How Singlelink Signed Up Nearly 2,500 Users with an Open-Source Linktree Alternative (Interview with Jim Bisenius)

Introduction and Jim's Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, My guest today is Jim Bisenius. He's a 22 year old formerly obese college dropout turned Founder and Triathlete. He lost over a 115 pounds and completed races up to the 70.3 mile distance while he's currently training for Ironman in Florida, is 140.6 miles. He's passionate about open source startups and pushing himself to the limits, currently working on an open source Linktree alternative called singlelink.co. Jim, you ready to take us to the top?

Jim Bisenius

00:26>> Absolutely. Thanks so much for having me.

Nathan Latka

00:28Man, 115 pounds knocked off. How did you do that?

Jim Bisenius

00:32>> Well, it took a long time. And I lost weight and I gained it back, and I lost weight and I gained it back. But it took me meeting with nutritionists and figuring out that losing weight is an equation. You know, you've about 3,600 calories in a pound. And I broke it up over the course of about eight months and I told myself, If I want to accomplish something that's going to be crazy, I've gotta put myself

00:53>> in a deficit every single day up until then, and we just stayed consistent. So a little bit of work every single day.

Nathan Latka

00:59That's incredible. Okay. So you're managing all this sort of personal, you know, balance, personal health, etcetera. At the same time, you're building this Linktree alternative. When did you start writing the code? What year?

Building Singlelink and the Product Hunt Launch

Jim Bisenius

01:10>> So that was last year in around August. We built the first iteration of it overnight on WordPress. And the following month, we decided to take it seriously. We rebuilt it in Nuxt.js and posted on Product Hunt in September.

Nathan Latka

01:22Oh, fascinating. Okay. So you're launching Product Hunt. How many hits did you get to your website on product product launch day?

Jim Bisenius

01:29>> A couple thousand. It was really interesting because we saw a mixed variety of people who wanted to see our GitHub, and we saw people who wanted the cloud hosting alternative. And despite the fact that we were doing no marketing, it exploded right off the bat. Mhmm. So I think we lost a lot of people because we really weren't set up for this to be anything but a sidecar project. We'd kinda built this in two, three days,

01:48>> but we saw a lot of traction.

Nathan Latka

01:50What's a lot of traction? Can you quantify that?

Jim Bisenius

01:52>> Yeah. So, I mean, from the gate, I we had probably about six, seven hundred users in the first month, I believe. Or 400, excuse me. We saw a 100 users in the first three days. I know that for a fact. And since we've maintained 41% average month over month growth, we just started taking this project full time in January. So you can see we're growing aggressively every single month despite the fact that we're not lending paid

02:15>> ads. It's all organic, and it's mostly from referrals. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

02:18So so how many users have have have start like, signed up for the application today over all history?

Current User Count

Jim Bisenius

02:25>> Close to 2,500 users.

Nathan Latka

02:27Wow. Okay. And have you started moving users from free to paid yet?

Moving Users from Free to Paid

Jim Bisenius

02:31>> We haven't. So that'll be upcoming in the next month, so fingers crossed here. But we're excited to just start deploying our premium options.

Nathan Latka

02:39Okay. This is like a beautiful place for a SaaS company to be, the moment when you decide pricing and what charge and when to turn it on. So what's your current thesis? What do you charge? How many options?

Pricing Strategy and Monetization Plans

Jim Bisenius

02:49>> So currently we kind of have the pro memberships that every single microsite platform has. Right? Those will be launching at $8 a user per seat. So per month. Right? And then we're also gonna have other ways to monetize that other platforms don't have. So we have our B2B2C model that seems to be very common in open source. You see these white labeled on premises hosting managed. Anything that falls into the open source exclusive category, we're able

03:16>> to do that because we're open source and we have everything we need to support on premises hosting. And then the other thing we're doing that I've seen no other microsite platform do is we'll be monetizing our marketplace. So we have a creator marketplace where Singlelink users can create plugins soon, and they can currently create themes. They can publish them, and they'll be able to sell those to other users who can buy them little micro transactions, etcetera.

03:39>> And we'll be taking a 25% fee of those transactions.

Nathan Latka

03:42We're launching a big campaign. We love supporting Bootstrap Founders assuming you're bootstrapped. We're basically taking a bunch of folks that are about to launch their paywall, letting everyone compete, and then we're just gonna write a price at the end. It's a cash prize of $20. And so that's the whole idea is, can anyone get to 10 k in MRR in ten weeks? I would love to to put you in and meet the other founders. I think

04:03you have a good shot there.

