Apply HN: – Linkedin without the spam | Hacker News Reader

Apply HN: – Linkedin without the spam

40 pointsvs237051 comments

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

View on HN

Here'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.

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.

Thats a pretty new angle. I think the key is to make good quality messages somehow more valuable than mass messaging. Real currency is def one way to do so but might be a little too aggressive. One idea that I commented here was to only allow certain free messages. If your quality and response rate is at par then you pay less for extra messages otherwise more.

LinkedIn already charges recruiters to contact you. The last time I checked, the spot price for a LinkedIn InMail was about $10 per message.

LinkedIn charges, but many people dont want to see most communications. And there is not price tier for contacting a student vs a CEO which obviously have different business value. This would solve both issues.

I was on Linkedin yesterday as I unexpectedly have to begin searching for a job. I also found out my Digitalocean credit was expiring because of some new policy where they are retiring them.

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.

Great anecdote. Brian is a great guy though. I am not sure I completely understood your concern but I think it comes down to how do you create value for influential people. I think this is exactly where having customizable contact questionnaire would help. Someone on the influential person team or ideally the person himself will do a onetime thing that people have to fill in to contact him.

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.

> Great anecdote. Brian is a great guy though.

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.

Thanks for such a detailed advice. Couple of things regarding the example of a regular person trying to connect with say Travis, Mark cuban or trump. - First of all I think those might be desired but are mostly less frequent cases so designing a platform around that is not ideal IMO - I like your friends take on it. But like you said there is a problem with it. I think this idea can really solve the problem of introduction through mutual connections though. Because lets say you asked a friend for an introduction to somebody influential. Because the platform knows how your friend initially connected with that influential person( By contact forms or well defined edges), the platform can hint you the quality of your friends connection with that person.

It is a tough but interesting problem.

There's something there, although I've thought a lot about this too and here's my free idea for @vs2370 or LinkedIn: let me control how many job opportunities I receive (unlimited, 1/day, 1/week, 1/mo, etc), then auction off those slots to companies/recruiters.

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.

thanks for sharing your thoughts. Its a great idea. One thing that I was thinking was to provide ability to recruiters to push jobs to my job stream but based on my filters/preferences a recommendation engine will sort them and also collapse them if they are irrelevant(like some quora answers) .. that way limiting how many jobs I would take in my feed is also one of the parameters

I'll ask the same questions / give the same advice I give friends who propose ideas like this:

* 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!

Great 2 cents !! I agree that social networks are tough. I did a whole course studying them. But the idea I am proposing is more of a community than a social network, although community aren't easier either.

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

If you're interested, I'd love to help on the UI/front-end, potentially as a founder.

Email is in my profile.

Sure, will email you

Actually I just applied for the yc summer batch with an idea about recruiting tech. Haven't heard back from them yet. I'm still looking for reliable co-founders. If you are (or anyone is) interested in a conversation, let's talk. My email is in my profile. If you google that, you'll find my LinkedIn profile.

Hey thanks for your comment. Please share if you have any valuable inputs on the original idea. It might not be clear but I am not trying to do any recruiting tech idea. All the best with your search

So your idea is creating a LinkedIn without spam. My thread of thoughts is like this: 1. Spams are from recruiters. 2. They are sending spams because no matching system can connect them with right candidates efficiently. 3. If there is this kind of matching system, recruiters will be redundant. Right now the decision makers are actually hiring managers and the team, recruiters can only filter obviously unqualified candidates, which is achievable with algorithms. 4. Eventually, why do we need recruiters then? 5. A more aggressive version of your website is similar to my idea, a LinkedIn (but better) without recruiters. 6. How to monetize this website since we cannot expect hiring team to do all the recruiting? We deliver a LinkedIn integrated with job boards and ATS and we charge enterprises. That's why I called it recruiting tech, not merely a website. 7. Actually, we can add many other ideal features.

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.

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.

Great point and I agree to some extent. But take the example of Medium vs tumblr(or blogger). Eventually they both have to monetize but it is upto what compromises the business is willing to make. And like I said the platform at some point started serving more to sales and recruiters and linkedin employees themselves have lost motivation to have a completed profile

Some thoughts/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/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/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 go to LinkedIn when I'm not looking for work. For some professions, at least, they do have great people and great discussions - but limited by the horrible UI/UX.

