These LinkedIn challengers created a buzz. Now they’re figuring out a business.

Grapevine, which was incorporated as Watercooler Chat Pvt. Ltd in 2023 and has raised about $2.6 million from PeakXV Partners and Riverwalk Holdings, plans to launch a job board shortly. “We want to give companies 10 good candidates every time they ask for one and do it faster than LinkedIn,” said co-founder and chief executive Saumil Tripathi. That said, Grapevine hasn’t yet figured how it will monetise its job board.

Medial, a networking platform for startup founders, investors and employees, is preparing to launch a marketplace for freelance or gig work. About “30% of our posts are people looking for someone to do some work for them,” Medial co-founder and CEO Niket Raj Dwivedi said.

This freelance marketplace will be locked behind Medial’s premium subscription plan, which costs $22 a year. Medial currently has 700 paying subscribers, who get access to a curated job board, a startup showcase, curated startups-related news, and a tracker featuring venture capital investors, government grants for startup founders, and a list of accelerator and incubator programmes.

Peerlist, a platform for users to showcase their portfolios and side projects, also has a job board that charges companies $29 per listing. “We have planned a very straight path to monetisation for this year and the next,” said Yogini Bende, co-founder and chief technology officer of Peerlist, which in 2023 raised $1.1 million from angel investors including Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah.

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A limited addressable market

While the idea of a professional networking platform for startup employees holds promise, establishing a credible contender to Microsoft Inc.’s LinkedIn could prove to be a tough climb.

For one, LinkedIn dominates the space, and recorded a 9% year-on-year growth in revenue to $392 million in the December quarter. In comparison, Medial has a monthly recurring revenue from subscribers of about ₹3 lakh, with a re-subscription rate of 70%, according to the company. Full-year financials for Grapevine, Medial and Peerlist weren’t immediately available.

Also, the total addressable market for a professional networking platform focused on startup employees may not have much headroom for growth. India currently has nearly 160,000 startups, which created about 1.66 million direct jobs between 2016 and October 2024, according to the Union commerce ministry’s department of promotion of industry and internal trade.

“Targeting niche networks is a better proposition than taking on large social media platforms. However, even then, you need to have 15-18% of the community actively engaging on these platforms,” said Raghav Anand, partner and leader–media, digital and convergence, at EY-Parthenon. “Ability to drive multiple revenue streams and thereby a larger LTV are key to being sustainable.”

Lifetime value refers to the total potential revenue that can be generated by a customer through the entire time they are associated with a company’s product.

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Grapevine says it has about 500,000 users, of whom about 200,000 are active on its website or mobile app every month. Medial says it has 200,000 users and 60,000 monthly active users, while for Peerlist the corresponding numbers are 100,000 and 24,000.

These numbers fall short of Anand’s benchmark for an engaged active community that can drive multiple revenue streams, and, according to him, are also too small for advertisers to see any decent return on investment.

“The bottom line here is that you either play in the 100 million userbase segment and get advertising, or if you are in the 5-8 million segment, then get subscriptions,” Anand said. “But if your community is under 1 million, you need to have some very high lifetime value mechanisms.”

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That aha moment

Medial is aiming to hit the 1 million users mark in the second half of this year. “We think the inflection point is pushing through the first 1 million users and once we do that it will automatically blow up,” said Dwivedi, its CEO.

“Medial is well on track to becoming a sustainable and profitable business within the next 8-10 months,” said Sayan Ghosh, co-founder at venture capital firm OG Capital, which has invested $500,000 in the startup, which was incorporated in 2023.

Peerlist, which was founded in 2021, hasn’t yet spent any money on marketing, relying instead on word-of-mouth to reach new users, according to the company. “Right now, 40% of our audience comes from India and 60% from around the globe,” co-founder Bende said.

Grapevine, meanwhile, is expecting its user numbers to grow during the ongoing employee appraisal cycle in India, which typically stretches from March to May. “This is the time that people want to talk about their raises, but there will also be people looking to change jobs,” Tripathi said.

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Grapevine had its aha moment in January 2023, when Google, Amazon and Goldman Sachs announced sweeping layoffs across global teams. Users flocked to the platform to exchange notes on the mood within their organisation and the sentiments of the employees.

“I don’t think people were getting a true account of what (these) employees were going through anywhere else,” Tripathi added. “That was the appeal that helped us take off.”

To be a credible startup ecosystem alternative to LinkedIn, these platforms will likely need more than just another aha moment.