Here’s why LinkedIn doesn’t work.
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News broke today about the acquisition of LinkedIn by Microsoft for $26Bn.
Holy shit! 🙈
That’s a whole world of pain for $26Bn. So much to fix. So much to rethink.
As someone who has founded a startup in the “professional networking space” (whatever that means these days), it’s been impossible to talk about Cohort without someone mentioning LinkedIn.
So, here’s why LinkedIn doesn’t work, and why Microsoft have a lot of work to do — unless of course, they just bought the world largest list of sales leads for their dwindling enterprise server and office products 🤔
LinkedIn abandoned their users to focus on customers. They adopted a policy where users were the product. They didn’t focus on building a product that had value to the millions, instead they focused on building a product that had value to the thousands — recruitment companies that want to leverage user data.
This just isn’t sustainable. While this benefitted them in the short term (can you call a decade “short term”?), I believe it to be a detrimental decision long term. The lack of focus on creating a wonderful, valuable experience for each and every user that has given LinkedIn their data, has led to a core product that doesn’t deliver on its original promise or vision: find and contact the people you need through the people you already trust.
This simple proposal isn’t unique to LinkedIn, they didn’t invent it. It’s why Networking as a human form of social interaction is and has been a thing for as long as people have been collaborating and building things together.
But because they stopped building value around this core vision, for their broad base of users, LinkedIn eventually became less useful and less valuable in the eyes of normal, everyday users.
This is why LinkedIn today had become fragmented across so many different product fronts. It’s your address book (Facebook!). It’s your news feed (Facebook! Twitter!). It’s your think pieces (er… Medium!). It’s how you build mind share and brand value (Twitter!).
They couldn’t go back and change course on their original decision — they couldn’t improve their position in the vertical they’d created. So they expanded their product line horizontally, adopted a reactive approach to product development (lets copy those guys, or try to buy them!), and lost the ability to actually innovate.
Horizontal expansion of product lines probably made share holders happy in the short term (look how much shit we’re building!), but ultimately led to an even more confusing user experience, and the ultimate conundrum for any product: everyday, normal users not even knowing what your product is actually supposed to do.
Anyway….
What have we’ve learned today, kids? Yes, you too can build something that’s an incredibly shitty experience but still make fuck tons of money out of it 👍
Seriously though… LinkedIn aren’t going away any time soon (obviously), and I’m sure Microsoft know what they’re doing (no, really, I do). I wish them the best :)
As for us — a small, scrappy team of four, crammed into a small loft over a pub in Dublin — we’re just jamming out code, helping people focus on those who are most important to them in their network, and helping them to do good things together ✌️
We’re pre-launch and you can get on a list to be one of the first to use Cohort, on our homepage.
