Show HN: LinkedIn sucks, so I built a better one (heyopenspot.com)
Thats why I used to built a personal microsite on Squarespace and uploaded a video resume to YouTube to stand out - it helped me land interviews and get into Big Tech.
But I always wondered: why isn’t there a platform designed to help you stand out like that?
So I built OpenSpot: a public, curated platform where you can showcase who you are — with video, audio, and proof of your work. No endless feeds. No humblebrags. Just real people open to new opportunities.
We’ve already onboarded a few companies, so recruiters can reach out to you directly. But you can also connect with other standout folks and supercharge your network.
Just upload your resume and we´ll automatically generate your profile in under 1 minute.
It’s early, but feels like something people actually need. Would love your thoughts.
397 comments
[ 5.2 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadYou can also restrict yourself to following friends, and disable notifications from people who write too much crap. I do this and my feed is acceptable.
But the core issue we’re trying to solve isn’t just the feed — it’s how hard it is to stand out when applying for jobs. Resumes and LinkedIn profiles all start to look the same, and you’re often just another name in a pile.
From what we’ve seen so far, people who include short videos or unique showcases of their work get 3–5x more interviews.
The fact is we're just another name on the pile - but it's not because of presentation, it's because the underlying structure that determines how to the job market works and for what intent. There are exceptions of course, both for fair and unfair reasons, but there's nothing your platform is solving for me: I need a job, not to stand out by changing how I present myself. I see zero reasons to engage in it.
I wish you luck.
We’re not pushing video as a requirement — it’s just one option for people who want to show more personality or communicate things that don’t come across in text. Some folks prefer writing, some showcase projects or code — all of that works on OpenSpot.
The idea is to give people more ways to be seen for who they are, not force everyone into the same format.
All platforms become bad as soon as you allow average Joe speak his mind.
The only ones that somewhat save themselves are the likes of HN and Reddit where it's all about discussing, but users are mostly anonymous and not trying to promote their brand.
To clarify: OpenSpot doesn’t have a feed, followers, or any social mechanics. There’s no algorithm pushing content or encouraging endless posting. When we say “create content,” we mean things like a short video intro, showcasing past work, or writing a quick blurb about what makes you unique — all on your profile, not for public engagement farming.
The spammers, the SEO farmers, the porn merchants won't care.
A link is a link.
I've been tackling spam for 15+ years and you will get hit. I wish it were not the case, but it is. Expect it.
Spam is not machine-generated content?
If it is so, I don't see the problem with that. Sure, you'll have the fake-happy and fake-positive content, but they'll not be force fed to you.
Most links are nofollow these days. Those still provide SEO value. Google will find your site very suspicious if your dofollow to nofollow ratio is too high.
For implicit algorithms, outside of the issues/misincentives of time-sorted feeds, there's also game theory and behavioral economics.
Hard disagree on that one. Average Joe is perfectly fine.
But I strongly agree on professional platforms allowing users to create content being an incredibly bad idea.
A possibility turns into an obligation for success real quick. I have just about 0 interest in creating 10 posts per day to game some algorithm into promoting me. And neither would I like hiring someone who spends 80% of his time awake trying to game some algorithm into enlongating his job title.
Openspot has no algorithm, no feed, and no pressure to post daily. It’s not about creating content for engagement — it’s about helping people show their real value in a more human way than a PDF resume or a keyword-stuffed LinkedIn profile.
You don’t need to “game” anything — a short video intro, a demo of your work, or just a few lines about what you’re great at is often enough to stand out. That’s the whole point: quality signals over content farming.
I do not think that is the big problem. The problem is what platforms promote: content that creates engagement.
[1] I accomplished that for the first time by writing a news article about an event a few months before it happened.
Perhaps not right when, but it becomes bad when you decide by yourself (or take advice from someone to pays you money) to show it to me.
It's a site for prospective employees/contractors. How do you expect someone to advertise themselves w/o creating any content? LinkedIn certainly allows user-created content.
also what if you get the area wrong? the site is not telling me which area it detected for me. i am traveling a lot and i am often not in the area where i actually live. i hesitate to sign up and find out that i get notified for an area that i am no longer in or was never interested in finding jobs in to begin with.
for any area specific features, if you open up signing up to anyone with the caveat that if they are not in a supported area they may not benefit from the site, then you could use the popularity of sign-ups as a suggestion where to focus on next.
