How did Foliad start?
I read a headline about Amazon deciding to lay off thousands of employees. Then, one headline became two, which became three, and so on until it seemed like corporate America was joining together to send thousands of unwilling employees back into the labor pool. It was disheartening.
Working for a big tech company that's similarly gone through large layoffs, I thought there might be a chance my company would join the roster, and so I got to updating my resume as a precaution. It'd been a while, and it's a good habit to do so periodically anyway, just in case.
As I was staring at my carefully-selected bullets, trying not to include too many or too few, I realized that my resume didn't even come close to telling my story. It was a highlight reel of a few accomplishments, carefully distilled into a form likely to catch a recruiter's attention in the 5 seconds they spend scanning it.
That bullet on my resume wasn't just a win on metrics. It didn't tell the story of the road bumps we ran into, or what I learned from it. It didn't include pictures of the final product, user testimonials, or any of the things that would really be valuable to understand the whole picture.
Having spent over a decade in growth and acquisition for websites, I knew I could spin up a WordPress site quickly enough to host a digital portfolio, but that got me thinking... what about the people who can't do that?
What about the people who can't design? Can't code? Don't have the SEO knowledge to make sure their portfolio is discovered and actually seen?
Sure, AI can help with a lot of that now, but suddenly this sounded like a much bigger, better challenge.
And here we are.
The non-negotiables
When I'm working on products, I pride myself on my pragmatism. I like doing much more than I like talking about doing. So, there were a handful of mission-critical non-negotiables that had to be included if I was going to give this a shot.
1. Ease of use
The whole purpose of this project was to make building a digital portfolio something that could be done by anyone. It should be straightforward, easy, and intuitive.
2. People-first
Many products are built to tackle a specific revenue goal, or with monetization in mind at the start. That's not the case here. I'm willing to eat the costs on my own if it means making something I'm proud of that's genuinely useful for people.
Will there be monetization one day? It depends. If it does, I refuse to allow a project with my name on it to become victim to enshittification, and so it'd be handled in a way that creates genuine desire to pay, not by degrading the core platform and charging for bits that were shaved off. And, that'll only happen when it's either asked for or highly desired, not forced.
3. Honesty and transparency
Besides being core values I try to embody in life in general, I want the things I work on to carry those values too. Have I ever built a platform like this before? Nope. Will there be stumbles? Bugs? Less-than-ideal issues? Absolutely. I learn by doing, and so this project is an intentional exercise in learning some things I've never tried before, and with that will come bumps in the road. I created the news section of the website for precisely this reason, and that's to be transparent.
Discoverability
Much of my career has been spent in growth and acquisition, with a special focus on SEO and, more recently, GEO. Foliad was built from the very beginning with optimizing for discoverability top of mind.
Here are a few ways this has been accounted for:
- Smart schema implementation that allows bots and crawlers to associate portfolios and portfolio entries with their authors in a way that's clean and easy to understand
- Optimized title tags and meta descriptions, so that when users' profiles and portfolio item entries show up in search engines, they entice a click
- SEO best practices have been implemented across the board; lessons learned from over a decade in this industry that are designed to give Foliad portfolios an edge in search
What this means for users: Foliad won't just display your portfolio; it's been optimized to have your portfolio be discovered. Whether by recruiters, or colleagues looking for inspiration, Foliad exists to help increase your professional presence and signal to search engines that you are a professional in your field. A well-executed portfolio could very well be an asset for your professional reputation.
What's next?
My priority right now is thorough testing, getting feedback, and initial adoption. Since this is a project I'm tackling on mornings, nights, and weekends between a full-time job, parenting, and an MBA program, the pace won't be quite as fast as it would be if this were a venture-backed operation. And that's totally fine.
I invite anyone interested in creating a portfolio of their own to do so, and let friends with similar interests know too. If you run into any issues, reach out to me on LinkedIn and I'll do my best to help you out. I'm up for hearing out feature requests, quality of life changes, or even just helping to troubleshoot something not working the way it should.
Until then, thanks for coming along for the ride!