Portfoium Case Study

Why Portfolium Matters

Let’s be honest, filling a job opening sucks. On one hand you have the applicant, blindly distributing bullet points of accomplishments they poured their time and energy into while constantly refreshing their email for a response. On the other hand is the person doing the hiring, inundated by descriptions of grandiose accomplishments with little to no context. Regardless of which lens you look through, the traditional method of hiring is uncertain, inefficient and frustrating.

For college students and recent grads, this problem is magnified. How can they showcase the accomplishments from their coursework to show real-world application of the skills they’ve learned? That’s where Portfolium comes in. Simply put, Portfolium’s mission is connecting learning with opportunity, and the company accomplishes this by providing a platform for students to make stunning digital portfolios. Instead of scanning a resume for applicable achievements, the person hiring also gains insight into what the applicant can actually do.

The Need for Filestack

Daniel Marashlian, Portfolium CTO & Co-Founder, first learned the challenges of delivering a photos to a user with his previous company TweetPhoto. “I know the pain your engineering team goes through every day, of not only photo delivery, but photo processing”. On top of this was the ever evolving file repository landscape, and Marashlian recalls integrating with these APIs as monotonous and time wasting “It was literally every other week”.

The user-generated file uploading problem became even more of a concern as more and more users signed up, “We were pushing files straight to S3, and it was like, there has to be a better way to upload and maintain them, but also process them. We want to transform them, we want to stream them, we want to eventually distribute them around the world”.

Uploading images to Twitter was difficult enough, now the challenge became presenting a student’s body of work in a visually convincing manner, “If it’s a portfolio, it needs to be very visual. It’s not just a list of files you’re getting in your learning management system because your teacher gave you an assignment, and you uploaded your word doc and you said here you go, grade this. It’s a portfolio you’re showing to the world, you’re showing to hiring managers…it’s very visual”.

Portfolium integrated with Filestack when “…We had 50,000 users, now we have 4 million” and notes that Filestack has let Portfolium focus on the unique qualities that differentiates itself from the competition, “The experience is probably beyond what we would’ve been able to write in-house because we would’ve had to focus so much time on the mechanics. Now we’re focusing on the experience”.

While Portfolium excels at connecting learning with opportunity; Filestack excels at empowering businesses to spend their time on perfecting their craft.