Am I going to be able to find new customers on this platform, consistently, like I do in LinkedIn? If not, why would I spend the X number of hours I have dedicated this month to finding new clients on this platform?
If you can Crack this nut you will have no problem finding users.
At least when I joined, LinkedIn was about connecting to your respected colleagues, so that in the future if you needed help from your network (a job, info about a product, but perhaps most importantly, a 2nd-level introduction), then you could ask for it.
I'm perhaps a dying breed but I still only connect to LinkedIn people that I either have worked with or know at more than a passing level. I make strong use of the "I don't know this person" when I receive unsolicited invites.
In my view you are missing out on a huge part of the value, and a lot of career opportunities by not using it to meet new people who share your field, vision and passion for your work. It's like listening to the same songs over and over and never doing any music discovery. It's not so "salesy", it's more about expanding your network beyond people you already know. This isn't something to eliminate, this is the whole value of the platform. Otherwise it's just a glorified mass text.
I can go to a dozen local meetups and not meet one heart transplant surgeon or CEO of an artificial heart company or other blood pumping medical device. Even major cities have only a handful and they are busy. There is very little chance of bumping into them at a local meetup. It's much more time efficient for us to connect in this way.
Anecdotally, I've seen its common in the bay area at least for folks to exchange linkedin qr codes right away when meeting new folks, like a business card.
Do you say so from personal experience?
So in the end, you are saying this is a networking app for people who want to network using apps less?
However in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me. Which immediately is more personal than one in a million messages on LinkedIn.
But again, not my field.
Depends on the person. But I'm sure the most conscientious ones will be the people making those "viral" posts that makes them connections. a potentially pompous surgeon is more than no surgeon if your goal is meeting likeminded connections.
>in both cases I expect an assistant etc to be at a conference, who then can introduce me.
sure, a conference which may not be in your area (so add in time and money to travel), potentially in certain areas needing a higher level pass (so more money). It's effective, but not potentially accessible. As well as rare; unless you have plenty of travel time you may only get to go to a few conferences a year. And even with all that a deep connection is not guaranteed.
You can already do this in many places and it still will be more noise than signal.
This pitch seems more aimed at solving a want from the type of companies that want a one way interview (film yourself telling us who you are) to save on resources than anything else.
It's even worse when you consider that in the word of LLMs they'll still want to parse those automatically into recommendation and filter systems.
I don't think you'll really love our thoughts. Heh.
With OpenSpot, we decided to skip the feed entirely. Instead of trying to fix the feed, we just removed it. No likes, no endless scrolling, no performance metrics — just individual profiles curated around quality signals.
It’s not about restricting average Joe, but about giving real talent — whether loud or quiet — a space to be discovered for what they do, not how often they post.
Had a look at your site and the carousel seems to slow down the entire site for me. Scrolling becomes janky and it's a drag to scroll down. I'm using Firefox and also tried it in a chromium based browser.
The carousel itself also jumps to the beginning when it reaches the end, i.e. it's not a seamless loop.
I would encourage you to just remove any custom scrolling code, it doesn't work well.
The LinkedIn feed problem can be solved by not going to the feed.
Openspot actually leans into that same idea: instead of feeding the algorithm, you just show your work — whether that’s a blog post, demo, video, or a quick walkthrough. It’s all hosted on your profile, so you can focus on signal over noise.
Stand out? "Write about stuff" is literally generic advice nowadays. Most of the content is crap, because people are only writing because other people suggest it.
- a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE 3 (L6) position when I had nothing on my LinkedIn profile aside from a bunch of CRUD jobs on my profile. I
- After talking to the recruiter, they suggested I apply for a remote role at AWS Professional Services which I did get. Funny enough, I had two recruiters reach out to me from Amazon on LinkedIn while I was - working at Amazon and it was on my profile.
- I had a recruiter from Google reach out to me while I was at Amazon for an Engineering Manager position. The problem is, my current position wasn’t even a software developer on my profile and I had no management experience.
- a recruiter from Meta hounded me for months about a senior position as a developer specializing in AI. Did I mention that my most recent role at the time wasn’t as a software developer and I had no AI experience?
- Even before working at Amazon, recruiters from Netflix reached out to me. No I wouldn’t have had any chance passing the interview
Recruiters - even at BigTech reach out to anyone with a pulse. I still get recruiters from BigTech reaching out to me about software development positions even though for the past five years my profile clearly shows a pivot to cloud consulting and customer engagement.
