In two years I have gotten a new job, sold my car, moved into a new place, started a very successful blog (SaintelDaily), traveled out the country(Mexico counts), brought two iPads (damn you Apple) and broke up with my long time girlfriend (Cry me a River comes to mind). That is nothing compared to BranchOut in two years the Facebook dependent company has gained 25 million registered users. The company works just like LinkedIn but with the same dependency that Zynga has on Facebook. BranchOut is now considered one of LinkedIn’s biggest competitors. CEO Rick Marini says BranchOut’s relationship with LinkedIn is; “At this point, it’s Coke and Pepsi.”
BranchOut allows users to see which of their Facebook friends (or friends of friends) work at specific companies. Unlike LinkedIn, it doesn’t require users to build a professional network one person at a time. Rather, they simply connect to their pre-existing Facebook graphs. The interface works a lot like LinkedIn from there: users can fill in their work histories, send messages to their connections, collect endorsements and request introductions to friends of friends.
BranchOut has about 3 million job listing. They work recruiters via a product called RecruiterConnect that works like LinkedIn Recruiter. LinkedIn blocked BranchOut from accessing its API. That has not stopped the startup from gaining another $25 million in funding, bringing its total venture capital backing to $49 million.
BranchOut is more popular than Instagram and Twitter on Facebook. They have 13 million monthly unique visitors. Half of new members of the company are from overseas. They owe that to StepStone and Totaljobs.com which are big overseas.