A team of former Tinder employees, led by Tinder’s original CTO Ryan Ogle, are today launching a new app aimed at professional networking. The app, called Ripple, aims to be a sort of mobile-first alternative to LinkedIn that addresses some of the problems common to the aging , now Microsoft-owned business networking platform.
LinkedIn today has a heavy focus on job searching and head hunting, which is only a subset of professional networking, and is beset with issues like unwanted connection requests and inbox spam , among other things.
In addition, LinkedIn came about in the days of the desktop web, which has since limited its abilities to fully take advantage of what mobile has to offer, explains Ogle.
However, he’s careful to clarify that Ripple( not to be confused with the cryptocurrency, by the way ), isn’t just a “Tinder for business networking.”
Rather it takes some of the psychological principles that helped Tinder become a top app in its own marketplace, and has repurposed those for use in professional networking.
“You have to address the problems with professional networking itself. It isn’t as easy as just hurling profiles up on a screen, ” Ogle says of competing apps that have tried to enter the business networking space in the past.