How T.LY CEO Tim Leland grew to $180K revenue and 600 customers in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is tim leland he's the creator of t.l.y url shortener and link management tool his goal is simple make creating short links a one-click process this led him to create the url browser extension that makes it easy to create share and track these urls currently the company has over 10 million short urls created and tracked sorry at over 100 million clicks across those links the link shortener extension has over 400 000 active users it's an affordable url shortener that allows users to brand track and share their short urls tim you're ready to take us to the top sure all right everyone thought bitly won this space what mousetrap did you build that made you steal market share here yeah that's a great question uh you know billy's been around for a long time and definitely uh still probably the most popular that you see but uh what i've been able to do is build the url shortener extension that has gained a lot of popularity and then on top of that i built uh a shorter url shortener uh using the domain t dot ly and have seen a lot of growth over the past uh year or so so so i think the product this is a rare case we're going to spend much time on a product that's exactly what it sounds like a url shortener right so what are people paying for this how do you make money yeah so i mean it's you can use it for free go create you know short urls but when it comes to some additional features so some additional analytics the ability to use the api custom domains ability to change the ending of the short url and some other features that you only get for paying so smart urls so if you want one url that will redirect uh based on a user's country browser uh and different things like that you know if they're on a phone you want to take them to the app store if they're on you know a desktop you want may want to take them to your desktop app so that type of thing very cool and so when people do this if you look at only your paid user base on average what's a customer paying per month yeah so i when i started this and i think their prices have changed but bitly to be able to have a custom domain you know it was it was very pricey so i went with the approach of uh you know a more affordable option so i started off at five dollars a month and that's where i'm at right now so you know pretty much anybody can get in there add their own domain and start sharing the term is branded links so they can use their own domain and create as many short urls you know depending on what plan they're on this is great i love this story okay so a url extension browser extension allows you to grow a big user base product led growth you put up a five dollar month paywall now people are paying today how many folks are now paying yeah actually look at that just now um i have over 600 paying customers so obviously there's churn in there and but once somebody gets using it and they're happy with it they usually stick around for a while that's awesome okay so three thousand dollars a month in revenue about right well the plans go up and down so i'm actually over the 4 000 so depending on what plan they select so there's you know the plans are really the difference are if you want teams and if you want additional short urls per month so that's how it kind of scales some some people sending out a lot of uh short links want to be able to you know generate more per month understood and what year do you launch the business uh 2020 20. okay so fairly new i mean are you is this a sole founder scenario up to 4k a month yep yep it's just me uh you know kind of doing it almost as a side project on top of a full-time job so this just uh you know nights and weekends type thing for me oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built 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valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview that's on you i see dad posters behind you you're a busy guy huh yes yes all right so did how many kids you have uh three boys okay three boys a startup and a full-time gig huh yeah yeah all right busy guys so okay um i guess walk me through why five bucks and when did you officially launch that that paywall what months so i'd have to look back at that um was it i mean was it this year or last year it was last year okay so second year in business and why five bucks or you just sort of make it up and see what happens yeah i think i kind of went the route of uh what a lot of people starting off they don't charge enough but but i was trying to you know give an affordable option to people who just want you know a certain number of links per month so that's that's kind of where i came up with the price you know i did some calculations on you know how much storage and scaling um go that's where the cost comes in for me is uh server cost and scaling this what do you think all in costs are per month per user no no for you for you to run the business uh so hosting wise i'm over 300 dollars a month so that's your biggest cost yeah and i've started experimenting with uh some advertising so seeing how that goes to you know paid advertising so and and so what do you want to do with the business long term i mean if someone came to you today i mean you have a very large chrome extension 400 000 users if someone offered you you know 100 000 bucks all cash upfront today do you sell uh that's a good question i've actually not officially had official offers but i've had people interested and and for now i'm kind of holding on to it to see how far i can take it what was the largest offer you got i know it wasn't binding but just that you were talking about it was a few months ago so you know it was more the 200 000 user range uh 200 thousand dollars 2 200 000 users okay um i'd have to look it up i don't remember oh come on tim you don't forget those things what was the offer what was the range like in the 60s 65 okay and and did you did so i mean did it at least warrant a conversation with your spouse at the dinner table or were you like immediately like no uh i was kind of thinking that's that would be you know a pretty good deal but no i i want to keep growing and we both decided you know keep working at it that's awesome i love that all right so that makes a lot of sense um again let me go back to my first question so where's the product going right so so do you offer 100 a month plans you build what can you build on top of this you think yeah so the plans uh scale up depending on how many short links you want per month and uh also team members so i have the largest plan i have right now is 100 000 short links per month and that's at 400 a month is anyone on that one i don't think anybody's on that one but i have some on the 100 a month plans so just be clear if you have a hundred thousand short links per month it's 400 bucks a month yes creating so you can create you know 100 000 each month so it kind of scales where you can do that many per month [Music] i mean i don't know if you guys listening or having the same thought i am but holy tim you give away a lot for a very little amount of money i mean i've i've seen things where it's like if you go up to five links it's 300 bucks a month and you're like 100 000 links a month for 400 bucks a month why not yeah that's yeah that's it could be it could come back to bite me how many here's a way to reverse engineer that how many users