# David Yuen, Senior UX Contractor at Yuen Design LLC — read of PortfolioCV, June 26 2026

> 9 years doing UX and product design work for hire, mostly mid-size SaaS companies, currently juggling two retainer clients and one agency subcontract. Son is 6. I do everything on a 2019 MacBook that still somehow works.

## How I got here

Googled "portfolio site for UX designers no maintenance" on a Tuesday night after a client asked me to send over "my resume" and I realized my PDF hadn't been touched in 14 months. A Reddit thread in r/freelance mentioned PortfolioCV alongside Contra and Read.cv. I clicked through. Tool stack right now: Notion public pages for case studies, a Cargo site I pay $13/mo for that I update maybe twice a year, and a Canva PDF I'm embarrassed by.

## What I clicked first

"Stop squeezing your best work into a one-page PDF." That landed. That's the actual pain. The headline "Your work is your resume" is a good line, not a great one, but that subhead underneath it earns some attention. I scrolled because of those two sentences.

The "problems" section also worked on me a little. "Finish a project Thursday. Your resume still lists work from 2023." That's just true. I've lived that sentence.

## Where I paused

The multiple personas feature. "One link, four different stories." That's the thing nobody builds well. I have a Figma file where I swap project order depending on who I'm pitching. If this actually works, and I mean actually, it solves something I've been doing manually in a janky way for three years. So I kept reading.

## What I distrusted

The testimonials. Sarah Chen got "3 clients this month just from sharing my PortfolioCV link on Twitter." Marcus Rodriguez "landed the contract Friday." Jamie Liu says it "transformed how we present to prospective clients." Alex Okonkwo gets "four different stories" from one link.

Every one of those quotes is a freelancer's dream outcome, stated cleanly with no friction or ambiguity. Four for four. Nobody says "it helped a little" or "I'm still figuring out the persona switching." Real testimonials have one person who kind of buries the lede. These read like someone describing the ideal use case in the voice of a satisfied customer.

And then I hit the bottom of the page. "Honest disclosure: we don't have live customers on this idea yet."

So those four testimonials are fictional. The page doesn't say that outright until you scroll to the scoring section, which most people would never reach. I have to assume Sarah Chen, Marcus Rodriguez, Jamie Liu, and Alex Okonkwo are invented. That's not a minor thing. That's a trust problem.

Also: "financial upside: 1/10" and "$-9,100 Year-1 take-home (Fermi)" are displayed on the product's own homepage. That is a strange self-own to lead with if you're trying to sell me on signing up for the tool itself.

## What would convince me

A real person using it. One case study from an actual freelancer with a before/after, ideally someone whose portfolio I could click through and whose claim I could verify. Not a testimonial quote, an actual URL to their PortfolioCV profile so I can see the output.

The multiple personas feature needs a video or a GIF of someone actually switching. Describe it all you want, I need to see what "one link, four different stories" means in practice before I believe it exists and works the way they're implying.

And the pricing at $12/mo is fine, but I need to know whether the product is actually live and whether "Start free" goes anywhere real.

## What I'd ask in an email reply

1. The page says no live customers yet. Are there any beta users I could look at to see what the output actually looks like? Even one real public link?
2. How does the multiple personas URL sharing work exactly? Does each persona get its own URL, or does the viewer see one link and I control which version is default?
3. Is this a real product I can sign up for today, or am I reading a concept page for something being built?

## Verdict: dismissive

The core concept is sound, the copy hits the right pain points, and I wanted to believe it. But fabricated testimonials on a page that quietly admits having no real customers is not a thing I can get past. If the product is real, prove it with one actual user's URL, not four polished quotes from people who don't exist yet.

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*Memo by skeptic persona, generated 2026-06-26. Studio breaks own self-grading loop.*