Linkout — Sept 26, 2023

Linkout & why it will not be built under a VC.

Linkout:

• Linkout: a LinkedIn connection request and messaging automation tool, similar to Phantombuster ($758.3K Seed). We achieved a weekly customer adoption rate growth of 10% during the MVP phase, with a pricing set at $29.

Downside - Platform Risk:

• LinkedIn restricted the weekly connection requests limit to 100 per week. Bypassable: [Evaboot Blog]. But still 3000 per week in 2017 to 100 per week in 2023 is bullying!
• Competitor Supersend was sent a Cease & Desist notice and later got revoked. Mere compliance with user agreement won't suffice. Applying Murphy's law, LinkedIn [cookie-based auth] will continue to develop methods to detect and block scrapers.
• Ex-competitor linvo.io was shut down because LinkedIn accounts were banned despite implementing proxy-based API hits, ghost mouse cursors, cookie-based authentication, and workflows sent from 9 AM to 5 PM, mimicking a human.
• All put, I have 6K followers on LinkedIn, if LinkedIn bans my account, I'll panic. It's a single point of failure that could make you lose years of network, portfolio, and reputation. Platform risk is real.
• You could imagine this cowboy tipping his hat and saying: "A blind donkey in a pitchdark room listening to Stevie Wonder could have seen that coming."

  Sooner or Later.

  If you were scraping or storing that data somewhere, that is against LinkedIn user agreement, but also illegal in many countries. We can devise workarounds, but that's too much effort for a market that's too mid with too much competition. Not being GDPR compliant and won't invite VC funding.

Upside - CAGR:

• 134.5 million users log in to LinkedIn every day. LinkedIn is the 8th most popular social platforms by monthly active users, well above Snap, Twitter, Reddit. There's so much money lost if we're not attacking this.
• To save you doing the math, the open rate for LinkedIn InMail is 166% higher than for email. [Mailchimp Stats]
• B2B runs on LinkedIn.

  LinkedIn engagement during SaaStr Europa about 50x that of a Twitter
  
  not unexpected but continues to be the social network for business peopleshttps://t.co/LdsWB4kFrq

  — Jason ✨Be Kind✨ Lemkin  (@jasonlk) June 8, 2023

Personal Notes:

• Building this full-time under a VC could be a bad move due to platform risk. What's a good move? Building part-time. Maybe.