Digital Noir – Nick Humphreys

[00:00:04] Welcome to another episode of Humans Aren’t Robots. A series of conversations with designers and creative thinkers uncovering the human elements of teams in modern business practices. I am your host Sam Davies and I am sitting down with Nick Humphreys. Nick is the co-founder and creative director at Linktree.

[00:02:07] When you were growing up, did you know what you wanted to be?

[00:02:30] It’s a tough question. I was always the kid scribbling on the piece of paper at the restaurant, always. So that was just like cartoons in my imagination was kind of imprinted on the fridge and anything like it had a surface and I had to sort of draw on. So creativity was definitely at the forefront of everything. But I also had an analytical and logical mind as well. So I’ve always sort of been trying to create little puzzles as well. And that eventually led me to study accounting at one point. I always loved the creative side, but then advertising always spoke to me as a kid, which is super weird. So, yeah, I guess that sort of want to be creative or mostly illustration led me into a uni course. I spent a couple of years working in advertising and really wanting to craft that creative idea to bring it to life and sort of earn an OK wage and three months out of my course in that industry, I really recognized how toxic it was. I then found myself taking a year off. I did a fine art course. I also found myself in a nightclub managing the bar, which was kind of, I guess, where I learned a lot of my people skills, I suppose, and the ability to crunch late nights and still have a smile on my face. So after the fine art degree, I really sort of recognised my desperate need to be a creator and sort of produce work. I did a psychology and design degree, communication design, like encapsulated both worlds. So not just making something beautiful, but something functional. And communication is that thing that sort of really drives me and design that communication.

[00:05:11] How many years of uni was that?

[00:05:13] Oh, I don’t often like to think of that because I was treading water for about seven and a half years, a long time. If I had my chance again, I’d probably go headfirst into actual work to really sort of find myself and I try to give that advice to any young person. I think uni is great, but there’s also a lot to be said about just actually applying yourself and practically learning on the job.

[00:05:41] Do you think that’s changed in terms of sort of how much information is readily available for a young person that can actually dive in and get a lot of the same information they could from uni practically themselves and then go out and start applying it?

[00:05:58] Now with all the availability of all this information and you’ve got YouTube like it’s a basically unending resource of inspiration and insight and tutorials. I’m really excited to see the future of education and it may not be a single uni, it’s kind of like leaders in the space that people go to for specific sort of insights.

[00:07:29]  I think we were just already in the late 90s at that cusp of understanding that we could teach ourselves online. And there was so much that you could learn and go out there and apply quickly. So it’s a tricky one, tertiary education, and especially in these fields that move quickly.

[00:08:36] Yeah, I think the biggest gap for me, obviously, the isolation of learning online is a big thing for me. Like obviously there’s communities you can tap into. But there are a lot of experiences that you can’t really replicate at home.  There’s kind of an element, I guess where meet ups come into play.  But there are some fundamental gaps that I had in my learning for design, especially that I think could be absolutely solved. It’s very rare that in design teaching, they give you insights on how difficult it is to be a client. And then articulation is incredibly tough. And that’s something that you generally don’t experience until you’re in the work force and you’re having to wrangle with somebody that can’t explain in your terms what success is.

[00:09:59] You found yourself in London after seven years of uni?

[00:10:04] I did. Yeah, it’s important to note as well, during that entire seven years at uni, I’d always had two or three jobs on the go as well. I was crushing some pretty big hours. I think that’s a common thread working myself to the bone, but it’s out of a deep love for it. So I was working, doing actual practical graphic design all through uni. And then I think I’d sort of reached a little period of burnout, decided to pack it all in and go to London and do the classic expat sort of thing and burn around there for a while and then ended up staying there for almost five years. I started, obviously, in a cafe, the obligatory cafe Australian pouring coffees. I got into fashion early on there, so I was doing graphic design for a very trendy East London label, a world that I had not really been involved in.

[00:11:24] So a lot of not really knowing anything about anything. I was just sort of bouncing around, figuring stuff out. And that was a really collaborative and exciting environment to work within. Then I moved into a more traditional agency, working on some immediately exciting brands, but the realities of the work was kind of different. I got my first sort of taste of experiential design and sort of really brand immersive websites, but also like hyper functional UX kind of utility design. I got the full spectrum of where I wanted to be. And then after London I did some freelance after working at that place and really got a taste of what it’s like to live hand-to-mouth and be very aggressive in trying to find new clients.

