[rachofsunshine]

Yep, pretty much this.

I worked on this problem for a couple years, with vastly more funding and an existing userbase to bypass the cold start problem. So did my predecessor. Neither of us succeeded, nor came particularly close. Here's what I wrote last year in a retrospective about how we failed (with a few things not relevant to this post trimmed):

> "LinkedIn For Engineers" - that was the by-phrase within Triplebyte for most of 2020 as we shifted into the Source era.

> Job searching on LinkedIn sucks! (True.) Engineers hate LinkedIn! (Often true.) So if we just make a LinkedIn that doesn't suck (uh-oh), everyone should want to use us instead!

> I present it here in a somewhat comedic tone, but this wasn't a ridiculous idea on the face of it. We didn't need to worry about the cold-start problem (because we already had a bunch of users on both sides of the hiring process) and we were competing against an incumbent people don't like. None of Triplebyte's leadership were stupid, and they didn’t pick that direction arbitrarily.

> Conventional wisdom, and wisdom within the company at the time, was that if you want to disrupt an incumbent, you need to be a step function better. The claim was that our skill assessments and our engineer-specific functions could accomplish that. And our assessments were very good. That part wasn't wrong.

> But the problem was that we couldn’t just be a step function better at something. That can work for a company just starting out (and in fact it’s standard advice for making a great startup), but we were a growth-stage Series B company with a nine-figure valuation. We needed to be a step function better at the core value proposition of our space. And the core value proposition of LinkedIn isn't "we make finding a job easy and pleasant". It’s "we have all the jobs and all the candidates".

> No one wanted another LinkedIn, because LinkedIn had already perfected its we-have-all-the-jobs-and-all-the-candidates value prop.

I'm not quite sure what OP thinks their step-function advantage is, either. It certainly looks nicer than LinkedIn, but if you're generating a profile from a resume, what does it add beyond resumes? Resumes that are already a de facto standard supported by every ATS in the Universe?

We had a UI with a bunch of nice displays and animations and such. No one used it - they all just used the PDF export. At my current company, I pretty much exclusively use linkedin's PDF export when viewing candidates there for the same reason.

[samiv]

Obviously if your business strategy is "build X but better" where X is some incumbent on the market you already failed. Because they have everything that you as a start-upper don't have.. money, resources, visibility, name recognition etc. They can simply out compete you anywhere. And if the only value added and USP is "better" (even if that is objectively so by some metric) you really need to be 100x better in order to overcome the inertia that people have when switching over to your product. (Or you need to throw money at the problem...)

As a startup you really need a completely different USP and value proposition, look for something that that existing platforms/products don't do so well (or don't do at all) and see if there's a market in that particular niche.

Two sided markets (like LinkedIn) where you need both sellers and buyers (in this case employers and employees) are really hard because you have a chicken-egg problem and you can't get one side of the equation without the other side. So you really need to crack this by solving some other problem first that you can get either group on your platform before you can start dreaming of creating that kind of platform for sellers and buyers to meet.

[dabbz]

wow I loved Triplebyte. The startup scene in Seattle was so small compared to the Bay area, so finding interesting companies was tough. I also loved skipping some of these places' horrible phone screens. The triplebyte backpack is STILL my daily driver. I was very sad to see it had been acquired and shuttered by honestly a company selling a horrible way to interview.

[rachofsunshine]

They didn't shutter us (we were dead anyway). And yeah, you're not the only one! I wouldn't have started a recruiting company in the year 2024 if I didn't think I was getting at a burning need, but the fact that no one shuts up about that product five years after it stopped existing was good reason to think there was one.

[nprateem]

Every business competing against a juggernaut should start with a business model canvas, value prop canvas, and analysis of the value chain at the bare minimum (not to mention lots of research).

You need to understand what disrupting the value chain and industry norms means and clearly identify how you'll do it. Done right, the incumbent can't respond head on.

The classic example was the budget airline model. Instead of using huge hub and spoke airports they used cheap regional ones. They ruthlessly cut costs through standardisation and pared back their offering to such a degree only other budget airlines could compete. By the time the big boys saw the size of the threat, the newcomers were dominating their niche.

