StudioHub is an easy-to-use platform for the new generation of professionals to quickly create personal websites that highlight their holistic selves.
After interviewing many college students and new graduates in various career fields (ranging from arts and design to English and writing to technology and product), our team quickly discovered a problem that people in this demographic experience. Many struggle with presenting the different aspects of themselves, both in their career and their personal interests.
The current ways of showcasing experience range broadly. Résumés and LinkedIn are both very linear and not accommodating to images, and are also restrictive as they are meant for specific roles. They are also unfriendly to those in more creative careers. The other side of the spectrum are existing personal website creators, which are intimidating to use and difficult to update.
We want to bridge that gap and bring together the visual nature of personal websites and the standardization of professional career platforms.
Our customer can see the following benefits with the product:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Customizable themes
- Automatically-generated bio and descriptions for thumbnails
- Tagging option to sort and filter thumbnails
- Organized, visual dashboard that can be shared with others using personalized link, or domain name if purchased
- Summarize a mock customer case study involving this work (with quantifiable impacts).
Nicole is a senior in college majoring in product design with a variety of different interests and experiences: entrepreneurship, consulting, and photography. She would like to be able to portray her variety of skills, interests, and experiences in a centralized, digital format that is less linear than LinkedIn or her resume. Nicole is intimidated by personal website builders like Squarespace because she doesn’t even know where to begin – she doesn’t know what to include in her portfolio, how to write about each of the things she includes, how to place her items onto the page, or how to design the look and feel of her site. She is also extremely busy with her college life and doesn’t necessarily need a personal portfolio for job applications, so she just hasn’t put in the time and effort to create her personal website. Nicole found out about StudioHub from one of her friends at college who is a StudioHub ambassador. Her friend told her all about StudioHub and told her to sign up. Nicole found StudioHub online, signed up for a free account, and instantly got to work uploading her resume, images, documents that she wanted to include in her StudioHub portfolio. After adding these things, StudioHub automatically generated a portfolio for her with her basic info laid out on the page, a bio, her headshot, and descriptions of her projects/past experiences. Nicole was able to go from having no personal portfolio to having a rough draft personal portfolio in 15 minutes from signing up for an account. She made some edits to her portfolio and then in the next few weeks, she started to include a link to her StudioHub site as part of her job applications to various companies. In almost every interview, the recruiter would bring up her StudioHub portfolio and they would chat about the experiences she had on her portfolio. Nicole believes she was better able to portray herself and her skills/experiences to recruiters in a visual way through her StudioHub portfolio and believes that this portfolio helped her secure a job.
- Top three areas of uncertainty, ranked by value of reducing uncertainty.
- Our top area of uncertainty is how much customization we want to offer to our customers when creating their personal portfolios. Some customers may want the freedom to design the look and feel of their personal portfolio from scratch, whereas others may want more structure and support when creating their portfolio. In addition, hiring managers may want more standardization across personal portfolios they are viewing so it is easier and faster for them to look through potential candidates. How do we balance the needs of the various stakeholders involved?
- The next area of uncertainty is our business model – how do we want to generate revenue? Do we want to have a subscription plan with a free option and then paid options with access to more features, primarily ads, or both?
- The last area of uncertainty is how we plan to cultivate a Linked-in-like network as we grow and expand to be more of a two-sided marketplace (employers and potential employees on the platform).
- Current plan to explore those areas of uncertainty (link).
- Interviews with more college students and new grads to find out what exact level of customization they would like to have and why. Interviews with hiring managers to learn what level of standardization they would ideally like to see to make their jobs easier. A/B testing with an option to have free reign in designing your personal website versus only access to the custom templates that StudioHub provides – how does engagement and activity change between users in the two groups?
- More competitive research – model business model and pricing off of Linked-In and Squarespace. Test out business model on beta users – is price worth it, how much would they pay, are these features important to them, etc.
- Need to do more interviews with employers/hiring managers to see what their needs are, what features they would need to have and like to have to use the platform, what is important to them. Also need to carefully study Linked-in and how it grew to be what it is today (learn from their mistakes and take notes on each step that worked well for them).
- Summarize prior research related to this opportunity. What do we know?
The past decade has fundamentally changed the way in which we view work. People are changing jobs more than ever before and there’s an increase in online open source work product. As a result, the lines between hobbies, careers, and personal brands are blurring.
- Leading signals we might observe if this is working (and not working).
A leading signal we might observe if this is working is seeing an increased use of StudioHub amongst young professionals. Specifically, if their StudioHub page is linked in their social media biographies and/or LinkedIn pages. We believe that StudioHub is the future of professional digital identities and if our hypothesis is correct, we will see a wave of next generation workers using our platform to showcase their holistic professional selves.
- What other options did you consider (including benefits) (link)?
At first, we were building our product for creatives. Since this market is the most likely to use portfolios for recruiting purposes, we assumed that they would be our target users. Our hypothesis was that an automated, easy to create portfolio tool would be very useful. However, we quickly learned through our user research that designers emphasize the importance of customization. They did not value ease-of-use and automation over having a custom feel.
Gen-Z is rapidly entering the workforce and exploring new ways to work and present themselves that have previously not existed. The future of work is changing, especially with the pandemic bringing along new working conditions that invite job hopping and having a wide variety of skills. We want to capitalize on this time of growth and challenge the products that currently exist. More and more people in our generation are moving away from platforms like LinkedIn.
- Brief summary of technologies involved (if known). Detail any areas of specialization required.
Our rough time frame and goals is the following:
- 1-3w: Create working Figma wireframe and interactive proof-of-concept
- 1-3m: Flesh out a working interactive prototype with preliminary UI & test MVP features
- 1-3q: Narrow down value add and conduct testing with beta users
