How T.LY CEO Tim Leland grew T.LY 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...