The purpose of the tech blog isn’t to impress recruiters because as you say they are impressed if you mention drinking a cup of java once or have a pet python. The primary purpose is for your own understanding. The secondary purpose is to impress someone familiar with your field.
> Writing a blog relatively regularly got me job offers from FAANG companies.
That’s just not how things work at FAANG. There is a regimented process with multiple interviews and then after the interviews, all of the interviewers enter their notes and discuss. I can’t imagine anyone in the loop saying “I read their blog post and they should be hired”.
Hiring is completely about some combination of how the candidate did on coding, system design and behavioral interviews.
In 2010 (15 years ago), all of the current FAANG companies were already large except Meta and it was growing rapidly.
In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people were blogging? 20 years ago, the interview process was even more esoteric than it is today at least at Google. I haven’t heard stories about any of the others
Yes I was around back then.
Hey, it's me, the person who said that!
>I read their blog post and they should be hired
Yes, that's what happened. Obviously, it's not "I read your blog, sign this contract, and you're hired." The actual sequence of events the one time I said yes was:
"Hey, I read your blog. I work for team X at company Y. Are you interested in working here?"
"Yes"
"OK, HR will contact you."
A 20-minute call with HR, followed by an invitation to onsite team interviews. One day of interviews. Job offer.
I have no idea what the internal process for that was, but I assume they have some referral program or something like that.
>In 2005 (20 years ago), how many people blogged?
I started blogging before the word "blogging" existed. I wrote my blogging software without knowing it was "blogging software."
Yes, I can see someone standing out in 2005 making helpful blogs qualifying under this. I can see it in 2015 as well if they are a subject matter expert or happen to otherwise be explaining the exact concepts a certain team needed.
I can't verify it firsthand, but clearly processes can be waived if desired. I did an entire interview gauntlet for my first "big" tech job in 2019. My lead hired the year prior describes his process as a director calling to him over lunch to talk about the company and basically got the offer on the spot, as if it was the 60's all over again. The director was in the same room as me nodding as my lead told the story.
Heck, even a mild anectode: a colleague of mine (maybe 2-3 years ahead of me in experience) was able to skip some coding test stage at Amazon to move through the process faster because he negotiated being close to another offer. Great worker but he didn't have any fancy accolades nor side projects/blogs. It was just a burning hot market and FAANG wanted whoever they could grab with good experience.
I find the idea interesting, but also puzzling -- If you work at a commercial company on proprietary software, like most of software engineers, there is very limited amount of things you can talk about work and not leak proprietary/internal information. Otherwise, you need to work enough outside work to have things you can talk about freely. I don't want to have a blog where it's all opinion and no concrete details, like my meaningless comments on HN. How do you manage to post "useful" things on a personal blog?
If you have the time, though, open-source is a good way to work on non-proprietary, useful things.
I also have a bunch of personal projects about which I can talk.
Topics like "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" contain genuinely useful information, but the company I worked for at the time didn't consider them proprietary because the proprietary stuff was what they ran on the cluster.
I'll acknowledge that this won't be the case for everybody. I've been pretty lucky that none of the companies I worked for prevented me from writing about these topics; some were happy to use what I wrote for their own promotional material.
(I don't want to dox myself, so I'd rather not share a link to my blog, and "what we learned load-balancing a tomcat cluster" isn't the literal title of a blog post I wrote.)
For instance between 2016-2021 where I was working in a large financial institution (Capital One), but still blogging about the work I was doing and problems I was solving, without leaking proprietary information
A lot of them didn't have the "context" for what problem was being solved or why, or I'd need to create a minimal example to help explain what needs to be fixed, which is also a very good skill to be more practiced in
You can also see how over the years of my career (https://hire.jvt.me/), some organisations have led to me blogging more openly about /what/ I'm doing
Having a blog allows me to compile my notes into a digestible and easy to read way, so if I revisit a project later I at least don't have to start from scratch.
