What happened to Coroflot?

Doing a bit of Portfolio housekeeping and marketing and just went to update my Coroflot…Am I missing something or is Coroflot totally different? You can’t search portfolios without paying? When did that happen?

Was looking to at least keep the Coroflot up to date for potential clients using the service until I heard from a new client the other day that they couldn’t use Coroflot as it was paid search only.

What good is that for small companies and individuals? How is someone supposed to find a consultancy or freelance designer? $199/mo?

Charging for access to our own portfolios doesn’t seem right. Charging for job postings is totally good.

I haven’t kept my Coroflot up to date in forever. Every 2 years it seems the site is revamped with a new format and I need to reformat everything or re-upload everything. I was using Behance for a while, until they did the same thing 5 years ago and broke the Portfolio website functionality. I’m now happily hosting on Squarepace and have full control of content and design.

I can’t even figure out now to how login to my Coroflot portfolio to edit it…

R

Ironically your portfolio is on the front page of the ‘People’ section. Can also get to it by searching you + coroflot.

Either way, that is a strange model to make companies pay to search. I used to use it a bunch for inspiration and portfolio references.

Well, I’m willing to hear some C77 insights about this…

+1 what RK said about charging for portfolio search access. Feels off-brand for C77.

I’m still searching for that “Pumping CAD” guy’s portfolio on Core. :laughing:

Although the direct person search is now behind a paywall, you can still be found under projects and your name:

https://www.coroflot.com/projects#keyword=kuchinsky&sort_by=5

Not ideal, but at least something?

I don’t think that was a great strategically move restricting the portfolio search.
I would assume that many have also Behance profiles and people looking for designers will just go there from now on.

Here is an older article from 2014 comparing both platforms:

The point is not that someone can find me if they are looking for me (searching for a name as a keyword is kinda silly no?- if they want to find ME, they can google me.), but that they can’t discover a designer when looking for one unless paying a lot of money, which is not great for freelancers or smaller employers, which means that there is little value for me, as a designer to post my portfolio there. Without the designers, Coroflot has no value, so unless they pay me for content, it’s a pretty unbalanced relationship.

Seems like a broken business model to me.

R

This is all good feedback – It’s been about 6 years since we changed anything of substance at Coroflot and the internet/industry has evolved a lot; our old niches have all been filled with dominant players – Indeed, Behance, Squarespace, etc. – or have fractured into smaller pieces – like companies hosting their own job postings and using social media to publicize them. We’ve tried on and modeled many different directions and we chose one that we felt conformed with established recruiting client behavior – paying for resume and profile searches – while leaving open alternative access points for members and small businesses seeking freelancers – e.g. using a keyword like “footwear” in the project search like you would have in the former people search: https://www.coroflot.com/projects#keyword=footwear&sort_by=5 yields a list of most recently active footwear designers. Though this alternate route isn’t 100% as robust a method for sourcing freelance talent, it is open and free and provides a bulk of the utility of the former people search. We should make it more clear that it is available.

We’ve been monitoring inquiry traffic between clients and users and so far it has remained stable throughout the transition so it seems like some clients have worked out how to get what they need. Ideally the transition would increase inquiries and that is what we are continuing to work on; we have a few more steps to take but in the near future everyone should see some increased exposure on the site.

While we need to include some money-making features in the continuing development of the site, we are very interested in not reducing the utility of it for our members. The difficulty is that coroflot is used in a lot of different ways by different people – for instance Richard, it seems like your use of it as a portfolio stopped when you moved away to Squarespace, and your sole use now is as an inquiry generator – so any feedback on how you (everyone/anyone) use it and what you are missing elsewhere is great to learn about …

Appreciate the dialog. Will for sure add more to reply…

In the meantime though, am I missing something? I don’t see any way to do the keyword search. It’s grey out and I can’t click on it.

If you could search with a keyword, that would totally change my comments…

R

I meant the project search, not the people search – it is a roundabout way to find freelancers, and different from starting with a list of people, but it does start a search by focusing on work samples and recent uploads/activity. At least that was our thinking in trying to provide alternative access points:

https://www.coroflot.com/projects#keyword=footwear&sort_by=5

OHHHHHH!

If you could just implement the same keyword search in people, that would 100% make the difference. Still could return only the projects, but maybe could click on the name in the project image to go right to the person profile.

I just thought it was broken this whole time!

Don’t mind at all a more robust search needing a paid entry of some sort (though I would think the barrier to entry at $199 is pretty high to hire a freelancer), but a basic search seems pretty necessary.

R

Agreed. Coroflot is no longer of value to me. I had used it in the past as a channel to get freelance work (as a fulltime freelancer). I have a personal site and as well as a Behance site that I will focus on maintaining.

This hurts small businesses and start-ups looking to dip their toes with an idea before massive investment and not willing to take a gamble with the $199 fee not certain if the talent they are looking for will be there.

Coroflot is no longer of value to me. I had used it in the past as a channel to get freelance work (as a fulltime freelancer). I have a personal site and as well as a Behance site that I will focus on maintaining.

– is it specifically the latest re-design of the site that has destroyed the value for you?

This hurts small businesses and start-ups looking to dip their toes with an idea before massive investment and not willing to take a gamble with the $199 fee not certain if the talent they are looking for will be there.

I can see the point here - the price tag is really aimed at recruiters who are hiring employees with bigger budgets. We could possibly split off an open search area specifically for freelance - it is something we considered in a member subscription model – $9/mo and you are front and center in a highly active searchable freelance pool.