He Built a Link-in-Bio Tool to 8.9 MILLION Users & Raised $30M 🤯 | Jesse Zhang (Beacons AI)

Host: Today on the podcast, we have Jesse Zhang, co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Beacons AI. So far, they've raised $30 million, and in the last seven years, Beacons AI has grown to over 8 million users.

Jesse, can you explain the business behind Beacons AI?

Jesse: At Beacons, we think of content creators as entrepreneurs and the businesses of the future.

But it turns out that when you're running a business, there are a lot of things you have to deal with that have nothing to do with content creation.

We're here to take all of that other stuff off the content creator's hands.

We're focused on building an AI teammate for the content creator. Historically, we've built a bunch of different software tools, including Beacons Bio, email marketing, digital e-commerce, media kits, and more.

Host: What was the inception of the idea, and how has that idea evolved over time?

Jesse: My co-founders and I met over 10 years ago while doing graduate school at Stanford. We were all working in different areas of machine learning.

During the last year of graduate school, we wanted to find a way to apply our AI and machine learning expertise to create value in the world.

While looking at different industries, a friend of ours was running a Shopify store. She was doing all of her marketing through influencers and content creators.

On a day-to-day basis, she would go to Instagram, search for hashtags relevant to her business, and then spend the entire day talking to creators and negotiating how much she should pay them to post about her product.

It was very manual, but she was making a decent amount of revenue.

So she came to us and said, "You guys are machine learning experts. Can you build me something that automates all of this? Something that tells me which creators are the best fit for my business and how much I should pay them?"

That's how we got into the content creator space.

None of us were content creators, but we liked the idea of democratizing influence and empowering individuals to monetize their passions.

As we spoke to more content creators, that's when we started realizing that these are the businesses of the future. They're aggregating huge audiences online and figuring out how to monetize them.

We started asking ourselves: How do we help even more of them?

Host: Can you talk about the product feature that you love the most about Beacons AI?

Jesse: My favorite feature is Beam, our AI teammate.

The reason Beam is so exciting to me is that I really like his design. I think he has this friendly but competent vibe. He's like a space beaver.

But he's actually really powerful because creators already run their businesses through Beacons, so we can see a lot of data.

We see what kinds of people come to a creator's link in bio and what those people click on.

Creators also connect their social media to use features like our media kit, which is a one-page document that organizes all of a creator's personal information so they can secure brand deals.

With all of this context, Beam is like ChatGPT or Claude, but designed specifically to help creators.

Host: What's the business model behind Beacons? Do you charge creators a small subscription, like $9 a month, or is it more about payment processing? What's the main business behind the company?

Jesse: We try to give as much of the product away for free as possible because it's a key component of our growth strategy.

We have a $10-per-month plan and a $30-per-month plan for more premium features.

The main reason people upgrade to the $10-per-month plan is to use a custom domain. So instead of having something like beacons.ai/manut, if you happen to have manut.com, you can use that.

The main reason people upgrade to the $30-per-month plan is to send unlimited email marketing emails to their email list.

They can also do more digital e-commerce, such as selling PDFs, courses, and memberships.

Early Growth

Host: What were some key observations or metrics you saw initially that really blew your mind? Was there a moment where you thought, "We can scale internationally. We can go wherever we want"?

Jesse: When we started the company in 2019, the first product that got traction was our link-in-bio product.

It's a really simple website builder.

Building a website can be pretty difficult. Even Webflow has an entire Webflow University dedicated to teaching people how to set up web pages.

But there was a real need in the market, especially for creators who wanted a simple, mobile-optimized landing page where they could list all the links they wanted to funnel traffic to—whether that's products, blogs, or their other social accounts.

Linktree originally solved this problem, and we took it to the next level.

It took a while for us to get the growth engine going, but once it did, it was really cool to see the flywheel working.

The nice thing about a link-in-bio product is that whenever a creator uses it, they also market it. They'll constantly tell their audience, "Go check out my link in bio."

Over time, if you're seeing the Beacons.ai link everywhere, you start becoming familiar with the brand.

Then, when you want to do your own content creation, you might remember that a lot of people use Beacons.ai.

Websites also retain users pretty well because when someone creates a website, they'll often just keep it up. They won't really take it down, especially if it's collecting analytics for them.

That information is aggregated over time, and you don't want to lose it. As their audience gets used to associating them with that website, it becomes even more valuable.

Host: So what Jesse is saying here for the listeners is that they had initial network effects.

When they put the link in bio out there, more people saw Beacons AI, and it subconsciously built familiarity with the brand.

Most creators are keeping tabs on other creators. They see a creator using Beacons AI, the link looks great, and they want to do the same thing.

Finding the Growth Channel

Host: When you guys first started, what was the growth strategy? Was it ads? Events? Influencer marketing? How did you go about getting the word out?

Jesse: When we first started, we went through Y Combinator in the summer of 2019. We shifted into building for creators about three weeks before Demo Day.

Demo Day is the last week of Y Combinator, where you pitch your product or company in front of thousands of investors.

We had basically no traction at that point.

To get our first few users, we aggressively cold-DMed and cold-emailed people. We also asked our friends if they knew any content creators.

At the time, we only had four people at the company. Two of us were building the product, while the other two were trying to get people to talk to us.

That's how we initially started learning.

We also went to an influencer marketing conference in LA around September 2020.

We realized we only had eight months of runway left. We estimated that it would take about three months to fundraise, which meant we only had five months to make significant progress.

At the time, my co-founder Neil read an article about 19 different growth channels, including events, direct sales, and email marketing.

We ranked all of them and chose three growth channels to invest in.

