So if you were going to build a competitor, you'd need to get everyone who has built a profile on linkedin and built a 20 year rolodex of their network to all migrate away.
I'm not saying it cannot happen, I'm saying it is not a tech problem, so building a new flavor of the same app and hoping it wins out is an even higher-risk bet than most startups, and therefore does not fall into most people's risk tolerances.
The question of an alternative to LinkedIn is like asking if there's a better hell with less satan (but that may be a bit cynical)
Instagram did photo filters.
LinkedIn did digital résumés.
Strava did activity tracking.
It's not zero sum. But if you're going to replace LinkedIn, you need to ask yourself: why would someone want a -new- digital résumé?
By the way, these things already exist, albeit in a more niche capacity, which is a good thing. GitHub is LinkedIn for programmers. Behance is LinkedIn for designers. X is LinkedIn for AI scientists :). Etc.
As we cruised through traffic, he asked me the most profound question:
"Why isn’t there competition to LinkedIn yet?"
His simple, yet life-altering words struck me like lightning.
I sat there, dumbfounded, as he explained how competition can ignite innovation and elevate societal connections.
This profound insight transformed my understanding of professional networking forever.
Who knew that an Uber ride could lead to such a groundbreaking revelation?
I realized that we often wait for others to create disruption instead of seizing the opportunity ourselves.
So here’s my unsolicited advice: if you’re not creating competition, you’re just complacently scrolling through life.
Every day is a gift, so unwrap it like it’s a $500 subscription to self-actualization!
Instead of just connecting, let’s start a revolution of meaningful engagement!
Remember, my friends: greatness does not come from sitting in the passenger seat!
Are you ready to drive your own destiny or just take the backseat?
---
Just in case this is a joke (an AI generated one) I used https://infiniteutils.com/internet/linkedin-post-generator
To be honest it's very similar to 99% of my LinkedIn feed
I personally never opened an account, do remember seeing ex-colleagues exaggerating their job descriptions, titles, etc It looks quite fake to me. But I wonder what could have happened to me if I had an account 10, 15 and 18 years ago.
There have been competitors, but they are either niche (Zerply) or more regionally specific (Xing, with its focus on following EU data sovereignty laws) or the latest trend, AI-enabled agentic recruitment, which as yet has no real track record.
LinkedIn flipped the job hunting from job offers DB to CVs DB with networking aspect and added jobs and more social aspect later.
On the other hand, the web is insanely oversaturated and in the end everything turns to steaming pile of shit because of it. so even if something new came, it too would suck sooner or later.
This can be done in many other fields or places where people are wondering why there isn't more competition
It solved the long running problems of: a) keeping tabs on people across company moves b) a public, standardized CV
Its moat is the scale of its network. Very, very hard to replicate, massive cold start problem. It killed business cards!
Maybe some AI generated thingy can attack it, akin to Grokipedia vs Wikipedia, but man is that unproven. Zero incentive for users to switch.
So once LinkedIn stops providing the value that gives it its dominance, and/or someone finds a way to deliver more value, you'll see your competition. That's your answer. Seemingly nobody has found a good enough angle or opportunity,
And FWIW, sure the network effect is hard to replace, but not even close to impossible. Just ask the dozens of other social networks that have fallen from greatness. It just means a competitor has to deliver outsize value to overcome the inherent network effect that they're competing with.
its ofc just hard to start and grow any social network and the default is death, but i think perhaps the more interesting answers are:
1) hiring is the one area where you want longevity, expertise, trust, and linkedin just had the most time to build that up on both the platform side and in terms of the people available on it
2) linkedin actually DOES put a lot of effort into Sales Navigator and other recruiting tools that basically all other social platforms halfass. so even though you and i may not love linkedin, it is the only platform to treat salespeople and recruiters with any form of love and respect, and you should not be surprised that it does well accordingly despite it's obvious flaws.
