by Tessa Kriesel
June 29, 2021
I recently stumbled upon Polywork and instantly fell in love. "By helping people share what they do, we can democratize access to opportunities" - Polywork's mission
I happened to stumble upon Polywork, likely through Cassidy on Twitter because she's a hoot. Their team reached out, and before you know it, I'm leveraging Polywork to display my recent accomplishments.
I had recently deleted my personal blog because it was deserted and definitely wasn't providing credibility with a 6 month gap from the most recent blog post. I do not plan on ever managing my own personal website again after hearing what Polywork's roadmap includes.
I had the privilege of chatting with their CEO who gave me a deep dive into how to best leverage the platform for success as well as the exciting new features they're launching in the coming weeks.
What is Polywork?
Polywork is a free platform that allows people to more easily showcase their projects through activity posts. In the developer relations field specifically, it can be incredibly difficult to find the best platform to shed light on your work.
I'm not talking about the arbitrary job title you held at your last company. I'm talking about the good stuff. The stuff that you personally accomplished that rarely gets celebrated and shared publicly.
By helping people share what they do, we can democratize access to opportunities
- Polywork Founder
Now that's a mission I can get behind. Not everyone is set up for success. Some people attend college, while others don't. Some people can afford those options, while others can't.
Polywork, in my opinion, is giving the "underdogs" a fighting chance.
How to best leverage Polywork
Polywork is intended to function in a completely opposite fashion as other social networks. You won't see any like buttons, follower counts, or other statistics that make you feel like you have to compete with others. People can favorite your posts aka activities, but that's it, and only you can see your follower & favorite counts.
Curious what a filled out profile looks like? Take a peek at mine.
Badges
Badges help people identify the parts of your life that make you, you. Your badges appear at the top of your profile and can be edited and reordered. You can even create your own badges if your skills aren't currently listed. Fun tip, if you create the badge, you are forever tied to that creation—immortalizing your contributions and clear early access to the platform.
Badges help people identify the parts of your life that make you, you.
Profile details
You can list a bio, similar to Twitter, but with a wysiwyg editor, allowing for a bit more creativity. You can also list your previous roles, but since Polywork's focus is on your skills and not what jobs you've held, this content is collapsed by default.
You can also add links to other profiles or platforms you leverage and want to share with people.
Activities
Activities are the bread & butter of Polywork. Leverage activities to their fullest as they're architected to be search engine optimized and allow you to be easily found across the internet based on your activity content and correlating badges. Activities and badges are very important if you're planning to leverage Polywork to bring you opportunities.
Communications
One of the best features of Polywork is how they handle communications. If you are not open to opportunities, people can't reach out to you. I don't know about you, but I get a lot of direct messages from folks that seem genuine to start and then turn into messages I have no desire to entertain, view or reply to. You control whether people can reach out to you, and for which opportunities.
Once you accept an opportunity, you can leverage an instant messenger tool inside the platform to continue to maintain safety until you're ready to provide other forms of communication methods.
71% of Polywork users are open to being contacted for opportunities.
Looking ahead at their roadmap
Polywork defines their roadmap in two different ways—single player and multiplayer. Single player meaning your profile and how you present yourself. Multiplayer being the features available to you to engage and connect with other people on the platform.
Single Player
In the coming weeks, Polywork will be adding a new feature that is going to solve my personal blog problems. You will be able to design your profile in whichever way you see fit. Today, you see a timeline view. In the future, you can decide the view. Prefer tiles vs timeline? Or dark mode vs light? Full background image? You can also leverage a drag-n-drop profile builder and folders for showcasing & organizing specific activities.
I've received 135x more traffic to my Polywork profile than my actual website. -Polywork user
Ever struggled to get traffic to your website? Polywork can bring the traffic and attention that you're seeking through their multiverse and search engine optimized activities.
At this point, I'm planning on just pointing my personal domain to my Polywork page and calling it a day.
Multiplayer
Also known as multiverse—you're exploring and engaging with your fellow peers. I really like the naming conventions they've chosen. Multiverse gives me the vibes that I am surrounded by other people like me in this universe of creators.
Badge pages will allow you to interact and find people and activities easier. If you recall, we leverage badges to define our skills sets. I feel like badges will make it a lot easier to find awesome people, outside of your network, that you can engage for opportunities. Which also means that people looking for your skill sets can find you easier.
You can find featured people that align with your skillsets and areas of focus. When diving into the multiverse, you can easily find people you want to learn from or engage with. Imagine the amount of content that Polywork will house when folks really begin to fill in the activities on their profiles. I can't wait.
You will be able to follow people that you want to continue to monitor and see activities from. As I shared above, the folks that follow you are only visible to you, removing the competitive side of social networking. Polywork has made it a point to ensure that folks are able to be their true selves.
Recent activities will allow you to easily navigate among the multiverse to find content that fits your areas of focus. Wanna learn how to crochet? I can guarantee that one day you will be able to find over 100 different people's tutorials on crocheting right on Polywork.
Polywork allows you to control the inquiries you receive in the contact form. You can also completely disable this feature and not allow anyone to reach out to you. Maybe you're swamped or you're already booked for the next 6 months. The new comms feature will allow folks to receive a notification when you're soliciting opportunities again.
Stuck on the waitlist?
Use my invite code to skip the waitlist and see all the greatness that Polywork has to offer.
