Charlie and Sam think LinkedIn has room for improvement. Can their new website ShlinkedIn.com provide a better networking experience? And more importantly, is that cool?
“ShlinkedIn is a special place where you become an alter ego. You can become a Titan of Industry or a Thought Leader or a Disruptor.”
Listen to their submission featured in Episode 96 of How Cool Is This? and read a transcript of the full 5 minute podcast episode below:
Charlie: Hi there. I am Charlie, and I work in tech. I'm alongside my roommate, Sam, who works in marketing. Sam and I have long complained to each other about the state of our LinkedIn feeds, so we decided one day that we could build our own satirical version of LinkedIn. And we decided to call it ShlinkedIn.
Sam: Hi, Sam here, other Co-founder. We kind of just wanted to make a space where people could have some fun, you know, poking fun at the state of modern business.
Charlie: SchlinkedIn is a special place where you become an alter ego. You can become a Titan Of Industry or a Thought Leader or a Disruptor.
Sam: You can go on and post a new job announcement for whatever awful position at your fake company you want to hire for. You can create ads for products. Some of my favorite right now are onion, Hamazon, and just really anything. It gets pretty absurd, but it's a lot of fun.
They can accumulate ShlinkPoints and just interact with other people and churn out funny, thought leadership-esque content. And that's the basic premise. We wanted a space that could counteract LinkedIn a bit, and sort of general social media trends.
Charlie: As a side note, we also own, Shnapchat, Shnew York Times, Shinstagram... so the ShlinkedIn Corporation is only going to grow.
Sam: Growth potential is tremendous.
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Brian: Nick. How cool is ShlinkedIn?
Nick: One of the coolest things you can do is punch up, and ShlinkedIn is a fake social network that makes fun of a real social network that I think deserves to be made fun of. So that, itself, and its premise is cool.
Brian: It's not your typical punch up where you just make a snide remark. They really went into it.
Nick: Right, and I do like that this is satire that everybody can participate in.
Brian: Experiential satire... I don't know if I've seen that before. Maybe Dogecoin?
Nick: There’s too many layers and too many complications there to even get into, especially in a podcast as short as ours.
Brian: If they achieve their goal, which I assume is to make LinkedIn cooler, then what is their purpose? It's to destroy themselves.
Nick: Is that their goal? I got the impression that they didn't necessarily want to make LinkedIn a better place. They just wanted to point out that it sucked. And, you know what? I kind of admire that. Not every platform needs to connect the world and make the world a better place. Sometimes it's cool to have a lower purpose instead of a higher one.
Brian: Full disclosure... I've used ShlinkedIn, and my foray into ShlinkedIn was the most fun I've had on the internet in a long time.
Nick: Having an alter ego that's a thought leader in the poultry space, I feel like is some harmless fun, as compared to some of the more harmful fun that's happening in other places on the internet.
Brian: Yeah, it's cool to open the gates to the masses to be a Titan of Industry.
Nick: If everyone is a Titan of Industry, can there be any Titans of Industry?
Brian: No, then everyone's a Loosen of Industry.
Nick: Do you think ShlinkedIn is going to get sued by LinkedIn? I wouldn't be surprised if they found a cease and desist letter in their mailbox by the time we posted this episode.
Brian: I think they're covered by parody law, and anytime that you can invoke parody law, it's pretty cool.
Nick: The fact that they made a law to protect people who are just making fun of stuff is one of the coolest uses of law of all time.
Brian: On the flip side, if you're invoking the legal system to stop someone from making fun of you, and of course that is assuming that they're punching up and not punching down, that's not cool.
Nick: Yeah, that's pretty whiny and arguably one of the least cool things you can do is to, instead of just standing up for yourself, just taking the joke and laughing along with us, is to sue someone.
Brian: It's interesting to think about satire evolving over time, because if you just double down on the joke forever, then it's not really a joke anymore. It's just life.
Nick: That’s one of the saddest explanations of jokes that I've ever heard.
Brian: Our stance is a podcast can't be that jokes aren't cool.
Nick: I mean, jokes are some of the coolest things out there, especially when they're jokes at the expense of something that's pretty universally uncool.
Brian: I wonder what the shelf life of cool is on a joke like this.
Nick: It sounds to me like we're going to have to have the ShlinkedIn guys back for a rebuttal.
Brian: Thanks for listening, and don't forget to Schlink us some dinks.
Nick: Or, if you want to submit an idea, just leave us a voicemail at (848) 863-9917.
Visit shlinkedin.com to start disrupting.
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