do you have that have more than that created more than 100 links last month do you know i don't have those numbers i'd have to take a look but do you know do you have some sense of how active your biggest users are how many links they create per month yeah so the biggest thing is not necessarily the links but more so the tracking of the redirects so that's where a lot of companies limit the number of redirects tracked per month and that's where you know if somebody creates one link and it has you know millions of redirects and they're having to track stats on that that's where it really starts to add up so how many redirects do you allow to be tracked per month at 400 bucks a month uh so it's unlimited and you know but come on man so wait why have you been so why are you giving so much away for free does make you does it make you nervous to ask for money yeah i think that's kind of you know the problem that a lot of people have you know us starting out um tim why not just rip it off why not just throw up a plan for five grand a month and just test it for a month and see what happens yeah that's a good idea uh you know you look at like tiny url who's been around for 20 years and they you know are doing uh been giving away for free so now they do some other things through advertising and they actually recently introduced paid plans but interesting well i i it's interesting what you've built you know a lot of people would kill for the kind of product-led growth sort of acorn you know you know foundation that you've built which is compelling and i also love i talk about this all the time actually it was a chapter in my book about using chrome extensions as your initial community and your initial go to market so have you learned anything i mean how did you grow that chrome extender to 400 000 users yeah that's a really good question so i started building extensions back in 2015 and i actually built a weather extension that grew to 200 000 users and uh it's still pretty popular um it's weatherextension.com if you're interested but it so i used the extensions i've built to help promote my other extensions and it's been in that space for a while and so the url shortener extension the idea came from when google was shutting down theirs i built the extension to use multiple services and that's when whenever that they're shut down and that's when i saw a huge jump in numbers which is what year uh that might have been 2019 okay interesting but now did you do things though to like encourage people to leave you a review on the google marketplace so you rank higher or do you optimize your headline on on the google marketplace to make sure they rank you in the right category like this kind of stuff yeah so just from building the other extensions i've kind of learned a few tricks and obviously just the words you put in there and then reviews are important um but no i mean it just it ranked well as far as google searches um if you search url shorteners actually in the top page which helps out a lot but yeah so you know back in 2019 it had 60 000 users so that's kind of the growth of in the past three years or so yeah it's interesting when i search url shortener um in the in google um i get all these responses and yeah you're you're listed as one of them i'm trying to find it right here featured by google so there's a lot my gosh this is competitive holy crap there's a lot of these guys huh yeah so you have tiny url bitly and rebrandly are kind of the top that i'm familiar with what about like what about like timeland the url shortener these kinds of things [Music] i'm not sure which it's interesting what's interesting because the reason i landed it's called it's called uh it's under extensions url shortness called timely land t-i-m-l-e-l-a-n-d oh that's that's mine tim okay i was wondering i was gonna say because in the description it says the best way to create short links using t-l-y i'm like i wonder if this is okay yeah so this is the first result then in google right so when i when i look at url shorteners and i go down the page and click on this thing which is actually it's actually a google it's a developer it's a developer it's it's a link to google's thing chrome.google.com forward slash for just for your stuff so that's interesting um did you intentionally set that up or was that like a nice accident as far as being on the top surface yeah like why is google why does google make have yours on number one for that keyword term is it just because you're you're the name of your thing is url shortener and that was my search i think that's a lot of it but i yeah i'm not 100 sure there but it makes a lot of sense you know people go nathan why did you name your show the top podcast when you launched and i said well look i just looked up the most searched word for podcasts when i launched and it was what's the top podcast so i said hell i'll name i'm named my show the most searched thing you know yeah it's a good idea interesting okay any other tricks we should know about sort of chrome extensions um yeah so using your using the extensions to promote each other so somebody's already installing one that's always a good thing so you know when when you install mine i kind of encourage people to check out some of my other extensions so um cool yeah all right and just be clear you're the only one on the team which is right in your bootstraps right i love that um cool uh well listen we're excited to see what you do next in the meantime let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book uh maybe not it's necessarily a business book but i just read atomic habits by james clear it's you know relates to business of building good habits and uh so that's that's probably my most recent uh number top choice number two is there a ceo you're following or studying uh so are you familiar with uh taylor hotwell nope what connie is he was he's the founder of laravel open source uh development framework and he's built several companies around stuff number three favorite online tool for building url shortener uh so the the framework that i use is laravel so that's the framework yeah number four how many hours of sleep to get every night i try to get at least eight so married and with three kids right yes and how old are you tim 34 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 yeah i think i when i was 20 in college i was doing computer science i wish i had started a business then versus you know wasting a lot of my free time guys there you have it launched in 2020 right around on google shut down their url shortener he launched t dot ly his own spin on the platform as chrome extension now has 400 000 downloads launched a paywall late last year for five bucks a month i think it's underpriced but he has great revenue and his customers get great value 600 customers paying five bucks a month about 4k or north of five bucks a month over about 4k right now a monthly recurring revenue recently turned down an acquisition offer for 60 000 bucks because he wants to see where he can grow this thing one man solopreneur cranking it profitable his biggest cost is 300 bucks for hosting we'll see what happens next tim thanks for taking us to the top thanks this is great one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas 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 central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 sas world 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