A few weeks back, I came across a LinkedIn profile of someone I used to work with. Good profile, decent number of connections, some solid recommendations from actual managers. Right at the bottom, almost hidden, there was a link. It took me to Topmate, where this person was charging money for “career guidance calls.”
That’s when it struck me - why is this person sending people off LinkedIn to prove they are worth paying for? LinkedIn already knows where this person worked, for how long, and what their actual managers said about them. Topmate doesn’t know any of that. It just trusts whatever the person types into their bio.
This one small observation is basically the whole article. LinkedIn has the most credible professional data in the world, sitting completely unused, while a scrappy startup is building a business on data LinkedIn already owns. Let me explain properly.
I say this as someone who has actually worked at Microsoft, LinkedIn’s parent company, so I am not writing this purely as an outsider throwing stones. I have some idea of how these organisations think and prioritise, and that is exactly why this gap frustrates me more.
What Topmate Actually Does Well
If you haven’t come across it, Topmate is a platform where professionals, coaches and creators can offer paid 1:1 calls, webinars, courses, and digital products - all from a single profile link. You set your price, people book a slot, you get paid, done. No back and forth on DMs, no chasing payments.
The numbers are genuinely impressive for a five-year-old, bootstrapped-feeling company. Topmate says it is trusted by over 300,000 creators, and it charges a fairly reasonable commission - around 10% on course sales, letting creators keep the rest. It was founded in 2021 by Ankit Agarwal and Dinesh Singh, and has raised close to $1.13 million in funding so far, which by startup standards is quite lean for the scale it has reached. It sits at a healthy 4.1 out of 5 rating on Trustpilot from over a hundred reviews.
So credit where it’s due - Topmate solved a real UX problem. It made it dead simple for anyone to package their “expertise” and sell it. The trouble is in that same sentence: anyone can package anything as expertise. And that is where my real problem with the platform begins.
The Part Nobody Talks About: Topmate Is an Open Floor for Unverified Claims
Here is my honest, slightly unpopular opinion - Topmate, in its current form, is a platform where anybody can claim proficiency in anything, and if you want to “learn” from them, you pay for it. Most people using it are genuine. But a good chunk are simply exploiting the format.
The example I keep seeing, and it genuinely irritates me: someone gets into a decent IT company through campus placement, works there for a year or two, and suddenly starts selling courses on “how to crack FAANG interviews,” “Data Structures and Algorithms mastery,” or “resume secrets recruiters don’t want you to know.” One or two years of experience, no proof of actually clearing a FAANG interview themselves in many cases, and yet they are charging freshers and juniors for “guidance.”
This is not guidance. This is somebody with barely more experience than the person paying them, monetising a title on their profile rather than actual expertise. And the platform has no real way to stop it, because there is nothing to verify against. A bio is not proof. A profile photo in a blazer is not proof. Testimonials can be requested from friends. None of this is checkable.
I am not saying everyone on Topmate is like this - plenty of genuine, experienced professionals use it well. But the ratio of noise to signal is growing, and in the age of AI-generated content flooding every platform (what people are now calling “AI slop”), we honestly cannot afford more unverifiable claims of expertise floating around unchecked. We need less noise, not more of it.
What LinkedIn Already Has, and Topmate Has to Fake
Now compare this to what LinkedIn already sits on, unused:
Verified employment history - companies confirm employees, not just self-reported job titles
Real, mutual, and second-degree connections - you can literally see if this “expert” is connected to people you trust
Recommendations written by actual former managers and teammates - attributable, dated, checkable
Skill endorsements tied to real working relationships, not anonymous upvotes
This is not a small advantage. This is the advantage. Topmate’s trust signals can be gamed by anyone with a laptop and a bit of marketing sense. LinkedIn’s trust signals mostly cannot be faked so easily, because they are tied to real employment relationships and real people who put their own name behind a recommendation.
If a career coach on LinkedIn has a genuine recommendation from an ex-manager at a company they actually worked at for four years, that is worth ten times more than a five-star review from an anonymous handle on a booking platform. Anyone availing services deserves that level of assurance, especially when they are paying real money for career advice.
The Current UX Failure: A Feature Nobody Knows Exists
LinkedIn does have a “Services” section on profiles. Have you ever clicked on it deliberately? Most people haven’t, because:
It’s buried - tucked away below the About section, easy to miss entirely
There is no discovery layer - you cannot search “career coaches who worked at Google” or “PMs my connections have recommended”
There’s no native booking or payment flow tied to it - worst case, it just gives you a way to message the person
It’s not surfaced in feed or search results the way job posts or content is
Compare this to Topmate, where the entire product is built around discovery and booking. LinkedIn’s version is an afterthought bolted onto a resume page, while Topmate’s version is the entire product.
My Fix: What LinkedIn Should Actually Build
This is not a “LinkedIn should copy Topmate” argument. It is simpler than that - LinkedIn should stop sitting on data it already has and build the layer on top of it.
Turn Services into a real discovery surface. Let people search and filter by verified experience, mutual connections, and recommendation quality - not by who paid for visibility.
