Get to know a Toronto startup: Konekt.me

There's no shortage of web sites these days that help you create a resume or online portfolio. From behemoths like LinkedIN to more recent upstarts like FourthDraft, Behance and visualize.me, there's almost a site for every type of career or skill-set someone would want to market. Almost. Enter Konekt.me which aims to offer portfolio building options not offered by the other players. Working out of office sharing space Project:RHINO above The Hoxton, the team is furiously writing lines of code to be ready for their beta release later this summer. I recently caught up with co-founder Neil Martin who gave me some details on what they're up to.

Why did you start Konekt.me?

Konekt.me was originally conceived as a better way for university students to organize their academic work. Rather than simply storing all your essays, presentations and class projects on a hard drive where nobody will ever see them, why not upload everything to a clean, professional looking portfolio that you can show to grad schools or employers?

However, once we started building the platform and talking to people about it, we realized that everyone, not just students, needs a way to easily showcase their best work online. We've talked to everyone from artists and musicians to lawyers and real estate agents, and everyone has discovered their own way to use Konekt.me. It's really exciting.

How is this different than other online options for managing and displaying your resume or portfolio?

We think of Konekt.me less as simply a resume site, and more as a tool for managing your personal brand. It combines a personal portfolio with an interactive CV to present a complete picture of who you are.

LinkedIn is great as a professional network, but lacks the ability to effectively showcase creative content. On the other hand, the majority of portfolio sites have a specific set of features that make them great for a particular audience (bands, graphic designers, photographers etc). But what if you're an artist and a musician? Or a photographer who also writes poetry? Or maybe you're someone who isn't fortunate enough to have a portfolio site dedicated to your skill, like a chef, web developer or tradesman.

With Konekt.me, we've stripped things down to a core set of intuitive features that make it easy for anyone to showcase their full range of abilities, no matter what those might be. The concept is to provide you with a single landing page that showcases everything from your education and work experience to your unique skills, opinions and creative talents.

Who is your target customer?

We've begun by reaching out mainly to students and creative professionals because they produce a lot of great content, and have immediate use for a portfolio. Feedback has been amazing so far.

Specifically, people have been blown away by our content uploader. Whether you're uploading work from your hard drive, linking to other sites, or importing directly from platforms like Vimeo, YouTube or Soundcloud, creating new portfolio entries is fast, simple and intuitive. We obsess over simplicity. The fewer clicks, the better. This means you can spend less time building your portfolio, and more time focused on the things you love to do.

Another issue facing many portfolio sites is the problem of over-customization. Too many options can often be overwhelming and result in a sloppy or cluttered portfolio, especially if you're a busy student with exams to worry about. On Konekt.me, we've embraced the philosophy that even someone without any design or coding skills whatsoever should be able to have a great looking portfolio.

What is your revenue model?

For the time being, our primary concern is with building a platform that looks great and is easy to use. That's very important to us, as well as our investors. We want people to love using Konekt.me. That said, there's definitely an opportunity to introduce some premium features down the road. We have some ideas we're pretty excited about, but we're not rushing into anything.