Copy linkEmailFacebookWhatsAppXLinkedInBlueskyThreadsImpact Link
SaveSaved
This story is available exclusively to Business Insider
subscribers. Become an Insider
and start reading now.Have an account? .
Daniel Goodman / Business Insider
Scott Belsky and Matias Corea spent the past five years bootstrapping a startup, Behance.
2012-07-17
Like LinkedIn, Behance is a great way to surf for professional talent. But instead of posting resumes, it lets creative people post their portfolios of work.
Companies like Apple use Behance to target and poach designers; designers use it to push out their work and get noticed.
Behance users upload their own creations for the community to browse and review. "Your work could appear on 12 different sites as soon as you hit publish," Belsky explains. Behance also powers websites for a bunch of publishers including advertising agency Leo Burnett and the Rhode Island School of Design.
While most of the uploaded content is images, Behance is also becoming a hub for Sound Cloud files and film projects. Pinterest is one of Behance's top 15 traffic drivers; 95% of the traffic comes from non-members who just want to peruse.
In addition to helping companies find talent and artists find gigs, Behance is a powerful search engine for creativity. If you want to look for the lead game designer behind Zelda, for example, you could search for that on Behance.
"Everything we consume is made possible by creatives," says Belsky. "You can get granular in our site's search. We're going to be like Bloomberg for the creative industry."
Behance has grown to 30 people and it recently raised $6.5 million to continue its mission to become a container for everything people design.
Since its site relaunch last year, Behance's traffic has exploded. Belsky tells us 1 million projects were published in the last 6 months; it took four years for the first 1 million to be uploaded. The 2 million published projects have been viewed more than 1 billion times on Behance; 75 million views occurred in just 30 days.
We met Belsky and took a tour of the New York City office.
The Behance office is done in classic Soho startup style. Wood floors, high ceilings, and some red piping.
Oscar Ramos Orozco is the lead curator at Behance. He is also a skilled graphic designer. He curates the Behance collections displayed on over 18 websites. It is a demanding job and involves going through tens of thousands of items posted to Behance daily and choosing the best ones to feature.
Daniel Goodman is a video producer and photographer at Business Insider.He most recently spent a year in Hong Kong pursuing a Master's Degree in Journalism from the Journalism and Media Studies Center at the University of Hong Kong. A New Jersey native, he moved to China shortly after obtaining a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science and Anthropology from Johns Hopkins University in 2006. In China, Daniel worked in teaching, furniture sales, PR, research consulting, and large-scale concert promotion.
