How to build the next LinkedIn, but on the blockchain
Kartik Mandaville is making a new LinkedIn, but on the blockchain. Kartik is the founder and CEO of SpringRole, a decentralized ‘verified professional identity’ platform for professionals. SpringRole’s mission is to cut out the noise of fake profiles and credentials while letting folks maintain ownership over their professional online profiles.
Our friends at Blockstack talked to Kartik about his journey making SpringRole.
Tell us a little bit about why you are so passionate about building SpringRole and why you’re so committed to creating a decentralized solution.
We started the company in 2014 by matching jobs with resumes using LinkedIn’s API, scaled to $50K MRR and then LinkedIn shut us down. Now you can’t even get access to their API without talking to them. They own all your data and decide what they want to do with it. Decentralization lets users control their data and decide what to do with it. Your profile is something you want to be able to customize, enrich with different modules, get it verified and finally own it.
LinkedIn inevitably comes up when thinking about SpringRole; tell us how you’re different (or better) and if you envision yourself as a supplement or replacement.
We don’t intend to replace LinkedIn completely. The way we are different is in the fact that profiles on SpringRole have each line item (your education experience, each of your work experiences) verified at three levels and written to the blockchain.
They’re unlike LinkedIn endorsements, which aren’t weighted by the endorsers’ skills and therefore aren’t very useful in assessing someone’s skills.
How can, say, a content writer who attests to another person’s programming skills hold the same weight as that of a coder who attests to another person’s coding skills?
SpringRole has weighted skill reviews, which makes these scores more useful.
In the world of dApps, we’re seeing the beginnings of new monetization strategies. SpringRole is already a profitable, and that’s no small achievement for a startup. I’m curious how you think monetizing is different for a company like yours (building a decentralized product) vs. something more traditional?
In terms of monetization, we realized early that it was going to be a tough task selling companies on the concept of Blockchain. It would take an immense amount of educating clients on our part.
So, we decided to take on a problem familiar to these clients: employee verification. We’ve been able to successfully use this as our pitch over the past few months and have signed up some of the most talked-about new-age companies in India.
Phase two is moving these companies through our funnel via case studies and reports. The best part about this is that instead of spending money (in ads etc.) to educate our clients, we’re able to educate them while still making money with our employee verification product.
Ok, let’s talk a bit more about the problem you’re solving with SpringRole. How would you describe the primary issue Springrole ‘fixes’ or the value it provides?
Verification is key. SpringRole’s goal is to be the gold standard for verification, all supported by blockchain. Companies can use this to initiate background checks on prospective employees (with their consent). Users can self-verify and use this to apply for jobs, get freelancing gigs, and generally control who gets access to their data. Universities can use this to reduce fraud around fake degrees. Reference checks also become meaningful with verification.
The advantage of first verifying each line item of an individual’s professional profile and then writing it onto the blockchain is in the reduction of redundant tasks. Currently, if a company wants to verify someone’s work experience, they can’t just rely on the last company’s evaluation (they usually aren’t even sure if the last company ran a background verification). In this case, they will have to verify all the previous work experiences of the candidate. With SpringRole, all a company has to do is look at the verified professional profile of the candidate and be sure that he/she has indeed worked at (or studied at) the organizations mentioned in their profile.
Our ultimate goal is to have an easy way for people and organizations to verify or ask for verifications. Resumes will be replaced by verified, customizable profiles.
What were some challenges you had building the product?
We launched on the Ethereum Mainnet and couldn’t scale beyond 1,000 users. The gas costs and the block times were crippling us. That is when we decided to a L2 solution with an ethereum side chain.
One of the other ongoing challenges is around the blockchain UX. How do we improve the user experience around private keys, seed words, etc.? It is difficult for a first-time user engaging with a blockchain UX?
Tell us a little about who actually uses SpringRole. Are there many folks on the network?
Two segments of folks are using SpringRole:
- Freelancers. They get a customizable verified profile, it’s ad-free, and they’re not locked to a system.
- Networkers . They use SpringRole as a tool for personal contact relationship management.
How did you acquire your first users?
Our user acquisition has been completely organic and driven mostly by referrals. The initial Telegram community saw viral growth on the back of a referral/airdrop campaign executed with KickoffLabs.
With all the recent hacks, breaches, and generally unsavory data practices we’ve seen from social networks, I’m curious how you’re positioning yourself to better protect your users.
This is where ecosystems like Blockstack come into the picture.
For example, we have an ‘Add Note’ feature where users can take notes on anyone’s SpringRole profile. In this case, we never have access to the notes you have written. They are encrypted locally and saved on a server through Gaia. If you are really conscious of your privacy, then you can setup your own server with Gaia and use that.
What’s your long-term vision for SpringRole?
We want to rethink verifications and how it will work in the blockchain world. The gig and freelance economy will be the default way to get jobs in the future — and with SpringRole you only have to verify yourself once to carry it to all your gigs.
What’s one thing you want people to know about SpringRole?
This is your own personal, verified professional profile that you own. There’s no ads and you can customize it. Everyone should have a SpringRole account.
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This post was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at Blockstack. 🙂