I do too. i like some of the pulse/blog post articles from influencers. But lesser so since they opened it to everybody the quality plummeted and now i see articles from people I did not even know I was connected. Some of them are job postings, real estate postings or a redirect to some other website.

True. And that's part of the bad UI - there's no good way to filter different types of content, and the group moderation system doesn't work too well.

Thanks for your advice. I think none of the social networks got groups right. Groups is a trick thing. I think the first flaw is creating membership of groups. Instead I think people are more interested in topics(HN, reddit, twitter, etc). So I think the first step is to not have groups and instead encourage discussions around topics, links, etc.

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 would prefer an anonymous employer/recruiter agent and an anonymous job seeker agent. The job seeker agent contains certain well defined constraints such as area=New York salary > 100k USD skillset=Java industry IN('medical','biotech') status=active

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.

great idea..took note

I originally tried to start a startup related to recruiting. I interviewed 40 recruiters. I could not find any specific pattern, so I moved on to other things.

Ah I could see but this is a conscious effort not to make it for recruiters. But it would be great if you could share some more notes from your learning :)

I said this before. The recruiters are not the problem as they are likely not going to give you a lot of info. for fear of losing out.

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.

Spam wouldn't be spam if it was relevant. Could the forms constrain the types of enquiry to only stuff you're interested in?

Yes thats the idea. If spam is of your interest then it does not qualify as spam. Yes the user can at anytime activate/deactivate/modify the form. Not looking for new opportunities at all, deactivate hireme form. Interested in buying a BI product, have a sellme form, etc

I was thinking about this exact same thing a while ago. My biggest problem with LinkedIn is that you can't enabled "Do Not Disturb" and prevent InMail. The chicken and egg problem is real, so is the monetization. Money from recruiters won'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?

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?

Ya monetization can be tricky but to keep the platform user centric it would be nice to not charge users at all. Also not spamming users is very important. I think there will be other monetization opportunities without compromising on basic principles. But definitely easier said than done.

I keep revisiting this idea myself. I figured a suitable prototype would just let you :

* 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.

Yes jotting down notes from this thread to build a MVP. Essentially I wish to target one particular vertical(engineers) or segment(students) of users. Also in case of engineers, let them import their github data or simply allow them to upload their work in files.

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

How will you target people who are more-or-less well served by linkedin?

> 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?

Great questions 1. Github projects are just one example. Other example might be for a journalist, his article ; for a photographers, his 500px or flickr stream, for a researchers, his courses, university or google scholor links. Thats the whole point I think linkedin tries to be too generic for its users.

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

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?

Great question. We believe the response rate will motivate them. If I get a well formed personalized message from a recruiter on linkedin, I always respond even when I am not looking. yes there are some assumptions here but I think the response rate from quality candidates that recruiters get out of linkedin is way lower.

I know 2 from Berlin

http://4scotty.com and http://honeypot.io

4scotty is different, honeypot seems to be down. I will check them again, thnx

How do you solve the chicken and egg problem? What's the benefit of being one of the first 1000 users?

OMG I am glad you asked that. Like traditional idea is to solve one side first. For first 1000 users there are only fellow chickens. So it is just engineers sharing work and profiles with fellow engineers. Once we have enough chickens, eggs will start showing up. Then chickens decide how eggs contact them.

chicken - users eggs - sales, recruiters, etc

The problem is that the spam - especially LinkedIn-generated invite spam - is how LinkedIn grew.

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.

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

thnx .. yes i started thinking what if we reversed the selling process and let sales and recruiter do more work instead of simply spamming a mass message .. just wireframing so far.. we did not know Apply HN will come up :)

it will be fun to see how linkedin would be built under YC leadership too

Good one :)

Thanks :)

I think it's high time someone disrupted Linkedin. Awful UI, spammy posts, pestering recruiters - there'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?

Thanks and great you share the pain. Critical mass of users We are trying to use linkedin :). We are researching the most active set of users on linkedin (apart from sales and recruiters) and thinking to cater to one vertical to start with so maybe engineers and technology people or new graduate students

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com