- Offers a dev "enough" control (some HTML/CSS/JS support but not total control)
- Stays largely out of the way (maybe something like a "powered by" header/footer only)
- Doesn't try to lock free posts behind paywalls
- Is independently owned and not a big tech product (so no Blogger)
- Is abstracted enough so that someone doesn't need to know domain, DNS, hosting, VPS, or sysadmin stuff in general to start a website
The closest things I've seen to this are Neocities and Glitch. The best one used to be Blogger, but again it's big tech so you can't use it without being assimilated into the Google collective consciousness.
https://bearblog.dev
You can see examples on the discover page.
https://bearblog.dev/discover
It has a small collection of simple pre-built themes, while also supporting custom CSS.
https://docs.bearblog.dev/styling
if you really can't be bothered to set any of that up, I suppose you can always find one of the non-mainstream open-source microblogging platforms. I'm sure there are some lovely "reddit alternatives" out there that feel great to blog on but has an audience of a dozen people internally.
[1]: https://write.as/
You can use GitHub pages with Hugo which is what I do. You can build out a series of GitHub gists that link to each other. You can host a static S3 website with raw HTML. You can post redundantly to Twitter/Bluesky/your own subreddit/Medium/Google drive.
It doesn’t matter if there’s no single solution to every possible problem. The point is to write something interesting so 1) you understand it better 2) you can reference it later if you forget some details 3) you can show off to potential employers.
Whether or not it’s owned by big tech is a non-goal as far as getting a job is concerned.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro.blog
Pretty sure that I’m really the only person that cares about it. That’s fine with me. I write for myself. Much of what I’ve written has “aged out,” by now (for example, I have a series on the Swift Programming Language[1], that may reflect dated observations).
When I write stuff, it helps me to “firm up” my own knowledge and understanding.
I’m no longer seeking work, but have a LinkedIn profile, so anyone that wants to know me, can get an idea. I basically stay away from LI. Every now and then, I may make a post, when I do a release of something .
[0] https://littlegreenviper.com/miscellany/
[1] https://littlegreenviper.com/series/swiftwater/
Even if you don't get any useful organic traffic, I find having a technical blog is useful so that when you do go to interviews or submit resumes, hirers can read your blog and quickly establish that you know what you are talking about.
No need to fix it if you don't want to but may be useful.
But if there's a place where the text doesn't separate (and flow below), that's a bug, so I'll review.
0. https://littlegreenviper.com/infrastructure/
I’ll check it out. That’s an old post, that was imported wholesale, from another site.
There was a link to a post, here, some time ago, that was about why we should write, and it was mostly for self-benefit. That's why I do it. I'm retired, and spend time learning and honing my skills. I write code for free, for folks that can't afford folks like me. I like to do a good job at it, and I like learning new stuff.
I've found that writing [tutorials, especially] is a great way for me to learn.
I also will check out candidates’ blogs if they list them. Some people have “blogs” but the content is mostly throwaway or hello world, but anything more than that is impressive to me. (Same thing with GitHub, hopefully it contains more than just forks of various repos with minimal diffs.)
And I really can't. Thanks, games industry. So I need to make it a full time job doing signifigant side projects just to show off my skills for jobs.
Even then, this market right now isn't in "we'll call you" mode unless you're highly specialized.
Except that it's 100% AI generated.
So it's only a matter a time before having a personal technical blog is seen as average as having a LinkedIn & GitHub account...
2) Wayback machine exists.
3) People who are bad at tech jobs will probably be bad at creating convincing fake tech blogs.
For a dev? Surely you are not being serious.
5 years ago maybe.
Now every tech/recruiting "influencer" suggests the same tactic, and the vast majority of it is pure slop, checking a box.
Ha, hadn't heard of it. I'll have to take a peak for sure...
Some ideas:
Avoid Engagement for Engagement’s Sake – Features like posting and analytics can create the same inauthentic cycles seen on other platforms, where users engage primarily to boost metrics and reach rather than build genuine connections.
Encourage Thoughtful Interaction – Consider placing limits on outreach, such as allowing only one new direct message per day. This ensures that when someone reaches out, it’s intentional and meaningful, not spam.
Resist Monetisation Pitfalls – Rather than introducing premium features like LinkedIn’s paywalls or sponsored content, a fair enterprise model such as paid job postings section could sustain the platform without diluting its core value.
Your approach is promising, and with the right focus, OpenSpot could offer a genuinely valuable alternative. Best of luck!
As soon as I read 'onboarded', and 'supercharge your network', I gave up (being young[er], I guess).
Supposing this project gets off the ground, maybe even somehow surpasses linkedin, some investor will come along, flash a big pile of cash at the owner and bam, through various monetization strategies to make back that money, you end up back at linkedin.
Linkedin isn't the way it is because they didn't know how to make good UI.