Apply HN: – Linkedin without the spam
Problem : Only professional networking site out there is also the biggest spammer. Mainly because it serves to Sales and Recruiters more than it does to Users
Solution : A place where users can do the following : 1. Publish their profile, interest and recent work. Ex direct stream to github projects blog articles about your work
2. Create forms that others need to fill in before inviting. Ex : DirectConnectForm - just how do i know you field HireMe form - mandatory fields like company name, comp, location, etc SellMe form - Product, problem it solves, pricing, demo link, etc Other customized forms.
3. People who are interested to connect with you need to go through one of the forms. These forms define the edge of the graphs
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 118 ms ] threadthen the employer agents can search for active seekers or passive seekers and present some detailed information about the position. If the seeker is interested, they make contact, if not the employer agent moves on unless told to check back.
It is the users you have to talk to. I have spent countless hours talking to users and employers over the last 8 months as I am doing something similar to OP. There are so many changes they will like to see with some voiced out here in the thread. There are also many ways to monetize as the employers I spoke with are frustrated and willing to pay for the right service that yield results.
> Ex direct stream to github projects blog articles about your work
The vast majority of people won't have this, what's the value for those people?
How will you make money?
2. Although we have to start somewhere and engineers and tech people are easier to start with hence github
3. Monetization is something we do think about in terms of areas that would not compromise with the premise of the network i.e users first. For example if the contact form works, recruiters will pay depending on how many forms/invites they can send, so like 25 free per month but then pay for next 5 till you hit the monthly cap(Yes cap please). But needs more thinking here
Fighting linkedin - Agreed. Its a gigantic company and a very difficult fight with amazing engineering talent. Convincing users to open another professional site account is not our value proposition, instead creating a product where they find a value proposition different from Linkedin's is where we want to concentrate.
Also, YC's and HN's guidance can help here.
Please share if you have any ideas too on your second question
chicken - users eggs - sales, recruiters, etc
There are other professional networks out there. You just haven't heard of most of them.
The trouble is that respecting people's right not to bombarded with cookie-cutter emails means that your social network struggles to even attract large numbers of chickens, and the eggs aren't likely to be interested because the same people can generally be reached more easily on the much-bigger LinkedIn.
Don't get me wrong, I think there's plenty of scope for a better professional network site than LinkedIn (they don't even do job boards well, which is frankly weird given their unrivalled candidate metadata) But sadly, antipathy to spamming is the differentiator that's least likely to result in a successful mainstream social network.
http://4scotty.com and http://honeypot.io
Thats why the importance is to have a platform/features that are geared towards users.HN, reddit, discourse are great pointers btw to learn from.
I thought about allowing users to "opt-in" to the network when they are interested in being contacted. Privacy and data ownership are another big concern of mine. Should advanced users be able to host their own profiles (no fees ever) and connect to the network when they want to be reached for opportunities?
* Social networks are tough, tough, tough. There are so many subtle UX issues (why did Facebook work but Friendster fail? Why did MySpace work for a while but ultimately fail?) and there's the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem. Do you really, truly understand why your idea will win?
* Do you think that you really need the YC Fellowship? Will that actually help you? What will you use the $ for?
As @patio11 tweeted the other night:
https://twitter.com/patio11/status/717474850927808512
"It has never in the history of mankind been cheaper to make software. You don't need funding you need a day job at McDonalds."
* I think your best bet - if you really believe in this idea - is to build a prototype on your own, show the world why you've built a better LinkedIn, and show us / investors / YC why your professional social network is better than LinkedIn, and back it up with hard growth numbers.
If this 'Apply HN' instead said something like:
"So we have an idea - it's LinkedIn without the spam. We built a prototype, and we've gotten 50,000 people in the < whatever > business community to use it. They love it. We're growing within this niche at 20% per week. But it's only two of us, and we need to grow. So here we are -- we'd love the YC Fellowship so we can put some real effort into X, then Y, and finally Z."
Do that, and you've got a winner.
My $0.02. Discount as you will, and best of luck to your team!
Agreed again,I do not need the YC funding. Although the advice,resource and the environment that it provides can be incredibly valuable. Having said that everyday there are great companies built outside of YC so yes will still give this a shot anyway
Yes but I just had this idea few days ago and with a full time job have just got some wireframes and data models done. I did not want to miss on Apply HN thread and the valuable feedback here. For example from one of the comments here I already changed one of my data models.
Also I am one man team right now :) so I realized from the feedback here that I would need a UI or hopefully a front-end UI founder on this.
I hope to move from Apply HN to Show HN. Thanks again
Email is in my profile.
Another obvious issue with today's recruiting is that every giant wants to maintain a talent pool, so they throw all kinds of events, and recruiters are helping with this. however, if they are able to socialize their candidate database attached with ATS, and keep them updated, I believe they are more than happy to. I think both your idea and mine is a good angle to solve this problem.
Anyway, let me know if you're interested in working together.
The business can clip X% of any earnings. Everyone is contactable at a price level they are happy to read emails as they are being paid to do so. Recruiters can still contact you but now they cant spam, or to do so has significant costs. Personally I'd be happy to pay a few bucks for the occasional non-contact message I send for business purposes as these usually have an expected payoff, and the person knows you're a bit more committed/serious too.
