I Built a Link-in-Bio Tool for Africa: Here’s What Happened Two Months In

Back in January, I started building LegacyTree. The idea was simple: a link-in-bio tool, like Linktree, but built with an African identity and one feature that most of the existing players don’t have - the ability to search and browse other people’s trees.

That second part matters more than it might sound.

Functionality first, polish later

The initial build was deliberate in its restraint. Get the core working: create a tree, add your links, share one URL. No feature bloat, no over-engineered UI. Just the thing that needed to exist.

By February it was live. And quietly, people started using it.

That’s the part I didn’t fully anticipate — how quickly “core functionality” can become enough for real users if it solves a real problem. There’s something freeing about that. You don’t need to ship the perfect product. You need to ship the useful one.

What makes LegacyTree different

The market for link-in-bio tools is crowded. Linktree, Beacons, Bento, Carrd — there’s no shortage of options. So the question anyone would ask is: what would make someone choose this instead?

Two things.

The LegacyAfrica Brand. The identity is baked in — the name, the framing, the community it’s trying to build. “Your Legacy, One Tree” is doing more work than just being a tagline. It’s positioning this as something for builders, creators, and entrepreneurs who see themselves as part of a larger African story. That’s a real audience that’s underserved by tools built with a completely different context in mind.

Discovery. On Linktree, your profile exists but it’s essentially invisible to anyone who doesn’t already have your link. On LegacyTree, through LegacyHub, you can search and browse other people’s trees. That transforms it from a static redirect page into something closer to a directory — a place where being present means being discoverable. For someone trying to grow their audience, that’s a meaningfully different proposition.

The recent update

Two months in, with real users on the platform, the focus has shifted from “does this work?” to “does this feel good to use?” The latest round of updates tackled some of the friction that was accumulating as more people came in on their phones.

Mobile navigation got a proper dropdown menu. Page headers across the site were standardised and tightened up. The logo got refreshed. None of these are dramatic changes — but they’re the kind of thing that compounds. A product that’s slightly more navigable, slightly more coherent, slightly more trustworthy at first glance is one that retains more of the people who find it.

This is the refinement phase. The hard infrastructure is in place. Now it’s about sanding the edges.

What’s next

The user base is growing. Slowly, organically, which is actually the best kind of growth at this stage — it means the people who are there actually want to be there.

The roadmap from here is about deepening what makes LegacyTree distinct: better analytics so creators can understand their audience, more ways to make profiles stand out visually, and continuing to develop the discovery layer that makes LegacyHub more than just a search box.

Building in public, building for a specific community, building lean — it’s a particular kind of discipline. But two months in, with users planting their trees and the product getting sharper with each iteration, it feels like exactly the right approach.

Shout out to Owam Hoyi, Founder of LegacyAfrica - the brand behind LegacyTree and LegacyHub.

LegacyTree is live at legacyafricagq.co.za. Plant your tree.