers asked for a way to manage multiple profiles. Charlie built that capability, found broader demand for it, and introduced a Pro tier aimed at users managing multiple profiles.
• Consider products that earn attention as a route into a market. Charlie’s current view is that it can be difficult to enter a crowded B2B SaaS category. He suggested building something novel or fun that people may share, then using it as a starting point for further products or monetization. A small niche is another possible entry strategy.
• Balance a successful core product with experimentation. Liinks provides income and, for now, grows with limited intervention. That gives Charlie room to pursue other projects, though he recognizes that platform or market changes could threaten the business. He would like to establish an alternate revenue stream to reduce that dependence.
• Use AI as a productivity tool. Charlie uses Cursor for coding and estimated that about 50% of his code is AI-generated. He has a software-engineering background and said it took time to become comfortable using AI this way.

Metrics and milestones

• Nearly five years: Approximate period over which Liinks grew steadily.
• Nearly four years: Time Charlie spent building Liinks on the side before leaving his job again.
• $1K MRR: Reached about six months after launching the MVP.
• $25K MRR: Approximate level when Charlie quit his job for the second time.
• $27K MRR: Liinks’ reported MRR at the time of the interview.
• About one-quarter of revenue: Charlie said the multiple-profile functionality had grown to account for roughly this share.
• Nearly 1,000 artists; high-five-figure revenue: Scale and revenue of the earlier art marketplace project. Charlie emphasized that its profit margins were very thin.
• About 20 launches: Charlie estimated he had launched more than 20 websites or projects, many of which were experiments rather than revenue-generating businesses.
• No employees: Liinks was operated by Charlie alone.

Presenters and sources

• Charlie Clark — founder of Liinks and interview guest.
• Mitchell Landon Cohen — interviewer and host.
• AppSumo — video channel and source.