[00:12:50] Did you find you were working in agency side in Melbourne before you went to London?

[00:12:56] No. So I was actually working with my current co-founders in the beginnings of their sort of music marketing agency. And the key thread for me or theme for me was I was generally the individual design contributor in these companies, which is challenging when you don’t really have a soundboard. I’d have a week to be competent in whatever it is. So there’s just me being the only one I had to work across everything I’d got exposed to everything. I’ve done sixty thousand product catalogues, and then I’ve run that entire print process. That get stuck in roll my sleeves up mentality has been common through my work.

[00:13:53] Coming back to Australia I found that the discipline of especially web design in general within businesses was much more insular.

[00:15:06] Yeah, absolutely. So working together with the technical side, that cross-functional team which I experienced over there coming back to Australia when I started the agency, that was a huge goal for us was to basically every single project that we did was in order to afford that engineer, because we wanted to work in tandem and that outsourcing element, which a lot of companies or outsourcing the tech side to somebody else that’s outside of the office, it can just be really difficult to work collaboratively together and make something to bridge that gap between design and development.

[00:16:12] Yeah, and it is often just seen as two very separate disciplines that don’t need to go together and then that loop back from development into design again,  strategy or marketing or whatever it might be, are often compartmentalized when in practice, as one sort of holistic flow, you end up with better products.

[00:16:34] Yeah, absolutely, definitely

[00:16:36] So the agency Bolster you came back and jumped back into that after London?

[00:16:45] I did and they were kind of knocking on my door the entire time. The opportunity to start a business and actually work on some pretty big campaigns back home. Yeah, it got me on the plane. We didn’t take any wages for about three years. So it was definitely an exciting time. But growing something with some friends in a space music that we absolutely love was sort of an opportunity I couldn’t turn down. And it sort of led to where I am today, which is nice.

[00:17:47] So Linktree, which is a co-founder of which many of our listeners will be aware of, came out of a frustration from you guys at Bolster. Tell us a little bit about the seed of that idea.

[00:18:04] Yeah, every sort of project that we did, we had this sort of goal like a kickstarter of our own. We finally hired this designer and an outside developer, and we’re super excited. So we always wanted to have these, like, little digital products that would be tied to music in some way or marketing kind of like you just have those brand immersive Spotify experiences. We wanted to do stuff like that. At that time we were working with hundreds of clients, like clients from the scale of a very small budget that we’re just trying to sort of market an album to large scale festivals like Splendour in the Grass with sixty thousand tickets to sell whatever it is. So the spectrum was broad. And at the time the algorithm in Instagram was chronological.

[00:19:08] So then they flipped that to a sort of engagement based algorithm. And what that meant was you might be seeing a post from two weeks ago and it might be tied to a link that’s no longer relevant or active. So that’s an issue for that end visitor trying to click on that link that’s no longer valid. And then because of the scale of clients we had, we were basically swapping links out left, right and centre. So that was irritating because of the time. And then the second thing was that sacrifice of one initiative over another.

[00:20:09] Was it as simple as, hey, why don’t we just create a Web page that has multiple links on it?

[00:20:23] Yeah, my memory’s a little foggy, but I’m pretty sure Alex came in and he goes dude, surely there’s an easier way. What if we just make this kind of, like, landing page of links? It allows you to connect everything to it. Six hours later, we had a prototype effectively. We eventually landed on this like very, very simple utilitarian Linktree, which is not dissimilar to what you find today. The back end was non-existent. We didn’t sit down for weeks and kind of go like, alright, well, what about the infrastructure layer and what could this happen? It was just solve this problem for us and then move on, really.

[00:21:38] I’d love to hear a little bit about the reality from going from, yeah, great we’ll create something in six hours and then actually scale into eight million plus users, because I think there’s a big gap in the middle there that most people don’t appreciate.

