Apply HN: – Linkedin without the spam

Here&#x27;s my free idea to LinkedIn or any substitute - allow people to place a price per contacting them. Some people can leave it as an open platform. Others can say for $5 or $50 they will read correspondence. Some CEO can put their price at $1000+ or whatever they think an email is worth for reading. This solves the issue of not everyones time is worth the same, yet inmail credits are priced equally no-matter who you contact.<p>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&#x27;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&#x27;re a bit more committed&#x2F;serious too.

I&#x27;ll ask the same questions &#x2F; give the same advice I give friends who propose ideas like this:<p>* 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&#x27;s the ultimate chicken-and-egg problem. Do you really, truly understand why your idea will win?<p>* Do you think that you really need the YC Fellowship? Will that actually help you? What will you use the $ for?<p>As @patio11 tweeted the other night:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patio11&#x2F;status&#x2F;717474850927808512" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;twitter.com&#x2F;patio11&#x2F;status&#x2F;717474850927808512</a><p>&quot;It has never in the history of mankind been cheaper to make software. You don&#x27;t need funding you need a day job at McDonalds.&quot;<p>* 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&#x27;ve built a better LinkedIn, and show us &#x2F; investors &#x2F; YC why your professional social network is better than LinkedIn, and back it up with hard growth numbers.<p>If this &#x27;Apply HN&#x27; instead said something like:<p>&quot;So we have an idea - it&#x27;s LinkedIn without the spam. We built a prototype, and we&#x27;ve gotten 50,000 people in the &lt; whatever &gt; business community to use it. They love it. We&#x27;re growing within this niche at 20% per week. But it&#x27;s only two of us, and we need to grow. So here we are -- we&#x27;d love the YC Fellowship so we can put some real effort into X, then Y, and finally Z.&quot;<p>Do that, and you&#x27;ve got a winner.<p>My $0.02. Discount as you will, and best of luck to your team!

I bet LinkedIn was not started with the intent to allow spammers to take over. It became a business need over time as the result of being a for-profit enterprise. Starting projects with a noble cause is a good idea but one also has to maintain them for continued growth.

Some thoughts&#x2F;advice: IMHO, what Linkedin really misses is a good community. I know there are different groups on there but my impression is that they are of really low quality and the UI&#x2F;UX is really lacking. I never find it worthwhile to try discussing anything on Linkedin. As it is today, LI seems to be used primarily by recruiters and they are ”merely” middlemen. A ”Linkedin killer” should place the customer (i.e. the people it wants to help being successful) in the front seat. A replacement for Linkedin need to find incentives for professionals to visit the site no only for the purpose of applying to a job. How else would you make the ”gainfully employed” visit your site and participate? Keep in mind that most people are not constantly looking for new jobs, so if that’s the only purpose of the site some users will visit too infrequently to build a good community feeling. Personally, I would love to have a good forum for discussing topics related to working in the tech&#x2F;IT fields. (E.g. salary negotation, how to collaborate successfully within a company, career advancement, etc.) HN fills this need to some extent, but it’s mostly focused on ”news” articles. Reddit’s subreddits are generally either too silent or to noisy. Anyone trying to build a community today would probably be well served by studying the principles behind HN and the UI of Discourse(.org). Creating a real ”Facebook for professionals” would not be easy, but could really be a hit if it’s done right.

I would prefer an anonymous employer&#x2F;recruiter agent and an anonymous job seeker agent. The job seeker agent contains certain well defined constraints such as area=New York salary &gt; 100k USD skillset=Java industry IN(&#x27;medical&#x27;,&#x27;biotech&#x27;) status=active<p>then 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.

Spam wouldn&#x27;t be spam if it was relevant. Could the forms constrain the types of enquiry to only stuff you&#x27;re interested in?

I was thinking about this exact same thing a while ago. My biggest problem with LinkedIn is that you can&#x27;t enabled &quot;Do Not Disturb&quot; and prevent InMail. The chicken and egg problem is real, so is the monetization. Money from recruiters won&#x27;t come until you have users, right? Would users be willing to spend a small amount of money for a yearly subscription (for hosting their profile)? First year free, perhaps?<p>I thought about allowing users to &quot;opt-in&quot; 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?

I keep revisiting this idea myself. I figured a suitable prototype would just let you :<p>* Create a profile.<p>* Record where you&#x27;ve worked.<p>* Post small &quot;updates&quot;. Which would be visible to &quot;connections&quot;.<p>That would be the core of the service and the job-hunting stuff would be kinda-seperate.<p>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&#x27;re doing it on the cheap with a simple virtual machine. You need to plan for rapid scalability but assume you&#x27;ll get none.

How will you target people who are more-or-less well served by linkedin?<p>&gt; Ex direct stream to github projects blog articles about your work<p>The vast majority of people won&#x27;t have this, what&#x27;s the value for those people?<p>How will you make money?

How do you plan to motivate recruiters to join the platform? Having to fill a different form to reach each person means it’d take years to recruit people, no? Why not e.g. fill one form once and for all?

I know 2 from Berlin<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;4scotty.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;4scotty.com</a> and <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;honeypot.io" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;honeypot.io</a>

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? What&#x27;s the benefit of being one of the first 1000 users?

given recent frustration out of linkedin spamming this would definitely not hurt.. do you have a prototype ?

Good one :)

I think it&#x27;s high time someone disrupted Linkedin. Awful UI, spammy posts, pestering recruiters - there&#x27;s a long list of problems with this site. One problem would be though how you plan to get a critical mass of users? Linkedin has become the default professional network for most people. How are you going to convince them to open another account?