Linkly Hits 1,000 Customers: A Milestone Conversation with Founder Chris Muktar
Reaching 1,000 paying customers is a moment most founders only dream about. For Linkly, it's a number that represents years of genuine customer relationships, hard-won product decisions, and a founding belief that the best way to build a business is to solve a real problem and solve it better than anyone else. To mark the occasion, we sat down with founder and CEO Chris Muktar to talk about where Linkly came from, what the journey has taught him, and what the next chapter looks like.
What problem were you trying to solve when you first built Linkly?
My previous company was an internet publishing business that made a lot of money from affiliate links. We were using a product called ClickMeter, paying $220 a month for it, and running into a lot of problems. I hadn't coded in several years and wanted to get back into it, so I decided to build my own and bring it in-house.
What started as an internal tool quickly took on a life of its own. We launched it publicly, and the response was immediate — people were looking for exactly this. Watching it grow from a scrappy internal fix into a platform trusted by organisations around the world has been one of the most rewarding things I've ever done.
What's been the hardest moment in your entrepreneurship journey?
Building something from zero is an exercise in navigating constant uncertainty. There are moments where you have to make big decisions with incomplete information, stay the course when the path isn't obvious, and keep pushing forward on conviction alone. Nobody prepares you for that — and you can't learn it in a classroom. The truth is, it's all hard. But every difficult moment has also been a lesson, and those lessons compound over time into something you couldn't have built any other way.
Who's using Linkly in ways you never expected?
The creative ways our customers use Linkly never cease to amaze me. We have teams orchestrating millions of links across global campaigns, marketers building sophisticated automation workflows, businesses running entire SMS marketing operations through the platform, and analysts generating deeply customised reports that we never imagined when we shipped the feature. The common thread is that if there's a powerful way to use a tool, someone will find it — and they'll push it further than you thought possible. That kind of customer ingenuity is genuinely exciting to be part of.
Was there a feature or decision that changed everything?
Scalable infrastructure was a major turning point, and AI has since allowed us to improve the product in ways that simply weren't economically viable before. But the most honest answer is that building something people love is thousands of small improvements driven by thousands of customer conversations. I still interact with customers directly — it's how I stay close to what's working and where there's still room to do better.
What does your team look like, and why stay lean?
Linkly is fully remote. We work with a talented network of freelancers, and with the leverage that modern tools and LLMs provide, a small focused team can move at a pace that simply wasn't possible a few years ago. Staying lean keeps us sharp, fast, and genuinely close to the product. It's a structural advantage we don't take for granted.
Big players exist in this space — where does Linkly fit, and what is it not trying to be?
Linkly was built for a use case the big players were never designed to serve. They optimise for simplicity and mass appeal — which makes sense for their market. We optimise for depth, flexibility, and genuine capability. Linkly is a product-led and customer-led company: every feature we ship comes from a real need, and every roadmap decision is grounded in what our customers are actually trying to do. That's a fundamentally different philosophy, and it shows in the product.
What's the biggest product mistake you've made?
Two things. First, moving too slowly on product improvements we knew mattered. When we finally shipped our redesigned interface and added localisation support, the impact on customer satisfaction and long-term retention was significant — more than I'd expected. It was a clear reminder that investing in the customer experience isn't a nice-to-have, it's the business. Second, not prioritising enterprise-grade infrastructure earlier. We had a significant outage that exposed real gaps in our setup, and I made a commitment then that we'd never find ourselves in that position again.
What would you tell yourself before your first paying customer?
Trust the problem you're solving. If you've identified a genuine gap — something that frustrated you, something the market isn't serving well — back yourself and build with conviction. The journey will surprise you, test you, and ultimately shape you into someone better equipped to lead than you could have imagined at the start. The work is worth it.
What kind of company are you intentionally building?
We want to be a leader in this space — and we want to earn that position the right way. We've served customers of every type and size: from the Olympics, major banks, and government agencies, to individual creators building their personal brands. What unites them is that they trusted us with something important to their business, and we take that seriously. We want Linkly to be the kind of company that wins because it genuinely serves its customers well, operates with transparency, and charges a fair price for real value. That's not a marketing line — it's how we make decisions every day.
1,000 paying customers — what does that number mean to you, and where does Linkly go from here?
It means a great deal. These are 1,000 active businesses and individuals who have chosen Linkly and kept choosing it — and that kind of sustained trust is what we're most proud of. From here, we're focused on making the platform faster, more powerful, and more connected — particularly around automations, AI capabilities, and integrations. This is a space that's too nuanced for the big players to invest in meaningfully, but for a focused and efficient team like ours, we can ship in a day what would take a large organisation months. We're just getting started.
The Takeaway
Chris Muktar built Linkly to solve a problem he felt personally — and a decade later, that founding instinct still drives every product decision. What makes Linkly different isn't just the feature set; it's the philosophy behind it. A founder who still talks to customers. A team that ships fast and listens harder. A business that measures success by how well it serves the people who depend on it.
If you're running link tracking at scale, building marketing automations, or looking for a platform that actually grows with you — this is what Linkly was built for.
Want to see it in action? Book a call with our team and we'll show you exactly what Linkly can do for your business.
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