Linkedin won't live forever, but it'll be something that fundamentally makes it's model irrelevant that will replace it (think an actually correct AI vs Google for search). "Better" is just wasting everyone's time.

[bbor]

Heh, gotta love HN -- we're all just musing, and in comes a founder of the biggest startup in this space to share their personal experience! Thanks for commenting, interesting stuff.

I think you hit the nail on the head with "LinkedIn had already perfected its value prop". We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn, but the internet killed that kind of highly-social networking anyway for most corp jobs (in the US?), so it doesn't actually relate to their real value props:

1. surfacing people for searches by name or specific experiences,

2. connecting employees & employers, and

3. providing some informal identity verification.

None of those really rely on the slop that we've all been drawn into scrolling through every now-and-again, only to be horrified by how banal & insincere it all is.

Personally, my takeaway is that for OpenSpot to really compete, one huge (+ hugely challenging) opportunity would be to actually do professional social networking well, and thus add something LinkedIn doesn't have for most people. I was going to cynically say that Bluesky already (re-)solved this for people in academia, writing, and journalism, but it's now occurring to me that bsky's protocol means that network could be leveraged here, too...

[rachofsunshine]

Clarification: I was not one of Triplebyte's founders (I was in the leadership there later, but not to start). I founded my current company, which - while it deliberately uses a similar model in many respects - is its own distinct thing with none of the same IP, clients, etc.

> We all hate the culture on the social media network hosted by LinkedIn

Who is "we" here?

I work mostly with Bay Area companies and engineers looking for early-stage startups, about as HN-y a crowd as you could possibly hope for. A plurality of our candidates - about 30% - have come in from HN engagement.

But many people on both sides of that set still buy into the things people theoretically hate about linkedin. Status-jockeying is everywhere, and insecurity shows up on both sides all the time. Founders are alert for any signal that you don't consider them The Most Special Company To Ever Exist (because they see that as a sign you'll leave). Engineers are often eager to withdraw at the first sign a company might not be a rocketship (because they want a stable job). It's not everyone, but it still happens plenty.

I'm not blaming them. This is the correct self-interested strategy (within reason) for both sides. In a game of imperfect information, you try not to show when you have a bad hand, and you look to see if your opponent has one. Sometimes you bluff, and sometimes you call others' bluffs - and as long as everyone wants everyone else to stop lying first, this doesn't change. You can choose not to bluff (and I do) but you will be playing suboptimally if you do. And good bluffs don't look like bluffs - the stuff that you see as "banal and insincere" is just the people who suck at it.

As a personal example: a friend of mine came to me yesterday and asked me about a job offer he was considering from a founder I'd met before. I hadn't been impressed with this founder. Bluster is pretty much all they seem to do, frankly (I'd blocked them on linkedin not long ago because I got annoyed with it). But my friend's impression was "wow, they seem so confident and energetic!". The bluster (or what I think is bluster, anyway) nearly became a self-fulfilling prophecy, and still might if my friend accepts their offer despite my opinions.

This call, unfortunately, is coming from inside the house. We do signaling differently, but we still do it.

[blackqueeriroh]

This is excellent. People do not take the time to truly understand human behavior and what it takes to shift i, along with the way that collides with the incentives corporations have.

Something I’ve started saying is “systems, not solutions.” If you aim to change the game at this point in most areas, you have to build a different system, not just a different solution. The way I define a system is also very important:

A system is a set of rules, norms, incentives, and consequences that define what is easy and what is hard.

You wanna change people’s behavior? Make the thing you want them to do stupidly easy. So easy they would feel like a fool to not do it. Then, make the thing you don’t want them to do incredibly hard, so hard that almost nobody will even try because it’s so clear to them that they’ll fail and feel terrible doing it.

That’s how you shift behavior.

[rachofsunshine]

Incentives are part of the story, but not all of it. Users can, and do, behave in ways that are deeply suboptimal in terms of getting the results they want. (In fact, the biggest success we had late in Triplebyte's history largely consisted of removing user agency in a way that didn't feel bad to them, precisely because users were behaving in ways that were counterproductive.)

Sophisticated users on mature platforms generally behave more-or-less rationally, but those will not be most of your users early on. That's to your benefit, because abuses take time to arise - you can get away with stuff on year one or two of your platform that would be a glaring vulnerability in year ten.