Ever felt like LinkedIn has turned into a bit of a mess?
You're not alone.
While scrolling through endless motivational posts and corporate humble-brags, London-based founder Draego Zubiri saw an opportunity to create something different.
INSPO is a social network built specifically for professional thought leadership and industry insights.
After a decade in EdTech, working with subject matter experts and industry leaders to deliver professional learning, Draego noticed a gap in how professionals share knowledge and connect around meaningful content. Instead of another platform chasing viral moments, he's building a space where substance wins over spectacle.
Here's how he's doing it.
Let's start with the basics. What problem does INSPO solve, and who's it for?
INSPO is the first social network dedicated to professional thought leadership content. While LinkedIn has now become overly cluttered, INSPO provides a clean feed focused on knowledge sharing, industry insights, and thought leadership.
While LinkedIn profiles are resumes, INSPO profiles are portfolios. LinkedIn tells people what you’ve done, while INSPO shows how you think. And importantly, the thinking you showcase is yours.
It often runs alongside your formal career, which lives on LinkedIn, but it isn’t defined by it, making INSPO a more personal, expressive, and intentional space that grows with you personally and professionally over time.
Additionally, INSPO allows you to easily monetise your thought leadership portfolio through a content marketplace subscription model.
What inspired you to start this? Walk us through your backstory
I've worked in the London EdTech and online learning space for the past decade and realised the professional learning and development space was lacking simpler and more social means for professionals to share their insights directly with audiences.
At the same time, I was frustrated with the current social media landscape, which focuses on entertainment value and clickbait over learning and meaningful conversation and discourse.
So one day, it hit me, there was no social network or platform dedicated to professional thought leadership and sharing industry insights. And so, I built INSPO a place where professional expertise could easily be discovered, shared, and rewarded.
How's the traction looking so far?
We launched in January on the App Store and Google Play. We hit 5k users this month despite no paid ad spend to date. Our web platform and app had 350k views in the past year.
Separately, our organic content strategy on LinkedIn has been a phenomenal hit. We regularly share content promoting thought leadership, its importance for careers at all stages, and our vision for what we’re building with INSPO.
One year on, the INSPO page has 74k followers, overtaking much larger players in the creator economy and proving our unique ability to speak to expert content creators and professional audiences and their needs better than any platform.
We are pre-revenue, as our focus right now is on early community growth and retention, as well as product validation as a social network. People want a space dedicated to thought leadership, without the noise or the clutter, and we are building that with INSPO everyday.
What's one decision or moment that changed everything for your startup?
Doubling down on a less visually intensive (albeit comparatively "boring") and clean user experience, which goes against the norm of social networks, which are visually intensive, in order to focus on quality conversations and insights between users.
You don’t always need all the bells and whistles to start meaningful conversations, regardless of the format or medium you choose to communicate your point.
This has helped differentiate INSPO from other social networks.
Where can people learn more about INSPO or connect with you?
- INSPO Website: https://www.inspo.expert/
- An overview of INSPO: https://www.inspo.expert/blog/inspo-alternative-social-network
- Founder's Story: https://www.inspo.expert/blog/founders-story
- INSPO LinkedIn page: https://www.linkedin.com/company/inspoexperts
- Founder's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/draegozubiri/
Draego's basically solving a problem by getting annoyed with it first, which is how a lot of good startups actually start.
The numbers back him up too. 74k LinkedIn followers and 5k users without any ad spend suggests people really do want this kind of focused platform.
What's cool about his approach is doubling down on being deliberately "boring" with the design. While everyone else is chasing the next TikTok-style feature, he's betting that professionals actually want fewer distractions, not more.
It's a pretty bold move in a space where flashy usually wins, but it seems to be working.