[00:22:03] Yeah, there definitely is. We never really started out wanting to be tech startup founders, to be absolutely frank. We really have this sort of vision to want to support creators. So in the agency, any time we had a budget to do so, we would try and loop in a musician in that marketing. So there’s always been these like very tight alignment to sort of making ethical decisions in the work that we make.  We built this product in six hours. Over the next two weeks or so, we sort of productize it created a skeletal sort of brand and we thought there was potential there. But obviously we had a growing agency and that was like picking up steam. So it was kind of put that on the back burner. Alicia Keys signs up and then that was kind of it. That trajectory was like we were catapulted into. Okay, well, now we have this platform that we haven’t really spent a huge amount of time thinking about how it’s going to grow. So there was a lot of learning on the job. And Alex, Anthony and I at the time lived together. We got a lot of stuff done and we grew really close as friends, founders.

So, yeah, that sort of gap, because we potentially didn’t spend so much time painstaking over what this would become, a lot of it was organically driven sort of growth. So at the time there was no other service like it. That early feedback from users was absolutely fundamental to where we are today, and it sort of underpinned every decision on going.

00:25:33] How many users were out before you actually started employing people to come and work on the platform when it wasn’t just the three of you?

00:25:41] Yeah. So obviously the agency was scaling so quickly we knew that it was important to Linktree to have some dedicated heads. So we got an engineer. We were growing the engineering department in the agency and we introduced kind of that you would get assigned a few days a week just to focus on the infrastructure, that sort of thing. But there was no real focus on it for a while because we had this scaling agency. And I think it probably got to a million users. It’s proven in the space where we created this category and now we’re the market leader. In the last 18 months, we’ve really put the foot down and sort of grown that team from five to ten to 40 now.

[00:27:03] And then you’ve got a million people that want tech support and customer support and then thinking about marketing and then also growing a new team on top of that.  There’s a lot as a founder to actually have to take in and juggle.

00:27:42]  I think I always say we were sort of building the plane as we were flying or laying the tracks as the train came, which is incredibly motivating and a little terrifying, but it’s kind of exciting as well. I think a lot of our decisions have been informed by instinct. And now we’re growing a team and we’re getting sort of dedicated people with a dedicated skill set. They’re almost validating some of the decisions we made. That leading by instinct was definitely something that was kind of necessary at that point.

[00:28:38] I’m interested in a term like design thinking. And what does that mean to you?

[00:28:47] Every single thing that I do is designed in some way, which may sound manipulative, but I’m very adaptive to the scenario, so I’ll design my feedback or a conversation with an intended outcome. Design thinking for me isn’t really sort of a tactical scientific approach. It’s just kind of embedded in everything I do. I’m more of a practical learner, but I’m always trying to figure out, it’s all about communication for me, no matter what the end state is or what medium I’m using, everything is about how can I craft this message to be received better?

[00:29:44] Which is essentially what the design thinking is. I think that the organic process of growing anything or building something, if you’re laying the tracks in front of you as the engines are moving, really is that process of learning quickly and adapting and getting the feedback and then taking the next step. Often the theory of a framework sort of gets in the way of actually laying the track.

[00:30:13] Yeah, and now that we’ve got a team to actually bring us into more of a refined process, I’m able to start sharpening my tools and make more informed decisions. In the early days, it was just like, well, here’s the problem, let’s attack it. It’s us versus the problem. Figure it out. And then luckily, we haven’t really made too many mistakes.

[00:31:10]How important is the role of design holistically in your business?

[00:31:21] Yeah, Linktree is incredibly driven by design, so I think all of us have a lot of sensibilities toward it. There’s no real points where I’m having to fight for design or where our voice isn’t included or as equal as another department it’s definitely something we’re working towards. Design has been incredibly important, although it’s like an incredibly simple looking tool on the surface. A lot of those design decisions we painstake over.

[00:32:30] So you mentioned sort of wanting to ingrain it further within the DNA of the business. How do you think you go about doing that?

[00:32:38] Yeah, good to have consistently surfaced goals and themes to inform our work. So a big part of that is like creating and defining our guiding principles for the design team. But it’s also related to how we operate as a business ongoing and as we include new people into that, making sure that they’re aligned and on the right bus with us. The intention economy has been driving a lot of apps forward. We wanted to do the opposite of that and try and make more ethical human led decisions.

