BeautyBuddy pivots into portfolio site for freelance beauty pros

BeautyBuddy just launched as a platform for beauty pros to show off what they’ve done, so they can better find work.

People hiring freelancers will look through portfolios on the site and take their pick. Cofounder Rebecca Hillegass said, “At this point, we’re going more toward getting lots of portfolios on, so it becomes more attractive to employers.”

The company pivoted from an initial idea about guiding people with sensitive or delicate skin to beauty products that were safe for them. The two-person team behind it, however, quickly learned that the problem they were attempting to solve wasn’t simply a matter of plugging the information into an API, but of getting the information itself. People still really just don’t know which products are right for which skin types.

Yet, the team got plugged in to the NYU Summer Launchpad accelerator as “Democrateyes” this year. Using the program’s lean methodology, they learned both that the sensitive skin problem was more complicated than they thought, but it also put them in front of a lot of freelance beauty workers, like hairdressers and makeup artists. Many of them were interested in the founders’ experience with the web and wanted to do a better job pitching their services online.

Similarly, employers that hire beauty professionals said that in freelancers’ scramble to find work, they often get incomplete applications or applications from freelancers who don’t meet the qualifications.

So the team pivoted to BeautyBuddy, which cofounder Jason Schapiro described this way: “What we are trying to do is simplify the process of advancing your beauty career.”

(Courtesy of BeautyBuddy)

The idea is to get lots of beauty professionals posting their resumes and — most importantly — pictures of their work, so that employers can come to the site and search it for people they might want to work with.

For employers, this means complete information for every potential hire. For freelancers, it could hopefully mean less trawling of Craigslist for work.

The team’s immediate challenge is to get enough portfolios onto the site, so that employers have a range of qualified candidates to pick from. In fact, that’s expected to be BeautyBuddy’s primary form of income: employers will pay to contact and interview potential candidates. Everything else will be free.

The founders live in Downtown Brooklyn and are both recent graduates of NYU Poly’s Computer Science Program. They have another business together making 3D-printed jewelry, which is for sale on Etsy. Thoughout their time at Poly, they interned and worked at MakerBot together, in various capacities. These days, they’re working partly from NYU’s Varick Street Incubator.

Employers have been invite-only so far, but for anyone who thinks they may hire beauty freelancers, sign up here. A new round of invites will be released soon.

BeautyBuddy has been bootstrapped thus far. The accelerator program claims no equity.