How Behance Brings Order to Crazy Creatives

Behance founders Scott Belsky and Matias Corea want to fulfill a broad creative industry need—for better organization—with web tools, events, even notebooks.

When Scott Belsky and Matias Corea talk about Behance, the business they co-founded, they sound a lot more like they are describing a social movement.

"We are a mission-centric, medium-agnostic company," says Belsky. "Our core mission is to organize and empower creatives--the artists, designers, photographers of the world."

But Behance is also a for-profit venture. Launched in 2006, Behance, which now has 30 employees, has three distinct but complementary lines of business. The Behance Network, a website where creatives can showcase their portfolios for potential employers (freelance or full-time), now boasts around a million users and is the biggest. (A new site design, with enhanced search features, for instance, was introduced yesterday.) The company also runs the 99%, a research arm, think tank, and annual spring networking conference in New York, and sells a suite of Action Method notebooks, all graphically laid out to help a disorganized artist prioritize her to-do's.

If that sounds like an unrelated hodgepodge, well, it is. But rather than a particular product or service, it's that mission—to organize creatives—that ties them all together, and that the founders believe has led the company to take off.

"Its easy to become enamored with a product that you dream of building," says Belsky. "We wanted to change an industry. And let's be honest, we couldn't conceive of the best way to do that if we were already set on building one thing or another."

It all started seven years ago when Belsky and Corea met through a mutual friend in New York. At the time, Corea was a freelance graphic designer, and Belsky had just gotten his MBA at Harvard. The two immediately bonded over their passion for "organizing" the sprawling, inefficient, chaotic creative industry.

"Creatives are the most disorganized people on the planet, but they're the people that make our lives interesting," says Belsky. "They struggle to have efficient careers."

Belsky and Corea spent a year ("lots of late nights, Chinese food, and wine," says Corea) crafting the best way to solve that problem and respond to a legitimate need in the market. Their first answer: the Action Method notebooks.

"Interestingly, the Action books were our first line of business. They were simple to get produced, and we sold them at a 50% margin. Then we were able to bootstrap the company, including the Behance Network, and the 99% Conference, which we launched about a year later," says Belsky.

"Some people might think it's strange to jump from selling notebooks to hosting a conference, but to us, it was just another excellent avenue to bring structure to this world," he says. "Four years later, we sell out of the conference tickets; there's a 1,200 person waiting list."

Aside from an initial "friends and family" round of financing at the start, the company hasn't raised third-party investment. While the founders won't divulge annual revenue, they say Behance became profitable in 2011. 

Today the Behance Network, the duo says, is by far the company's biggest business. The site has grown to include not only job listings for creatives, but also custom design portfolio tools, and creative exposure through prominent placements. A majority of the network revenue comes from premium services like a Behance online portfolio (that displays all of an individual's Behance projects, which are each posted free), fees from recruiters looking to enlist new talent, and advertising.

And they add, what gives the network a competitive edge, is that it's in line—like everything else—with their overarching mission.

"It's not a social network. It's not about friends, inspiration, or creativity. In fact, we never use those words here," says Belsky. "It's about execution, empowerment, and organization." And getting more struggling freelance artists hired.

SOURCE: www.inc.com