[00:33:53] How many people in the design department?

[00:33:57] Not enough, absolutely not enough.  We’ve been holding up eight million users with two designers, two point five. I’m the point five. We’re getting five hundred and sixty million unique views a month on Linktree platforms. So, yeah, the desperate need for engineers to facilitate that outweighed our focus for the design department, which is unfortunate.

[00:35:29] That obviously speaks to the organic growth of the platform and then someone like Alicia Keys coming on board. I suppose that that does just sort of push fairly heavy organic growth when you can have those types of people on board.

[00:35:51] Yeah, definitely. Obviously, those kind of users with a lot of influence, they’re incredibly valuable from a marketing sense, they kind of are the marketing engine. But we absolutely don’t rely on that as the only area of growth. Like, we just always focusing on how to make this product better and easier and simpler and maintaining uptime.

[00:36:41] Do you think that there’s space for people to actually have small business online that can serve users and be quite niche as opposed to this incessant need to scale to 100 million plus?

[00:37:28] Yeah, I think a lot of our growth happened organically and led us to this position where we have a platform and we can see the growth potential.  It’s evident to us that that was a missing piece, that connective tissue from social to wherever else. And also what we recognize is the need to democratize the digital experience or the ability for somebody to have a digital presence.

[00:39:06] What do you see as maybe some of the future trends in the world of Web?

[00:39:38] Yeah, so I do enjoy speculative design, or speculative thinking, I also like catastrophic thinking as well, trying to think of all the bad things that could happen then designing to defend against that. But in terms of the speculative exercises we’ve done at Linktree, it’s kind of thinking about what does 5G mean for online experiences, like how could that inform some of the features that we release ongoing? And what about market changes? What happens when social media changes? So trying to defend against that and just look a little further on the horizon.  Linktree is kind of this utilitarian, very hyper functional tool that’s conversion focused. And I don’t want to add too much embellishment because it’s important to say that we have two people that we work for – there’s the user of the Linktree and then there’s the end visitor.

 

So, yeah, as we sort of scale, keeping a Linktree looking like a Linktree is important to us. And it’s also giving people the choice to discover content.

[00:41:52]  As a leader now, like, how do you actually, for yourself, go and seek professional and other advice to continue your sort of growth as a human?

[00:42:27] Yeah, I think I’m one of those hyper, I don’t know if it’s right to say, but I’m incredibly empathetic, potentially not as empathetic as I could be to myself many times. But I think that’s just the nature of building a scaling business and adding more and more people into that team. It’s very hard to find that time to focus on yourself.. I think I do subscribe to a lot of newsletters when I have the time to read it, get some really great insights from those people.  When we were allowed to meet physically I would go to these sort of meet ups or I would go to sort of events like PausFest, for example, and just having that, the ability to talk to somebody that’s had a similar experience. I hung out with one of the founders of Patreon and showed him some koalas. And I’m also in this thing called Growth Club, which is a Victorian initiative. And it sort of groups you with other founders in the same scale up stage.

[00:44:49]. It’s hard when you’re running that fast. But I think that taking that time to speak to other people that are in the same boat as you is quite cathartic.

[00:44:59] So being able to talk to other founders that are having similar sorts of thoughts and I can bounce ideas off using them as a sounding board has been absolutely invaluable.

[00:45:47] Thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to have a chat with us. If people want to find out more about yourself or Bolster or Linktree, what can they look?

[00:45:58] Yeah. Firstly, thank you so much for having me. LinkedIn is a good place.  Hit me up on LinkedIn obviously Linktree and Bolster.

[00:47:02] For one thing, I will tell the listeners to check out on the Bolster website you’ve got your staff handbook or the business handbook on the website, which I think is a really brilliant example of a handbook. And I love that it’s public facing.

[00:47:17] Some of the expectations people have of tech don’t quite align with the way that we’re sort of growing Linktree. And the handbook has been an incredible tool to convey that vibe to people. And they almost know what to expect when they’re coming into that team.

[00:48:24]Thanks so much, Nick, for that chat. I really enjoyed it and love the product. And like I said, this is the last episode of this season. So we’re wrapping things up here and will be back bigger, better, shinier later in 2021.