Jim Bisenius

04:05>> Yeah. That'd be an interesting discussion. I'd love to talk more about that.

Nathan Latka

04:08So why open source? I mean, why not go the Linktree route?

Why Open Source Instead of Closed Source

Jim Bisenius

04:12>> Yeah. So it it's super interesting because originally when we thought about this, we were we we came into this with a mission to make the world open source. We are truly in this belief that pushing your code publicly and creating this transparent relationship with your consumers would be able to help you actually charge more or offer a better product. And so we looked at all the industries out there and we were like, what is one industry

04:35>> that is just exploding and is in desperate need of an open source alternative? And when I say desperate need, a lot of microsite users, they don't necessarily just want to go up and they sign up. Right? Some people want it to be super simple and then some people want it to be super complex. So that sort of modification need was what I saw as a need for open source. So that drew us into the industry. We

04:57>> were like, okay, the industry is, you know, exploding and it needs people are ready to contribute. I think that's the biggest thing. And we we wanted to create an open source alternative in that space.

Personal Finances and Living Expenses

Nathan Latka

05:09It sounds like you've set up your life to be able to work on this for a year, taking no money because it's not making any revenue. So what decision did you make intentionally before you launched this business to give yourself that kind of cushion?

Jim Bisenius

05:22>> So I dropped out of college a few years ago. And since then, I've been working twenty hours a week part time outside of this as a developer. And that allows me to make enough money to just get by and still work forty hours a week on this. So it's kind of a sixty hour a week grind on top of all the training and all that. But it has allowed me to make just enough money while

05:45>> also putting my heart and soul into this. And I've been working remote for years. So and actually working flexible time. I work most of my hours after midnight for my side job. So it gives me the entire daytime hours to work Singlelink.

Nathan Latka

05:58Where are you right now?

Jim Bisenius

06:00>> I'm based in Chatham County, North Carolina. We're not even in a city. So super small population, no police. I'm on 12 acres. I'm taking this call over DSL actually. But we're just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina, which is the capital. It's about thirty minutes.

Nathan Latka

06:16Very cool. And so can I ask you, you know, this is what a lot of founders have struggled with is keeping their monthly expenses really low so they can have freedom to work on their side gigs? How low have you managed to keep your like total personal monthly expenses?

Jim Bisenius

06:30>> So it's tricky because we've had some recent changes in the past year. My fiance has come down with epilepsy. We've had to she's had to leave her job. I've actually had to come take care of that. So the past year we've been kind of burning some savings, but in general, I've been able to live off of this like $20K to $30K a year at points. You know, there was points where I dropped right out of college and

06:51>> I just found, you know, I was living $400 a month in rent and just living in a side little room. And, you know, I was I was eating out for all my meals, but I just did one meal a day, go to the dollar menu type stuff, McDonald's. And it's been pretty convenient to able to keep our incomes that low. Lately, we've increased our expenses. We have a paid CTO now and we've taken an investment to

Fundraising: $100K Raised and Next Round

Jim Bisenius

07:10>> be able to help pay him. Oh, how much money have you raised? Currently, it's a we've raised a 100 k and we're about to raise a 400 k pre seed round. So that will be very interesting. And but we've I'm not taking any payment. It's just to pay employees and help cover some of our company costs, which I would say we have under a thousand dollars in, like, monthly recurring costs on Singlelink.

Nathan Latka

07:34How many full time folks are on the team right now?

Co-Founder Equity, SAFE Terms and Use of Funds

Jim Bisenius

07:38>> Currently, we have two people full time, one almost full time. And so it's been fun. We're all three co founders.

Nathan Latka

07:45Okay. So three of you guys. And did you guys just split equity thirty, thirty, 30?

Jim Bisenius

07:52>> Nope. So it it's actually quite interesting because we originally didn't intend for them to be co founders. Right? Like I said earlier, I started this as Neutron Creative, not as Singlelink. So it's been very interesting as we switched from Neutron Creative to Singlelink full time. And one of our early advice from investors we got from Danielle Strachman from 1517 Fund, amazing advice, and she was a great investor to talk with, is that she you know,

08:16>> we were working alongside Naved Cabir and Andrew Boyle, and she says, these two individuals are incredibly passionate about what you're doing. You need to bring them on as co founders. So whatever capacity they had, I basically went up to them and I was like, is there any chance you would be willing to come on to this really full time? Let's make it happen. Let's take it work. And as they kinda came on, we you know, they

08:34>> took the work. So Andrew is vesting up to 15% now, Naved's vesting up to 25%. I've got the rest. And it makes it safer that way because, you know, they want the save folks that put

Nathan Latka

08:44in a $100K?