I ended up inmailing the CEO of digitalocean (brian uretsky) to ask if they woul reverse the expiration of my credits (they did, great company although I also went through the support channel) but when I pressed send on the inmail it said:
This user has an open profile, your 1 free inmail sent. i forgot the exact language, but this was close.
It just made me feel like they(linkedin) felt like it was doing me a favor because Brian Uretsky has an open contact policy for some reason. Despite what is probably an unmanigable inbox.
Si if we accept this isn't the norm(it isn't) some people may be keen on this implementation, myself included.
However, the problem is a value mismatch. I was working on this with a buddy and persuaded him to pivot, the Value Prop Mismatch, is hard to correct.
Sure, wealthier but idealistic people might ask you to donate to charity, or some other option. Maybe answer a few emails of people below you, but if I needed/was hoping to, contact a guy who is the ceo of a company to do something other than beg for his product for free, what would I offer him/her?
The people at the top (typically) have money, influence and connections. they don't need linkedIn and have enough friend-of-a-friends to read biz plans and advise & mentor them. they don't care about money (withon reason), so why are they using it?
the idea we had was foreign-local mismatch for high end professionals in places where both parties would need something: buyer, seller, partnership, mutually strong connections.
but it just isn't that sticky. on balance, i like the idea, and it works for linkedin as they have all the users, but if they don't...well it just becomes a consulting marketplace like whatever the new current odesk-esk company is.
That enables two things - it gives the system well structured data. And then we can give the user a UI which enables them to filter out interested reach outs than not so interesting reach out.
So in your case Brian can have a form titled digitalocean customer. You can use that to connect/contact him. He can either chose to accept it, ignore it, or if we can make it downloadable/forwardable he can send it to head of customer support etc.
One challenge that is posses is to have limited number of such contact forms do the trick and its relevance to the person who is connecting.
That was my concern. Brian (didn't here back, but everything got taken care of) seems like a great guy. I was raising the concern that; and this is rather unfortunate, he is atypical.
If I am simply in it for the money/selling favors. Well then the business ends up being a consultancy. The other end, would be the example above. However, the ratio of really successful and thoughtful people willing to read unsolicited email and provide feedback likely isn't very large.
The gap between the people at the bottom - their perceived value, is much lower than the people at the top.
Your model works really well for the middle third of the social network. People in the middle may or may not be willing to help ostensibly equal people do something (advice, get a deal done, talk politics, etc.)
The problem I found was the people in the bottom (me in this example) and Brian[1]. But not actually Brian, but a character representing how the media portray Travis Kalanick.
Travis has a lot of money, success, insight and power. He has a super small amount of time. I on the other hand have more time now as my recent contract negotiations didn't go super well.
The problem, we found doing the model is what the people at the bottom could provide of value to a guy like travis that would be equal in value to his perception of time.
So I like the model, there has to be something interesting to bridge the gap though, a twist that would tie it together. I don't love just limiting people to castes or something, or only letting high value or mid-value people on.
My buddies Idea was basically a reverse syndicate. Actually turned out to be interesting, but I don't thin workable, where I (a person at the bottom) am an entrepreneur.
1. Entrepreneur [me]
2. You [you]. You and I know each other, and you know Brian. I am raising a seed round and I want Brian to fund me, but I don't know him at all. Well, you know me so we are a degree of separation.
3. However, that isn't really enough for you to leverage your friendship with him for an acquaintance. His idea was something like:
I would give you micro equity to introduce me if you got a deal done. maybe some bips if you can get him my deck, and the guy get's me to invest
4. So I am bridging the gap with a maven in the middle. However, it get's crazy as some people are social connectors and some aren't and then you just end up trying to remap society into a sql/graph database, or distributed ledger if your trendy.
I really like both the ideas (yours and his), but really cracking that code is the win, and while I trivialized it above, it is both high value and a super hard problem which is not solved at all. Especially, if I need to/want to connect with some subset of the billions of people like me, but who don't speak my language.
The idea is pretty decent. Execution is hard as it always is of course, but really connecting the dots here on ux and psych will be interesting to tackle.
Jeez. I realized I have been invoking this guys name a ton, and I don't know him at all. I mean, I assume he is a great guy based on the fact that I was able to email him, and you said he was a cool guy, so I am making him out to be a social network hero, but this is an example. Brian, if you read this, hit me back man, I could use some more DO credit.
It is a tough but interesting problem.
Really, what I want is the best offer every so often to keep my head in the market, and (I assume) the amount recruiters would pay to contact me is basically meaningless to me but nontrivial at scale for the platform.
Or maybe Dutch auction and send me the top 3, then I can ignore them if I want but I can at least pick my favorite(s) to give some signal back upstream for what kinds of jobs I might actually be looking for (or let me "thumbs up" any that are particularly interesting, etc), even if I don't actually respond to that individual contact.
* Create a profile.
* Record where you've worked.
* Post small "updates". Which would be visible to "connections".
That would be the core of the service and the job-hunting stuff would be kinda-seperate.
The problem is twofold: scaling and getting users. If you have no users then the system is futile (I setup a dating site once, which struggled due to lack of users. You join? No users in your city? Never return). On the other hand if you suddenly have 50,000 users you system will struggle if you're doing it on the cheap with a simple virtual machine. You need to plan for rapid scalability but assume you'll get none.
Regarding the lack of users, I agree that deserted website is not ideal. But I think it should initially go from a individual centric website and organically evolve into a community