Max Fischer, a 28-year-old Wharton-educated investment banker from Los Angeles, uses LinkedIn for all the reasons anyone uses LinkedIn — professional networking, staying abreast of career opportunities, scoring dates.
OK, I didn’t actually realize people used LinkedIn for that last one.
“Sure,” Fischer told me by phone today. “I noticed that my friends and myself would subtly begin conversations with interesting people through LinkedIn. You hear stories about people meeting their spouses and significant others through LinkedIn’s messages platform. The most popular feature on LinkedIn is the ‘who’s viewed your profile?’ feature.”
Which is what inspired Fischer to launch BeLinked, a newly rebranded mobile dating app that taps into LinkedIn’s user base. Formerly known as LinkedUp, the new BeLinked is not affiliated with LinkedIn, but you need a LinkedIn profile to use it.
Once you log in, BeLinked pulls your profile photo, name and age from LinkedIn and lets you add more details about your job and the college you attended. The app then offers up a bevy of potential matches, filtered by gender, age, distance, industry and school.
“The three most common, non-confrontational questions when you first meet someone are, ‘Where are you from?’ ‘What do you do?’ and ‘Where did you go to school?'” Fischer said. “Why not get those questions answered right off the bat?”
BeLinked is Tinder-esque, in that it uses the swipe left to pass, swipe right to select for each potential date. And if you find a mutual match, you can chat through the app’s built-in messaging feature.
I asked Fischer if he minds comparisons to Tinder, which has 10 million users worldwide, but is often portrayed as little more than a digital hook-up site. “Tinder craze: A casual sex cesspool or a swipe right for true love?” asked an article in the Melbourne Herald Sun just today. Conan O’Brien and actor Dave Franco testing out Tinder is one of the most hilarious bits in recent “Conan” memory.
“We like Tinder,” Fischer says. “Tinder is a great success. I think we are a complement to them in the marketplace, similar to the way LinkedIn is a complement to Facebook.”
He declined to say whether he met any potential matches through LinkedIn — or the new BeLinked.
“I try to keep my personal life out of the press as much as possible,” he says.
So he’s as smart as his resume would indicate.
Twitter @heidistevens13