Jim Bisenius

08:46>> So currently, they're putting in at the same investment terms as our $4,000,000 pre seed or excuse me, $400,000 pre seed raise they're about to so it's a $4,000,000 cap with a 20% discount SAFE note.

Nathan Latka

08:58Okay. So the the first $100K that you raised was at a 4,000,000 cap with a 20% discount?

Jim Bisenius

09:03>> Yep. Yep. Yep. And they're raising at the exact same terms as the pre seed round we're raising right now.

Nathan Latka

09:08So it's really awesome Why is it why to do that? You have more users now. You could argue for a higher cap, save some dilution.

Jim Bisenius

09:16>> Every single one of our investors is incredibly passionate about our project. They're people I could call on in the middle of the night. I could trust them with any part of our project. They've given me fair advice from the beginning. These are people who are more than investors to me. They're team members. And that's something I really wanna offer better terms at to help attract people that care.

Nathan Latka

09:36Mhmm. Mhmm. Got it. Very cool. Okay. So raising now, we'll see what happens there. 4,000,000 valuation. That's great. What what how where will you spend the money?

Jim Bisenius

09:46>> So mainly on our team. Right? So we've been unpaid for a long time. We need to get us paid full time and committed to this project. Like I've mentioned, we have another team member who's currently part time. He needs to drop out. We're gonna go full time with this. And all of us are gonna work for the next twelve months. We're gonna onboard new developers and pay for all of our current costs so that we can

10:04>> monetize over the next twelve months. Our monthly growth is great. We don't need to really improve it by much. Right? I would love to maintain 50% over the next year, so we're gonna have some semi organic advertisements. But realistically, our our biggest goal is just building the infrastructure so we could monetize this audience. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

10:19Yep. Do you feel like you've lost any optionality having raised capital for this vision? What if you launch a paywall and no one wants to pay for this thing and you've gotta do something totally different?

Jim Bisenius

10:30>> I think with the investors we have now, they are backing the team with whatever decisions we decide to choose. So that's part of the reason we've taken the terms we have. So I I would really say no. I I I really like the people we're working with, and they give us the availability to change directions if we need to.

Paywall Launch Plan and Feature Roadmap

Nathan Latka

10:49Yep. Jim, what's the plan? How do you

10:51convert like, where do

10:52you put up the paywall for $8 a month? Is there a usage metric that people have to hit before they see it or what's the plan?

Jim Bisenius

10:58>> So currently, everyone's kinda running on this pro version. Right? But we're gonna start adding a little bit of branding. We're gonna allow people to just skip the event tracking. We're gonna add all sorts of new features like one click export. So you could take your site, export it, custom domains, all sorts of new things. So it's really a bunch of small power, small little add ons for power users, which is a tremendous portion of our audience.

11:19>> People who really use these microsites, they host their full website on a microsite. So again, people who take their microsite and do way more than they should with it.

Nathan Latka

11:28What's the utility based upsell? I understand people paying to remove branding. I understand them paying you export the code, but what's the thing where they hit X amount of website views to the microsite or leads opt in or clicks generated? What's the utility based upsell?

Jim Bisenius

11:44>> So we we currently don't have any of that. I mean, think that's the best part of open source is I mean, if we had that, people would be just going and self hosting this. We have to have competitive pricing with our self hosting audience. And we're building a relationship with them that, you know, we understand that, especially for us, a lot of these sites that we are able to export them to static. So there's not actually

12:02>> increase in price for us that have a difference between a million clicks and two. So, you know, as long as we're

Nathan Latka

12:08Not about a cost to you. About the value. It's about the value back to them. I think a lot of founders, they they undervalue what they've built. And and I hear you using some of the same language that others have used. I mean, if someone's getting a lot more traffic and a lot more leads from what they built on your thing, shouldn't you try and capture some of that value?

Open Source Value Capture Philosophy

Jim Bisenius

12:26>> Absolutely. But I think that's the way that open source value capture differs from closed source value capture. Right? In closed source, you try to capture as much value as possible of the little value you create. In open source, you publish code, it affects millions of people across the globe almost instantly. And you try to capture as much value you can of that. But you're always gonna be able to capture less value, if that makes sense. So

12:49>> I just think it's one of those limitations of open source businesses that's just always going to be there if that makes sense.

