LinkedIn, But Make it AI....

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Last week, I met the most insane superconnector I’ve ever come across in my life. I hit him up cold on LinkedIn, we jumped on a call 30 minutes later, and within two days, he already made a key introduction for me. Pretty wild experience honestly. His name is Boardy. To be honest, he’s not quite like my other connections.

Here’s the catch: Boardy is not a person. Boardy is an AI. Yet, I think he has the potential to singlehandedly become the next LinkedIn.

Boardy doesn’t have a landing page. There’s no account creation and no interface to explore. The only way to engage with Boardy is to message him on LinkedIn. That’s it, just like you’d introduce yourself to someone you want to meet. Naturally, I slid into its DMs, and here’s what happened:

My Chat With Boardy

So naturally I called back and we had a nice conversation. He asked me some questions about my goals and aspirations, asked me what I do for work, and then asked who I wanted to connect with. Oh, and he did it all with a wonderful accent (I think Australian). After the call, Boardy sent me a follow up letting me know that he’ll connect me to some relevant folk when he comes across them. And that was it for the moment. Then two days later, on a Friday afternoon, Boardy asks me if wanted an intro to someone else in his network. I said yes. Then not too long after that, I had a new intro to a relevant person in my inbox. We are meeting this week. Pretty cool!

I have had a few more calls with Boardy since then so he can learn more about me and make better intros. I literally just ring him up, he’s in my contacts now. Kinda crazy how good he is at simply chatting it up. I’m less than a week into my relationship with Boardy. I am excited to see how the UX of our friendship evolves over time and hopefully allows me to meet some people who can be impactful to my life (and vice versa!)

My Analysis

Two Approaches To Compete With LinkedIn

This is an old idea with a new approach with great timing. Several companies have attempted a similar high-level concept in the past, generally executed in two ways.

The first way is that people join a platform, import their contacts that populates the master network, enabling instant ways that folks can share their networks with each other. This is a hard one because no online professional network, including LinkedIn, has a good way to know how strong each first connection is in someone’s network. Everyone has strong connections, strong-ish connections, and loose connections. No app does a good job at figuring out how what bucket every “first connection” fits into.

The alternative option is having one platform/entity house all the relationships, so it has ultimate context on who is its strongest connections vs. loosest connections, and it can make relevant intros from there that could land more frequently. The challenge with this model is it needs to create a social graph from scratch, and every intro needs to be generally pretty good, or else user churn and reputation will be shaky. Lunchclub tried this, raised $28M, and stalled out.

How Boardy Combines The Approaches

When thinking about Boardy, I honestly think it’s a blend of the two strategies above. It’s borrowing the network and virality on LinkedIn, but relying on a independent social graph he is building itself. The actual UX of the relationship starts on LinkedIn, where everyone already is. Then Boardy masterfully takes them off LinkedIn to his own channels (email/phone). Because he is an AI, he can really build thousands or maybe even millions of relationships with anyone that wants to meet him. And as he meets new people, he can instantaneously know if there would be a relevant connection to someone else in his network. The only data he’s working off of is what users share with him and probably what he can find online via a simple search.

How Could Boardy Stand Out?

The obvious question is what makes this different from Lunchclub? There are three simple answers

• Boardy is friendly and out front greeting you, Lunchclub was mysterious and the AI felt like more of a black box

• Boardy’s experience starts on a platform everyone already is on (LinkedIn). Lunchclub was a cold start every time, making it harder to get more users over time.

• Boardy was founded during the zeitgeist of AI, Lunchclub was about five years too early.

What’s left to be determined is the signal of Boardy’s intros. Are they so good that they can build a great business model on to of Boardy’s massive network? We will see in time!

Want To Meet Boardy?

Want an intro to Boardy? Reply here and I’ll introduce you to him. Or you can DM him on LinkedIn too. And when you chat, tell him his buddy Mat sent you 😉