Rank by authenticity signals, not marketing budget. A coach with three verified manager recommendations should outrank a coach with none, regardless of how much they’ve spent promoting themselves.
Native booking and payments, so people don’t have to leave LinkedIn (and lose all that verified context) to actually pay someone.
Let recommendations function like structured reviews - attributable, dated, tied to a real working relationship, visible right where someone is deciding to pay.
Surface it in search and feed, not just as a static tab nobody visits.
Pull in certifications directly, with verification. Not just a badge someone uploaded, but something tied back to the issuing body, so a “Certified Scrum Master” or a “Google Data Analytics” certificate actually means something checkable.
Attach real project details. Let people showcase specific projects they’ve worked on, with the option to tag the actual collaborators - teammates, clients, cross-functional partners - who can then confirm the contribution themselves. This turns “I led a migration project” from a claim into something with names attached.
Let tagged collaborators leave contextual feedback, not just a generic recommendation on the profile as a whole, but feedback tied to that specific project or piece of work. Far more useful for someone deciding whether to book a session with this person.
Link out to research papers, publications, or public work. For anyone offering guidance in a technical or academic area, a link to an actual published paper or a patent is worth more than any testimonial.
None of this requires new data collection. LinkedIn already has every ingredient. It just needs to be assembled and pushed forward as a priority, not left to rot as a forgotten tab.
A fair caveat here - not everyone has the luxury of glowing recommendations from managers, colleagues, or employers. Some people work in toxic environments where nobody bothers to write one. Some are early in their career and simply haven’t had the chance to build that kind of documented goodwill yet. Some switched fields and their old recommendations don’t even apply anymore. This is a genuine gap, and I won’t pretend the fix I’m suggesting solves it completely.
But this is exactly why widening the net - certifications, tagged project work, research links, peer feedback on specific work rather than just formal manager recommendations - helps close that gap, at least partially. A freelancer who never had a “manager” in the traditional sense can still show a verified certification, a tagged project with a client who confirms the work, or a published paper. It’s not a perfect solution, but it gives far more people a legitimate way to prove themselves than relying on manager recommendations alone.
Why This Needs to Sit at the Top Surface Level, Right Now
This isn’t a “nice feature for later.” It needs to move from a buried tab to the top of the profile, and the timing is exactly why.
Right now, anyone can generate a polished bio, a confident course description, even fake “results,” using AI in a few minutes. This “AI slop” problem isn’t just about images and lazy posts anymore. It has crept into how people package themselves as experts too. A well-written paragraph proves nothing today. Anyone can sound credible. That’s the real problem.
In a world like this, verified signals aren’t a nice-to-have. They become the only real way to tell a genuine expert apart from someone who just prompted a chatbot for a convincing bio. LinkedIn already has these signals - employment history, recommendations, certifications, tagged project work. They’re just buried where nobody looks.
LinkedIn has over 1.2 billion members worldwide, with India alone at roughly 150-180 million members, the second largest market after the US. That scale is already sitting there, unused. Topmate built its 300,000-creator base from zero, mostly on self-reported trust. LinkedIn doesn’t need to build anything from zero. It just needs to stop hiding what it already has.
So this isn’t optional polish. It’s the single most useful thing LinkedIn could put at the top of a profile, right where people are already looking.
To Be Fair: The Counterpoints
I don’t want to make this sound one-sided, because it genuinely isn’t that simple.
Verification cuts both ways. The moment LinkedIn starts enabling paid services at scale, it also takes on the responsibility of policing who is “qualified” to charge for what. That’s a moderation headache Topmate largely avoids by staying hands-off.
Org culture matters. LinkedIn, under Microsoft, has historically been B2B and enterprise-first in its priorities, not creator-first. This isn’t purely a UX oversight - it may reflect a genuine mismatch in what the organisation is built to prioritise.
Risk of feeling “salesy.” LinkedIn already gets criticised for turning into a feed of humble-brags and engagement bait. Push monetisation too hard, and the platform could tip further into feeling like a marketplace rather than a professional network.
These are real risks. But they are solvable problems, not reasons to avoid the opportunity altogether.
Closing Thought
Topmate built trust from scratch, using self-reported bios and testimonials, and it did a genuinely good job of it. But LinkedIn is sitting on trust it already earned - verified employment, real recommendations, real mutual connections - and simply refusing to spend it.
In an era where AI can generate a polished bio, a glowing testimonial, and a “proven track record” in about thirty seconds, the ability to say “this person’s experience is actually verified“ is not a nice-to-have anymore. It is the single most valuable thing a professional platform can offer. LinkedIn already has it, sitting quietly in the background. It just needs to bring it to the surface, before more people are pulled toward platforms that let anyone claim anything.
Sources referenced: Topmate, Topmate Features, Topmate Funding — Tracxn, Topmate Trustpilot Reviews, LinkedIn Statistics 2026 — Charle Agency, LinkedIn Membership Numbers — John Espirian
🧠 Human driven, AI assisted. The perspectives shared in this newsletter are my own, refined and structured with the help of Large Language Models.