Travis Vocino

My good friend, a model at the time, was the inspiration for an idea I had to solve a major problem with model portfolios. Most model portfolio sites are built on top of open-source CMS themes designed to get you up and running with your own “social network” in minutes. That is to say, they’re mostly crap.

The largest model portfolio site was and is a MySpace software clone called Model Mayhem. It’s not very pretty.

I thought “What could be better than looking at models all day to build an app?” Thus, Folioly, an easy interface for models to upload, organize and share their model photos and create a comp-card style portfolio, was born.

The Business Model

Freemium is a business model that works by offering a game, product or service free of charge while charging a premium for advanced features, functionality, or related products and services.

I decided early on that I was going to build a freemium service. This has been a proven SaaS model—especially in regards to apps where you upload and store a certain amount of data. Photos and portfolios are therefore a perfect fit. Simply allow a limited storage metric for free and then increase it for some monthly fee.

Since in my default template the user would get a nice layout for 5 high resolution images, I decided that offering 4 hi-res photos for free would give the user an opportunity to test the platform and encourage them to upgrade since it would look nicer to complete the page.

The Homepage

There wasn’t much to the homepage. Its only purpose in life is to convert paid visitors, through Facebook ads and Google Adwords, to free sign-up users.

I wanted the call to action to be huge but not stupid, which is why I made it big but kept the color scheme rather than opt for red or an accent color. For the heavy reader or researcher, there’s another small call to action across the middle of the page in the white space.

Other than that, you’re really just trying to convey some quick reasons why one should sign up. Most visitors from paid acquisition spent very little time on the homepage before signing up. People land on your app’s homepage and decide within seconds if they think it’s some fly-by-night bullshit or if it’s a well-crafted web application that they might be interested in.

That’s why UI and UX investments are so important!

The Dashboard

It’s important to let your users know that they have something to do next. By showing icons and outlines for where photos should be it encourages users to upload more. This coupled with the fact that a user has a limited amount of free storage creates a sense that they should upgrade so they can complete the unfinished work.

The dashboard in Folioly used a sortable list powered by jQuery to allow models to arrange their photos.

The blank space items encouraged users to upload new photos to fill out the layout (and thus upgrade to a premium plan).

The dashboard is clean and seeing the photos dragged and dropped into place is very cool. I’m excited to use this UI pattern again soon.

The Conversion to Pro

At any point in our users’ lives they can check the status of their account. I deliberately kept it extremely simple. Two plans, one is limited, one is unlimited. There’s really not much to think about.

The account overview page has one job: sell pro conversions. It’s big, it’s blue, it’s pretty.

Using Amazon S3 for storing model photos meant even high resolution images had a relatively low cost. And how many photos can someone really upload? Offering an unlimited plan didn’t seem like much of a gamble since averaged over the entire user base, the $12 per month more than covered even the most ambitious of uploaders.

The Viral Loop

Sharing was initially handled by a simple custom AddThis integration. Later, it was moved to more integrated Facebook and Twitter API connections.

The key aspect to success with web software products like this is a strong viral loop. The Folioly model worked well for this since models inherently are looking for exposure and therefore genuinely want to share the portfolio they’ve just created with as many people as humanly possible.

At that point, you just need to give them the tools to do so.

For a more technical overview about tracking the viral loop in Folioly, take a look at my article Tracking Goals for Your Web Application with Google Analytics.

Why It Didn’t Work

Folioly got some traction, converted well (Facebook ads worked better than Google Adwords) and had decent retention in the beginning. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t enough of a return to justify spending the time and money marketing the site.

I believe it could have worked if features were continuously rolled out and more attention was given to the relationship and contact building between models and photographers. That’s what a lot of these model portfolio sites are really used for, it seems.

I loved working on it as it taught me about conversion tracking, plotting cost-per-acquisition scenarios and designing viral loops for social apps.