How Polished Launched a No-CodeExample CV Assessment Web Service in 2 Months

Polished is a double-sided marketplace for on-demand resume help. The platform aims to attract both parties of the process: hiring professionals experienced in various industries and job seekers who need help. A job seeker can choose a professional with the relevant experience, send them their resume, and get a personalized video review.

In the resume market, there are a lot of resume writing services offering to write an entire resume for a job seeker. This approach has two problems: first of all, the price of such services ranges from $250 to $400. For most people, especially if they're currently unemployed, it’s too expensive.

User research revealed another problem: most people don’t want somebody to write their resume for them. When they go to an interview, they want to feel like they know exactly what their resume says and be able to answer every question, which is hard when it’s written by someone else.

Polished eliminates both problems. Reviewers only help to refine the resume, not write it, and the average review costs from $40 to $60, which is much more affordable than resume writing services.

It was important for the team to make the service affordable. Striving to reduce the costs even more, the team chose video reviews over live calls with reviewers. The review is provided in the form of a 10- to 15-minute pre-recorded video. The HR professional gives the client comprehensive feedback and shares suggestions on enhancing the resume to get more job interviews. To make it work, the Polished platform needed a reliable file uploading solution that would help easily send video files back and forth.

Building such a solution in-house wasn’t an option. The team consisted of two members: the founder and the designer. Though the founder of Polished had some experience in software development, coding the platform from scratch would have significantly postponed the project’s launch.

The Polished team decided to build the entire platform using only no-code/low-code solutions, and the file uploader was no exception. Here’s what they were looking for in an uploading service:

It was essential to have understandable, comprehensive documentation on getting the platform up and running without any hassle.

Since the entire platform was built using ready-made modules, Polished was looking for an uploader that provided out-of-the-box integrations with all the necessary tools, including Webflow and Zapier.

The video reviews uploaded to the platform appeared to be quite large: most often, their size ranged from 50 to 400 MB. Polished needed an uploader that could handle such files quickly and easily.

Polished was looking for a solution that wouldn’t require much code to integrate and run, but still be customizable when required. When using tools that don't permit code, there’s a big risk of bumping into limitations over time, for example when you need certain functionality that’s missing and there’s no way to add it manually.

Uploadcare killed two birds with one stone, allowing Polished to get up and running in minutes thanks to smooth integration with Zapier. With Uploadсare enabled, reviewers send large MP4 files that then travel through all the Zapier connections and get delivered to the end users. Yet, the solution is flexible enough to evolve together with Polished.

The documentation was straightforward and all the necessary integrations were available out of the box, so the team of one managed to integrate Uploadcare by the end of the day. After the integration, the uploading infrastructure doesn’t require ongoing maintenance.

Uploadcare File Uploader has a wide range of functionality, which allows Polished to easily enable additional features if needed. To enhance the user experience on the platform, they plan to enable multiple uploading so that reviewers can send an edited CV document along with the video. Uploadcare already has this feature; the only thing left is to enable it in the settings.

At the very beginning, Polished faced a challenge: they didn’t realize how large the uploaded videos would be, so they quickly hit the limit of their Uploadcare plan. To increase the limits, they would need to switch to the Enterprise plan. At that stage, however, they didn’t need all the functionality Enterprise plan offers; they only needed to be able to upload large files. To get around this issue, Uploadcare created a custom plan with extended limits so they didn’t have to pay for functions they didn’t need.

The founder of Polished built a full-fledged marketplace with a flexible uploading solution without hiring a development team.

Integrating Uploadcare allowed Polished to cut down the time to market. In just a few months, the team of two people managed to design and build a full-fledged marketplace and accomplish all the other tasks related to the product launch. Polished started functioning early and, as of today, it provides about 10 reviews per week. The team aims to hit 50 to 100 sales a day as the first phase of growth.

Polished drastically reduced development costs by avoiding building an uploading solution from scratch. In addition to the initial development expenses, they cut down on ongoing maintenance. Bug fixes and minor feature development would have required at least one full-time developer and high ongoing costs. Instead of that, the founder of Polished successfully runs the platform himself.

Uploadcare is an end-to-end cloud platform that provides a next-gen infrastructure for file handling. It can cover any part of the media pipeline or all of them at once: