The Developer Who Sold Movie Colors as Posters Before Building Liinks

Charlie Clark's early project, The Colors of Motion, was a website that extracted the average color of each film frame. Stacked in chronological order, the shifting colors of a whole movie appeared as one long striped image. When visitors asked for prints, he started selling these images as posters. It was his first experience turning a visual idea built in code into a product people would pay for.

In 2019 he quit his job and built VSUAL, an on-demand print marketplace for artists. While recruiting artists to join, he noticed many of them used link-collection pages in their Instagram profiles. A similar service was already in use, and he decided to enter that market with better design and pricing.

Liinks, the product that grew out of that decision, is a service for building small websites linked from social media profiles. Users gather their content, stores, and other social accounts on a single page and share its address. They can rearrange photos, text, and links to style an intro page without building a separate website. It now supports image grids, embedded video and music, and multiple pages and folders for organizing content.

Building the first version took about two weeks. He reused much of the infrastructure, code, and layouts he had built over six months developing VSUAL. The first version covered account creation and simple page building.

Early sales were done by hand: he built pages for prospective customers himself. For people already using a competing service, he rebuilt the same content more attractively in Liinks and proposed switching. He also built custom pages for people not using any link-collection service and invited them to try it.

He previewed the product in late January 2020 and launched on Product Hunt on February 26. Liinks was free at the time, and it could automatically add links from Instagram post captions to a page. In April he introduced a premium plan at $3 per month, and on April 15 he announced his first paying customer.

On August 15 that year, monthly recurring revenue passed $1,000. Slightly more than 330 customers were paying $3 per month, and it took about four months from the first payment to reach that level. On October 11, 2020, he announced $2,000 in monthly recurring revenue. During that stretch he raised the new-customer price to $3.99 and added onboarding guidance plus conversion-rate experiments.

He kept testing prices afterward. In a 2024 interview, Clark said he had tried several prices including $5 per month, but conversions fell sharply above $4, so he set the base price at $4 at the time. Low operating costs let him stay profitable even at cheap prices.

The product that broadened the customer base was the Pro plan, then starting at $10 per month. With custom domains and multi-profile management, it attracted small businesses, agencies, and customers running several brands. Business demand for managing multiple accounts attached itself to a product that had started as personal intro pages.

Pages that customers published also brought in new customers. Liinks addresses visible in social media profiles and the "Made with Liinks" badge at the bottom of pages advertised the service. He also ran paid ads. Early on he used Instagram ads, then moved to Google Ads when their efficiency dropped. Google Ads figures he shared in 2024 were about $1 per click and about $30 per conversion, with a Stripe-estimated customer lifetime value near $100.

The free plan raised operating costs. Spam and phishing pages grew, and even with automatic blocking, workarounds and false positives forced him to review many profiles by hand. Clark removed the free plan to raise the cost of entry for abuse. He changed the trial so visitors could build a page and try features first, then choose a plan when publishing. New active users fell, but new paying customers rose.

When improving the product, he looked at pages customers had actually built. He created a separate admin screen for that and used it both to set feature priorities and to detect abuse. Features that drew no response after launch were removed, and he reworked code substantially when something genuinely blocked development or performance.

VSUAL met a different fate in the same period. Artists liked the service, but it never gathered enough buyers to sustain the business, and rising printing, framing, and shipping costs piled on. Clark shut it down in April 2023 after funding it with personal money. He ran both products after starting Liinks, but did not keep the earlier business alive to the end.

Liinks recorded $20,000 in monthly recurring revenue with more than 4,200 paying customers in July 2023. An interview published in October 2024 reported about $25,000 in monthly revenue and about 5,300 paying customers. Roughly 4,800 were on the base plan and about 500 on Pro, with trailing-twelve-month revenue near $250,000.

Clark said margins ran 80-90% depending on ad spending. At the time of the 2024 interview, support requests averaged fewer than five per week. High margins and a light support load were what let him run it solo while keeping subscriptions cheap.

Right after launch, the pandemic made his finances unstable, so he took a job again and ran the business alongside employment. He quit to focus on Liinks when monthly recurring revenue reached $25,000 in August 2024, about four and a half years after the first launch.

Clark's official bio, checked in September 2026, says he grew Liinks solo to more than $30,000 in monthly recurring revenue. Current monthly prices are $5 for Starter and $12 for Pro, which includes five profiles, with a 14-day free trial. Building a page stays free, while customers who publish and keep operating a page pay a subscription.