Loading...
Answers
MenuAny strategies for building a creative portfolio without giving work away for free and thus risk losing product value in the eyes of the customer?
This question has no further details.
Answers
Well, it depends on your skills and what kind of portfolio your clients ask for. I can share some comments if you are a content strategist, UX engineer, or a technical communicator. You can prepare custom portfolio, such as content inventory or gap analysis, or a quick guide from whatever apps you use in routine.
For example:
(a) If you blog, prepare an ‘inventory’ of how you planned this blog, your branding process, and calendar (if any).
(b) If you manage any facebook or G+ brand page, prepare a quick guide to share how you post media, moderate the page, and see insights and analytics.
(c) You can prepare a story of how you plan and structure your resume (digital or paper), the conventions and styling, and the branding.
(d) Prepare a UX report for gap analysis and optimization scope, for any app you use (ToDo, Emails or for anything).
I always recommend NOT to use your portfolio from past employers. Create your own custom portfolio, and show the value.
Need more directions? I can discuss more on a call.
If you don't want to work for free and are starting from scratch, then I recommend doing the following
- make up sites. Create websites that come from your imagination. These can be riffs off of existing sites if you like but make sure you don't just copy something and change the main pic. They should be entirely of your creation.
- redo an existing site and show a before and after. Include a case study to show how and why you made the changes.
The point of a portfolio is to showcase your work. Whenever I review a candidate, the first thing I do is check that portfolio to see if their level of design is what I'm looking for. Doing the above will show the viewer that you are experienced and competent, even if you don't have a ton of companies under your belt.
If you are already engaging with customers but are losing them because of a weak or non existent portfolio, then spend some time looking over their site before you meet. Put together a plan of what you would do to improve it and walk that customer through this plan. This will help establish you as someone who is not only knowledgeable, but actually vested in your customer's success. Doing this prep work will go a long way towards landing the client. Especially since few people take the time to do so.
Do spec work for large companies, but, don't just redesign something for fun.
Find a company that has a problem with something that relates to your field (for example, a UX Consultant, like me) and then solve that problem with your redesign.
Explain what the problem was, how you solved it, and the value you created for the business by implementing your solution.
No one cares about your design, they care about the value you're creating for their business. Focus on that.
Hit a cause. Something current and of value and that strikes a chord with you personally. Create a piece of content that reflects not only your skill but your passion for the cause. This will obviously not come across that you are a pro bono machine as it was a personal cause you were committed to while at the same time creating a piece of work that accurately portrays what you can deliver for a client.
Related Questions
-
What product should I build?
You can only solve a big problem that changes the world if you solve a problem that is deeply personal to you. Two great examples and why they worked: Roy Raymond was a sad pervert. He'd buy bras and panties at the department store and all the clerks thought their thoughts about him. Roy felt embarrassed. He wasn't really a pervert. He just wanted to buy lingerie for his girlfriend. So he solved this major problem he was having. He created a space where men could feel comfortable coming in and buying sexy lingerie for their partners. He called it Victoria's Secret. But Roy, by solving this important personal issue for himself, apparently solved the same issue for many other men. First year sales were over $500,000 and he quickly opened up three more stores. In 1982 he sold Victoria's Secret for one million dollars before trying multiple other businesses that ended up failing. One MILLION Dollars. A decade later Victoria's Secret was worth over a billion dollars but Roy Raymund was nearly bankrupt and had missed the huge run-up in it's value. -- Picture New York City in the late 1800s on a rainy day. It was disgusting beyond belief. 150,000 horses transported people up and down the busy streets. Each of those horses, according to Super Freakonomics, dropped down about 15-30 pounds of manure. That's up to 4.5 million pounds of manure A DAY on the streets of NYC. And now imagine it raining. Would you cross the street? How long could this last? How long would the city survive without being infested with crap and all the diseases brought with it. What would happen as population of both men and horses increased? Was someone working on inventing a gigantic manure scooper? How would this problem get solved? It never got solved. Instead, Henry Ford invented the assembly line to mass produce cars. Every horse lost their job. People began to drive cars. Manure problem solved. -- In both cases there is a common theme. Someone outside the industry solved a problem that was personal to them that then changed an industry forever. Roy Raymund wasn't a fashion designer or a retailer. He worked in the marketing department of Vicks, which makes over the counter medications. Henry Ford, I don't think, ever worked in the manure industry. Instead, each person focused on a problem that was important to them. A problem that excited them at that moment in time. Raymund wanted to avoid being embarrassed in the future. Ford wanted an efficient way to make cars. The ONLY way to change the world is to solve a problem that is important to YOU. They had to choose themselves for success before they could save the world. Raymund had to convince himself that he didn't belong