I'm not sure that's actually true. We have a lot of different social media applications but they all mostly serve different purposes or different demographics. Where is the direct competition for Facebook? For Instagram? For Reddit? Maybe only Twitter has what could be considered real direct competition in purpose and demographic.
It started out as sort of digital resume website where you could also build a network, but ultimately devolved into a social media slop platform.
Kind of like with FB - the feed now consists of 0.01% stuff that I actually care about. It's bots and sales as far as the eye can see.
But, then again, you can't become a billion dollar platform with all that junk.
The same reason you get wierd looks when you say you don't facebook sometimes.
It's like existing outside the control or influence of some $manyuser $app/$website is unthinkable to those who exist within the prison ecosystems. I am a greybeard linux admin moonlighting in windows world, and the state of infra in ms land is baaaaadddd. When I tell engineers though, I get a thousand justifications about why its ok that its this bad (because it was worse before, etc), because the tooling is so bad it gets in the way of accomplishing your goals.
Same mentality... I personally don't really understand it. Either you control your compute or you don't.
Thats who linkedin draws. I used to exclude linkedin resumes when interviewing heavier linux engineering/ops candidates for this reason.
LinkedIn is notable for not being affected by these: 1. There are no major influencers (though they tried.) The most influential person on LinkedIn is very close in value to the median software engineer 2. There are no significant leaderboards (though they tried.) Few people care how many followers others have 3. Regular engagement doesn't matter, because it is still the Schelling point for irregular life events (ie needing a job.) 4. Most of their revenue comes from subscriptions for recruiters, so the lower engagement is not an existential crisis.
LinkedIn is an always-on jobs expo pretending to be social media. Even the executives think they are social media. They are actually something else.
Some angles to compete: 1. Build better data for an underserved segment. Obvious choice is SWE, but MSFT owns Github as a firewall here. Another candidate is the top 1% of executives: they might be the major influencers that haven't been activated yet. 2. Build an identity layer that mitigates risk of fake job seekers. LinkedIn has halfheartedly tried this but their inertia might be an opportunity. 3. Build the Github for other segments: the verifiable portfolios that show real work. 4. Build a frontrunner to the hiring pipeline. If every star candidate can be identified three months before they start looking on LinkedIn, the recruiting system there will fall apart. 5. Build the workplace social media network that users actually want to use daily. LinkedIn failed at this, and their effort indicates they see the risk of disruption coming from here.
Some existing companies that are on the right track: 1. Slack. Already owns DAU for work, well-funded, competes with MSFT in many domains. 30% confident they've considered moving into this space, but Benioff getting AI-pilled will slow it down. 2. Behance. Owned the market for designers, sold to Adobe, game over. 2. Glassdoor. Useful data that LinkedIn doesn't own, but they seem to have embraced the Yelp business model instead. 3. Fishbowl. Daily engagement solved but they've backed into a local maxima. 4. Upwork. Stuck with low-end brand that will prevent them from winning this market. 5. X. Has all the pieces except for a leader who cares about a jobs board. Would need a certain kind of leader for their jobs product to get it to win. 6. Every other talent startup: fighting for the right revenue, but they almost always approach it from the transactional staffing model or the ATS subscription model. Would need someone to buy all of them up and launch a network with 100M profiles on day one.
I have a new email account on my own domain. For the sake of this discussion lets pretend my domain is MYDOMAIN.com, but keep in mind my actual domain isn't some words put together that a human could conceivably guess.
Just now I got two confirmation emails from linkedin. They read as usual:
FIRSTNAME, your pin is XXXXXX. Please confirm your email address.
I received these confirmation emails on NEVERUSED@MYDOMAIN.com where NEVERUSED is some string that I've never used before anywhere.
What is going on here?
There are pockets of resume sites. Coroflot has been around for over 25 years. https://www.coroflot.com/
GitHub is its own kind of resume.
What is it you want to see from a LinkedIn competitor?