Meta announced that Instagram users would now be allowed five links on their profile, but Linktree believes it's not facing an existential risk.
👉 Background: Social apps like Twitter, Instagram and even TikTok only permitted their users to add one link in their bio. So Linktree launched back in 2017 with the idea to become the one link in a user’s bio. But that link links to all their other online pages.
👉 What happened: Late last week, Meta announced that Instagram users would now be allowed five links on their profile. According to Mark Zuckerberg, this was one of the most requested changes by users.
👉 What else: Linktree believes it's not facing an existential risk because it provides unlimited links and works with different social networks at the same time. But it's still not ideal to be facing up against Meta.
💡This is a classic case of startup product innovation vs incumbent size and scale.
💡 Big tech companies have a track record of replicating popular product features that were originally created by smaller startups. Often popular features from iOS apps have suddenly appeared as defaults on Apple’s iPhones. Think popular apps in the health, fitness and wellbeing space.
💡And then, these tech companies leverage their size to offer these popular features to more users. So, the challenge for start-ups like Linktree is to make their products essential to users before a behemoth - like Meta - comes along and steals!
Sign up for Flux and join 100,000 members of the Flux family