We tried product-led growth and word of mouth. We also tried building more community, but that didn't work. We did some form of email marketing, which didn't work either.

The thing that ended up working and really got the flywheel going was something I discovered while going through my TikTok For You page.

For every person who had a Linktree link, we would add them to a Notion table or Airtable.

We would recreate their page on Beacons using the same links, but make it more personalized.

Back then, you couldn't customize Linktree very much. Even on the paid plan, there weren't that many design options.

We would embed a YouTube video if they had one. We'd also add things beyond simple links, like text blocks.

Then we'd email the person:

"Hey creator, I'm the co-founder of this creator company. I saw that you were using Linktree. You should check out Beacons because we offer free monetization features and free analytics. We also built your entire page for you already. All you need to do is click this link to claim it, and it'll be ready."

We were inspired by Yelp's tactic of putting up unclaimed business profiles and allowing the actual businesses to claim them.

About 25% of the people we reached out to ended up signing up for Beacons. Half of them would actually put their link in their bio.

These were pretty big creators with millions of followers on this up-and-coming platform called TikTok.

After doing this for a month or two, we started noticing that we were getting organic sign-ups.

At first, it was 10 sign-ups a day. Eventually, it became a couple hundred.

Scaling the Process

Host: How time-consuming was it to make those profiles? Was it really time-consuming?

Jesse: It really was.

I had multiple existential crises while doing it.

For a couple of weeks, I was manually putting together these Beacons pages for content creators and researching who they were.

We hired a small team in the Philippines to help put these pages together.

We also used scrapers and other automations to quickly build these Beacons pages.

You could simply enter the name of a TikTok user, and we would automatically scrape whatever information we had about them to quickly construct the page.

The team in the Philippines would then QA them.

We also had a system where we would automatically send a couple hundred of these emails every single day, followed by additional follow-ups.

The Inflection Point

Host: What was the inflection point where you thought, "Wow, today we saw 100,000 users sign up"?

For example, I interviewed the founder of Neurogum, and he told me that when Joe Rogan mentioned Neurogum, they literally blew up overnight.

For Beacons, was there any moment like that where you thought, "Whoa, what happened?"

Jesse: The first moment that comes to mind is when we started getting multiple sign-ups a day—around 10 sign-ups a day.

We started growing around October or November of 2020.

Then we raised our seed round in May 2021, about six months later.

I think that's when we realized, "This is really interesting."

Suddenly, investors were coming to us.

We were talking to Connie Chan from a16z, The Chainsmokers, Naval Ravikant, Scott Belsky, and a few others.

It was a really interesting moment where we went from being nobody to being somebody.

Fundraising

Host: If you could give some quick advice about fundraising to other founders, what would you suggest?

I meet a lot of founders who really struggle with fundraising. When I talk to people like you, it feels like they just had it figured out.

Jesse: I wouldn't say we had it figured out.

By spring 2021, we had traction, so fundraising became easier.

After we finished YC, Neil, my co-founder and CEO, did all of the fundraising.

Around Demo Day, he went to 150 to 200 meetings and basically got "no"s from everyone except around 10 people.

Huge props to Neil's determination. I don't know how you can deal with that many "no"s and still keep going.

But we learned that the best thing to do for fundraising is actually just build a business that's working.

Once you have traction, you don't need to spend too much time figuring out how to tell the story.

If you find yourself spending a lot of time trying to craft the perfect story because you don't have the data or the expertise, that might be a warning sign that you're not building the right thing.

AI and the Future of Work

Host: How do you feel about where AI is right now, especially with the rise of Claude and all these other tools? What are some of your predictions? What do you think will happen in the next three years?

Jesse: I think we live in a time where it's more possible than ever for individuals to work on their ideas and actually fulfill them.

It's easier than ever to distribute your content and impact a huge audience.

At the same time, it's easier than ever to use AI to help run other parts of your business—to do things that you previously would have had to hire people to do.

I'm optimistic, although it's not clear that we completely understand how AI works yet.

With all technologies, there are going to be bad actors around the world.

At the same time, creativity is being democratized.

You can be a 10-year-old kid with a phone and tell stories. If they're compelling, they can reach the right audience around the world.

I think a lot of people will have to reinvent themselves, which is definitely harder for older people.

For creators, the opportunities are growing.

Think about white-collar jobs like consulting. Why would I hire a consultant when I can just go on Claude, press Deep Research, and get incredible insights on competitor analysis or whatever I need?

I don't need to pay someone for that.

Host: I agree. I think people will just have to figure out how to work in more creative states.

Notable Beacons AI Users

Host: Can you tell us some of the big names that use Beacons AI?

Jesse: A lot of big musicians use Beacons, including Sia and Finneas.

Other users include Chase Stokes from Outer Banks, Wong Fu Productions, Jeremy Lin, and Chloe Kim.

What's Next for Beacons AI?

Host: Before we wrap up, I want to know what's next for Beacons AI. Are there any exciting updates you're about to announce?

Jesse: Beam, the AI teammate, is getting smarter every single day.

The main competency we're teaching Beam right now is helping creators with brand deals.

Beam will be able to reduce the friction between creators, managers, and brands.

Creators are getting taken advantage of every day on so many deals.

This is a very common problem in the creator space. Most creators simply don't know how to price themselves.

If you're a content creator, go to Beacons.ai. It's the best link-in-bio tool right now.

Host: How can people find you and reach out to you?

Jesse: You can go to Beacons.ai/jessie. All of my socials are there.

On LinkedIn, I'm Jessie N Zang, and on Instagram, I'm @jessie.zzzzzz.

Host: Thank you, Jesse, for coming on the show. I really appreciate your time.