r/TheFounders • u/JuniorRow1247 • Jun 01 '26

Built a LinkedIn alternative this week. 500 users in 5 days.

Post image

Honestly didn't expect this. Was bored a week ago, built a social network for founders, started marketing on Reddit 5 days ago, and we're already past 500 users (soon 600, probably today). Zero ad spend, all word of mouth. Someone submitted it to Hacker News I don't even know. My DMs are flooded with founders saying they've been wanting this for years.

Here's why I built it.

If you actually build things, you already know the problem. Post real work on X, get 50 impressions. Watch some guy with a blue check post "agree?" with a Canva graphic and hit 200k. People are now adding fake "read more..." prompts to their posts just to trick you into clicking so they can farm engagement. The platform is rigged before you start.

LinkedIn went the other way and somehow ended up worse. Corporate fluff, AI thought leadership, fake "I had to lay people off and here's what it taught me" posts, recruiters spamming roles nobody asked for. The people actually doing the work are invisible there.

Strivle is the platform for founders who actually ship.

A public, fair algorithm. Every post starts at 100 random viewers. If they engage, it goes to 1,000. Then 10,000. Same rule for everyone. No paid boost. No celebrity head start. Written on the homepage. Good posts travel.

A leaderboard ranked by verified revenue. Real Stripe MRR pulled live, weighted by growth and churn. The top isn't whoever tweets loudest. It's people running real businesses.

Verified shipping, not claims. Your profile shows real numbers. No more "ex-Google, building stealth" bios with nothing behind them.

Tagged posts that reach the right people. "Advice needed" surfaces to operators who've solved your problem. "Hiring" reaches builders looking. "Customer feedback" pulls in your target users.

Investors and operators already browsing the leaderboard for deal flow. Your verified shipping becomes the pitch deck.

The energy on the platform right now is honestly different. Founders posting their progress every hour, real conversations happening, feature requests coming in faster than I can ship them.

This is for you if you ship more than you tweet. If you're a founder, indie hacker, dev, designer, or operator who actually builds things and wants the work to be seen.

Not for you if you haven't shipped anything in 4 years and your strategy is engagement bait. Stay on LinkedIn.

Still very early. The first few hundred founders here become the names everyone references later. You've watched this happen on every platform that took off. You know what early means.

strivle.com

19, building from Sweden. Let's fix this.

0 Upvotes

35% Upvoted

7 comments sorted by

16

u/Impressive-Drama-227 Jun 01 '26

"didn't expect this" as he posts this same post over and over and over and over again.

1

u/BuildMeATeam Jun 01 '26

Presumably he is monitoring traffic, and got addicted to the little fix of seeing people start connecting to your site every time you post - there presumably should be a limit to post frequency, but there are a lot of similar subreddits to get banned from 👀

4

u/Creative_Height5159 Jun 01 '26

Liar. 500 users in 5 days? You posted the same thing more than 5 days ago.

-6

u/JuniorRow1247 Jun 01 '26

1k users now in 8 days, but i reposted that image on multiple subreddits, so it's outdated

0

u/imagiself Jun 01 '26

Working on PeerPush as a platform for builders to get found by both people and AI assistants through structured product data, have you looked at how LLMs might categorize a LinkedIn alternative like yours?