I joined Selim and Mugeeb at CreatorSpace, which was the name at the time, to help creators show the products they've built and find others who do the same.

After redesigning the whole product and talking to many early users, we noticed a problem. People had to spend a lot of effort and time to write long form posts from scratch, and didn't even get much in return because the platform was still unknown.

So we sat down and decided to pursue a different path first.

For the next four weeks, we designed and built a completely new product from scratch. It allows you to build a beautiful personal page by just pasting in all your links from around the web.

We decided to call it Bento, a nod to the grid layout of bento sushi boxes.

We received an amazing response when we launched in mid-december. People couldn't wait to try it out and use Bento as their new link-in-bio.

Because of that, we decided to double down. Mugeeb and I started work on a custom grid implementation that would serve as the foundation of the ease of use and playfulness Bento became known for.

We also added a full drag & drop experience to the mobile version of Bento which felt almost like a native app.

We had one overarching design rule at Bento:
The whole experience had to be WYSIWYG; every element on your Bento had to be directly manipulatable, without opening a separate edit menu.

This rule forced us to reduce every feature down to its essence, because the edit UI had to live right alongside the element it would manipulate, without conflicting with it.

Over the following months, we kept adding features every week that made Bento even more useful and fun:

Rich widget previews for major social media platforms. An interactive Spotify widget that could play music. A text widget. A maps widget. An auto generated open graph image that showed a simplified mini version of your Bento when sharing your link.

And every widget included fun little details, like a cursor chat bubble in the figma widget, moving clouds and flying objects in the maps widget, or a rotating vinyl record when playing the music from a spotify widget.

Over the course of a few months, Bento became the link-in-bio of choice for many familiar names from the industry.

Among them were rogie, David Hoang, Josh Miller, Greg Isenberg, Andy Budd, Andreas Storm, Jordi Bruin, Dustin Mierau, Lochie, and many others.

We were also featured in videos from famous Youtubers:

When we added the ability to add links to images, something interesting happened:

People started creating custom widget designs and distributed them to others as Figma community files. Skeuomorphic leather widgets, weather widgets, templates for "my favorite tv show" widgets - you name it.

A whole little ecosystem formed naturally around designing little images that others could use to make their Bento look great beyond the built in options.

It was amazing to witness how we must have hit the sweet spot between a valuable use case and the right creative constraints that sparked something in people and made them spend hours creating beautiful little images.

We were also lucky enough to have a whole little community of people form around Bento. People that really cared about the product and what it stood for.

Whenever we launched a new feature, there was an outpouring of love and excitement, and it became a habit to start searching for what easter egg we might have hidden this time.

I've never experienced something like this at previous companies I worked for. It was endlessly motivating to go the extra mile and make Bento as cool as possible for them.

The whole journey wouldn't have been the same without them, and they truly helped make Bento what it was.

In June 2023, just 5 months after launching Bento, we were acquired by Linktree and joined their team.