in the marketing department of a division of Procter & Gamble. He borrowed $80,000 and took the big risk of starting a business. Ford had to survive numerous failures and bankruptcies in order to find a cheap way to make cars. He would abandon investors, people who supported him, and even companies named after him, in his quest to solve his problem in his own way. Nobody gave them permission. And neither of them set out to change the world. They only wanted to solve a problem that was personally important to them. It's unfortunate that often we forget that choosing ourselves is not something that happens once. It has to happen every single day. Else we lose track of that core inside of us that solves problems and is able to share them in a way that makes the world a better place. Ford forgot this and became obsessed with Jews. Ford is the only American that Hitler mentions in Mein Kampf: "only a single great man, Ford, [who], to [the Jews'] fury, still maintains full independence...[from] the controlling masters of the producers in a nation of one hundred and twenty millions." And what happened to our embarrassed marketing manager that has ignited the passions of men and women for the past 30 years? Roy Raymund saw the value of Victoria's Secret jump from the one million he sold it for in 1982 to over a billion dollars a decade later. He failed in business after business. He got divorced. Then at the age of 46, my age, he drove to Golden Gate Bridge, jumped off it and killed himself. Before you can save the world you have to save yourself. But you have to relentlessly do it every day. Sometimes the train wakes me up at night and I feel scared. What will the world be like for my children? I won't always be able to help them. I don't even know if I do enough to help them now. And then I remember. I'm alive for another day.JA
-
How do you build a MVP for an innovative tech b2b product? We would need good amount of funding to build a decent MVP and show businesses.
The idea of an MVP is 'minimum, viable' ... If you feel you need a "good amount" of funding, I would challenge if you are minimum enough. Obviously, without knowing the details of your product, your ideal customer, or what need you will solve, it is hard to help expose what is necessary in an MVP and what is a Phase II or Phase III feature. I am happy to help you work through this, or answer specific questions, to get you rolling. Just book a call with some times that will work for you. Regardless, I would love to know more about it and how it goes after launch. To your success, -ShaunSN
-
What is the process of productizing a service? Also what are some good examples of productized services that have scaled?
2 different categories come to mind. H&R Block or other tax preparation services. The second is restaurants. This may seem like a product more than a service but I think it truly falls into the category of service, especially if you look at the national chains. Think Applebee's, TGI Fridays etc. The reason people go to these places is because of the experience they receive. The franchisors have created a system that generates nearly identical results nationwide. The first thing you need to do is figure out what makes your service superior to others out there, then you need to figure out how and why this is the case. From there you need to document it and make sure that you have a mechanism in place to ensure compliance. Granted that is a huge amount of work, but the basic premise is quite simple. You want all of the people you hire to do things more or less the way you would do them.MF
-
Taking a ridesharing idea from concept to market
here is my simple advice which should save you a lot of time and money. your journey should start identifying whether or not you have a problem worth solving. Most of your issues, assumptions, solution you put forward is irrelevant until you have done this. Don't get me wrong, your idea is sound and it often starts from a vision or an intuition that your idea is great. You now need to take a step back and do a coue of things: - what problems does cabsharing solve? Share the cost? Meet new people? Etc. - how would you rate the pain i.e. have people been dying for someone to co.e up with such a concept or is it simply a nice to have You have to come up with a porblem statement, good understanding of the problem and start testing this first. Get out there and interview people. Measure. Learn. If you have not heard of it yet just follow the lean startup approach (i recommend ash maurya's blog that will give you plenty to start with - his book running lean is also a great and practical resource). If you need help structuring it all or formalising your initial lean canvas I am happy to help. The most important thing is to test and validate key assumptions before you embark on something bigger. Many ways nowadays to do this, give me a shout in less than am hour we can get you up and running. Hope that helps, good luck the exciting part is just starting now: making it happen!ES
-
How do you get a product prototype developed in China sitting in the US?
It varies and it's very very specific to what you want to develop. The concrete design of your circuit matters. Also prototype building costs are usually a factor 10-100 higher than series. If you already have your prototype then you can shop around various manufacturing companies. To do that, you need Gerber files (your PCB design) and a bill of materials. You also need to think about casing: designing it and creating the mold is expensive. If you don't have your prototype yet, I recommend having it engineered in eastern Europe. Custom engineering is cheap there and high quality. IP protection is a problem. One thing to do is to distribute the work to different manufacturers. For the design phase you are safer if you design your prototype in Europe or the US where international patent laws apply. I could give you more specific advise in a phone call, getting to know a bit better what you are trying to build.GF
the startups.com platform
Copyright © 2025 Startups.com. All rights reserved.