Our path to becoming the leading software player for revenue through influencers.

Skepticism became inspiration. Today, we work with the leading brands.

Linkster is our third joint company that we have successfully launched. The first one doesn't really matter for Linkster - you may know the second company.

In 2016/2017, we went into influencer marketing for the first time, we were founding employees at one of the leading affiliate marketing platforms: Stylink.

To be honest, we were super skeptical, we hadn't had any contact with influencer marketing before and couldn't even imagine that it could work at all.

Our “influencer marketing moment” - Otto.de

The skepticism quickly evaporated. Back then, we saw an influencer on Stylink that we don't really know today. At the time, she had around 80,000 followers. Not much, is it?

She published 2 stories a month on Instagram and generated around €100,000-€150,000 in sales for Otto.de. And we're talking about the poorly optimized 2017 Otto.de - unimaginable for us.

Fascinating! Is this a system, or just a coincidence?

Influencer marketing was a complete black box back then. Brands never really had enough insight into what makes influencer marketing successful and how influencers can be used systematically to achieve long-term success.

For us, success has always meant traffic, purchases, sales and profit.

That was the basic idea behind Linkster.

Linkster = FOR BRANDS that want to understand influencer marketing, make it optimizable and more predictable.

Every other online marketing channel, whether Google Ads or social, has undergone this development. In the beginning, it's the “wild west” - everyone is doing “something”. Everyone throws money at it and hopes that something will happen because it's the new “hype” topic.

At some point, the first people start to focus on measurability, bring in transparency and then at some point it becomes manageable and calculable.

We wanted to make the same possible for influencer marketing.

Back then, influencer marketing = voucher codes + Excel. That's it!

Everything was summarized above. Some successful players stood out in the game. These included FitVia, HelloBody, Invincible Brands Group, the Kaptn and Son bubble and Abouot You. They all started at a time when it was relatively easy to throw money at influencers and then just see what pays off and what doesn't.

Today, influencer marketing is much more competitive, costs a lot more money, and only a few can afford the old “trial and error” strategy...

That is why we have set ourselves the goal of enabling brands to create more efficiently. By bringing the necessary transparency, providing the management tools to reliably achieve clean results and supporting the brands in terms of content.

Linkster was founded in August 2019 and we have been available on the market since fall 2020.

We also acquired our first customers at that time. In pilot projects with the Fond Of Group (which includes Affenzahn, Ever and PingPong, for example) and Congstar.

Two totally different cases, but both were groundbreaking for what we are today.

We quickly focused on building them all around our own sales and user tracking, because that was the most important aspect for our customers from the very beginning.

In the first six months after the launch, we won our first 30-35 customers relatively quickly with this first product. The first full financial year was also a complete success.

We were able to grow quickly from our own resources.

But we still had a lot to learn. Figures alone were not enough. We had to deliver much more. Our customers wanted to set up processes, manage and administer everything, and the first ones were already talking about automation and links between individual modules in Linkster.

And so we have continued to develop Linkster ever since. With confidence in the performance of the channel and trust in the path that our customers take with us.

Developing software for the best of the best and democratizing this knowledge and experience for everyone else - that's Linkster!