Hello guys, I've been designing and putting together a better alternative for LinkedIn, AngelList and all other professional social medias. The idea is
to create: A new professional networking platform - Connect with investors, founders, professionals and companies.
The reason I decide to develop this idea was because I never liked LinkedIn because everything is focused on employer and employee all the tool you have are only for companies, recruiters and professionals looking for jobs. The same goes with AngelList and all the other apps for jobseeker and companies.
There's not app that let you connect the right way with investors, vc's, founders. That's way I decide to create a new professional networking platform with a different approach.
The app would have 4 different accounts for (investors, entrepreneurs, professionals & companies) all account with different tools and features to help you achieve what you need. For example:
The entrepreneur account would give you a unique feature to showcase your startup idea by creating a (QuickPitch) to raise funds.
The investor account would give you the tools to invest in startups and ideas, and also for creating (A competition) for entrepreneurs and startups to apply and win prices like (money to get funds, etc.)
The professional account would give you the tools to showcase what you are working on, to build up your professional profile, to show your experiences, etc.
The company account would let you hire the best candidates, create and post jobs offers, create hiring events and more.
This is just a really basic explanation of what you would be able to do and what you would get in each account, but remember that there's always more.
You would be able to connect with everyone regarding to the account they chose. The difference would in the account unique features and tools. You would get different options and feeds regarding the account you choose.
The app would also have other features like: All account would be able to create
and more..
I would like to get some feedback before i start looking for a freelancer designer to redesign the app. If you are tired of the same boring platforms, please help me by giving me your feedback and connecting with me.
Soon I will be launching a landing page to gather feedback and customers to join the waitlist.
If you would like to know more, feel free to comment, message me or following me on twitter. Also ¿What other features you think would be good to include?. THANK YOU!
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of professional social networks. I will, however, try to answer to the best of my ability.
Maybe that's because those relationships are often built in an informal way. The best way to get an investment is probably through personal recommendations or by already having built a relationship with that investor years ago.
My problem with social media is that there are already too many platforms.
Why add one more?
What if somebody is both an entrepreneur and an investor? That seems to be a common combination.
Most successful platforms have gone in the opposite direction during the last few years. Think Instagram where there's no differentiation between creator and consumer.
Didn't you complain that LinkedIn was all about hiring?
This actually sounds like a cool idea. I've talked to an investor who complained about not getting enough pitch decks.
Maybe I'd just work on this and provide a very specialized platform for this particular use case instead of trying to solve everything that's wrong with professional networking platforms. If you pick one thing and do it well, that'll have a higher probability of leading to success.
This sounds very expensive to build.
Are you sure? Implementing just one of these features would cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. I don't think you'll need all of them.
In my opinion it's more important to determine which features to leave out, so that it's actually realistic to build the app.
Hello nikwen, Thanks for your reply.
Actually you're not wrong and you're not that first to tell me not to try and solve all that wrong with professional network platforms. You're the third person to tell me that it would be better if I just specialize and built a platform like you said just for investors and entrepreneurs.
I just realized that it would be for the best, after all the idea started because I wanted to meet and connect with investors. I should stick with that and solve everything that's wrong with investors and entrepreneurs.
Thanks again nikwen, you really help me and I'm grateful for your really good feedback and all of your observations.
Hey Ivan,
Awesome! That sounds like a very good decision. Good job listening to all of the feedback you received. 👍
Some advice: I'd try to keep the scope small in the beginning. Identify just one feature that is the most valuable to founders and investors. That single feature alone should be enough to get them to sign up.
Then build that feature, get users, and expand the scope when it's successful.
Don't make the mistake that I once made where the scope was too big, I kept building and building for a year, and then never found a single user. Be smarter than me. :)
Hey nikwen,
Once again thanks for your advice. I'll definitely would be making some changes and I would try to keep small at the beginning. Like you said it doesn't matter how many features and tools your app have if at the end of the day you don't have any users.
Once a redesign and change my project I'll be posting it again and i hope you provide your feedback one more time.
Take care,
Good luck, Ivan!
Great info!
I usually don’t post comments on articles but I’m really impressed. I must say, In today’s speedy world, the mobile app market is extending by leaps and bounds. As a result, mobile marketing has become more competitive, to make sure the visibility of your app in such a complex situation, you need to be very particular about the approach being followed for the Mobile App Development.
Thanks for sharing this.
here are some app ideas to check - https://www.viprabusiness.com/blog/21-app-ideas-worth-millions/
It sounds like your going to spend 5-20m$ OR 10years building something that might be 2% better than what's currently out there
And you didn't even talk about the business side of actually getting people to use it, why should they care and switch...
You also mentioned that the job side in the other sites is fine so why redo it?
What are you solving?
What's the smallest MVP that creates new value here? Why should ppl care about it?