Nathan Latka

12:55Yeah, look, on open source, you're in a very unique spot where you have to keep the community on your side. You wanna keep people contributing code to make the value there. You can go listen to my episode with Sid at GitLab or even Matt Mullenweg at Automattic who built on top of WordPress, both open source platforms and they talk about this story in great detail. It's not an easy thing to balance.

Jim Bisenius

13:15>> Love it.

Nathan Latka

13:16Absolutely, I will. Thank you.

Famous Five: Books, Tools and Habits

Nathan Latka

13:17Alright. Alright, man. And that's for you guys listening in too. Wasn't Jim, it sounds like you're already on the right track, but that's for anyone else listening wanting more of Jim's sort of style. But Jim, the meantime, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book.

Jim Bisenius

13:29>> Favorite business book? How to be a capitalist without capital. That got me to know you, and I gave it out to my whole team when we read it first. So Oh, that's amazing.

Nathan Latka

13:37You have

Jim Bisenius

13:37>> to you you read it?

Nathan Latka

13:38Yes. Absolutely. How'd you

13:40find it?

Jim Bisenius

13:42>> I found it on Product Hunt when it came out. I bought it instantly.

Nathan Latka

13:45Very cool.

Jim Bisenius

13:45>> And you can look back up. I even emailed you for the bonus.

Nathan Latka

13:48That's amazing. I love that. Yeah.

Jim Bisenius

13:49>> It was really hard to come up

Nathan Latka

13:50with a title that didn't seem like a get rich quick book. So you've read it. What would you tell people who say, I'm not buying that? It feels like a get rich quick thing.

Jim Bisenius

13:59>> The lessons in it are really true. They're fundamental business lessons, especially like copying other businesses, being able to do so and not worry. I wouldn't be here today without that advice. You know, building an open source Linktree alternative, it's following that advice. So it's just fundamental business advice that everyone could use, especially somebody like me who's a dropout.

Nathan Latka

14:17I love that, Jim. Alright. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Jim Bisenius

14:22>> I think Elon Musk. I'm a big Tesla fan. I'm wearing a Tesla shirt right now. His decisions confuse me a lot, but, I'm trying to learn along the way. So he's a great person to follow.

Nathan Latka

14:32Number two, besides your own, what's your favorite online tool for building a business?

Jim Bisenius

14:37>> Favorite online tool for building a business. That's interesting. I think, unconventionally, Twitter. Twitter is very easy to start building a business on top of even if you don't know it. So just start building a community on Twitter, and it can very easily turn into that business.

Nathan Latka

14:53Jim, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night?

Jim Bisenius

14:57>> I I love to say eight, but it's probably closer to four to six.

Nathan Latka

15:01Okay. And situation? Married, single kids, think you mentioned you had a girlfriend?

Jim Bisenius

15:06>> I have a fiance. We were about to hit five years together. It's it's been great. We're trying to get married soon, but COVID's kept this the whole ceremony off. Yeah. And no kids? No kids yet. So how Maybe soon, but not yet.

Nathan Latka

15:19How old are you?

Jim Bisenius

15:20>> I'm 22, and she's 22 as well, so it works out.

Nathan Latka

15:24Alright. Take us home here. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Jim Bisenius

15:30>> I wish I knew that you can fail and learn from failing. Traditionally in school, I always learned from succeeding. Right? You you feel like you were only able to do better if you kept studying and you kept getting As. As a founder, you learn through failing, you fail, and then you learn, oh, that's something I should not do. Learn from failing. Failure is entirely okay. Don't be afraid of it.

Nathan Latka

15:48Guys, singlelink.co is a open source Linktree alternative. They signed up many hundreds of users, a 100 users in the first three days when they launched on Product Hunt. Over 400 users in month one today were 2,600 active users launching an $8 paywall in the next month or two. We'll see how it works. They raised a $100,000 to get going and raising another $400,000 right now on a SAFE at a 4,000,000 cap, 20% discount. We'll see if

16:10Jim can get it done with his team of three. Jim, thanks for taking us to the top.

Jim Bisenius

16:14>> Thanks so much for having me. It was great seeing you.

Nathan Latka

16:18One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM

16:42Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button, and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big

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17:24for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We

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