In 2015, Instagram was a conversion dead end for retailers. Brands had huge followings, but users couldn't click through to buy. Link Big was built to solve that: a patent-pending smart bio link that automatically pointed to the exact product a retailer had just posted — years before Instagram Shopping existed.

Impulse buying is fragile. Every extra step — searching a site, typing a product name, navigating a homepage — bleeds intent. Instagram would not open its platform, so the answer had to work within its rules: rather than fighting the network, the bio link became a live, intelligent redirect to the product page a user had just seen.

Link Big was B2B2C, so it had to serve 2 groups at once:

• Instagram shoppers — responding to impulse in their feed. The experience had to honour the speed of that moment.
• Retailers — from solo Etsy sellers to enterprise e-commerce teams. Small sellers needed simplicity; enterprise clients needed data fidelity and reliability.

Designing a setup flow and reporting layer that served both, without over-engineering either, was one of the project's most nuanced challenges.

I founded Link Big and operated as CEO and Chief Everything Officer — holding product vision, design, business development and marketing alongside a CTO and PM. I owned the retailer-facing product and the marketing experience end to end.

The scope was broad for a 3-person team: backend infrastructure and Instagram integration, a simple retailer setup experience, a marketing site, and sales collateral capable of opening doors at major retail brands. The binding constraint was resource — bootstrapped, with every decision needing to hold up under enterprise scrutiny.

Proof of concept first. The first version validated that the redirect logic held up in the real world — right product, right moment, at feed speed. Only then did we approach the UK's largest retailers directly.

One link, two products. Shoppers saw nothing but a fast jump to the product. Retailers got setup in minutes and a reporting view that tied each post to the traffic and sales it produced — the evidence an enterprise team needs to keep a pilot running.

A pilot with ASOS in Australia led to an 8-week pilot with John Lewis. Formal usability testing in their UX lab produced the result we needed: 10 out of 10 users said they would use the Instagram shopping experience we had designed.

The John Lewis live feed trial delivered a 4× uplift in traffic to JohnLewis.com in week 1, followed by a 29% increase in organic traffic over the first month. The smart bio link itself hit an 8% click-through rate — roughly 8× the ~1% CTR of Instagram ads at the time. These were the headline results of JLAB 2016, where Link Big won £50,000 (matched by L Marks) from a £200,000 prize fund, beating 280 rival entrants. That traction translated directly into investment: we raised £150K on the back of it, and a further £300K 12 months later as we pivoted toward insurance.

The durable lesson: the best product insight often isn't adding capability — it's understanding exactly where friction lives, and removing it before the user has time to give up.