Beyond LinkedIn: The Rise of Peerlist and Community-Driven Portfolios for Makers in 2025

For years, LinkedIn has been the undisputed king of professional networking. It's the digital equivalent of a Rolodex, a place to list your job titles, connect with old colleagues, and maybe, just maybe, get noticed by a recruiter. But for a growing segment of the workforce—the makers, builders, and creators—LinkedIn is starting to feel less like a professional network and more like a crowded, noisy room where everyone is shouting but no one is listening.

The "maker" economy, encompassing developers, designers, product managers, indie hackers, and content creators, thrives on a simple principle: show, don't tell. Your value isn't defined by the title on your profile but by the code you've shipped, the products you've designed, and the communities you've built. Traditional platforms, with their emphasis on text-based résumés and often cringeworthy self-promotion, simply don't have the DNA to showcase this tangible proof-of-work.

This gap has sparked a revolution. A new wave of community-driven platforms is emerging, built from the ground up for the way makers work and think. These networks prioritize projects over job titles, verifiable contributions over self-proclaimed skills, and authentic community over algorithm-driven noise.

Leading this charge is Peerlist, a professional network designed specifically for people who create. But it's not alone. This article will take a deep dive into Peerlist, explore why the old model is failing, and introduce you to the best community-driven alternatives—including the visually rich nazca.my—that can help you build a professional identity that truly reflects your work in 2025.

The Credibility Crisis of Traditional Professional Networks

Before we explore the solutions, it's crucial to understand the problem. Why are so many talented professionals feeling disconnected from the world's largest professional network? The issues run deeper than just a cluttered user interface.

A System Built for Titles, Not Talent

LinkedIn's core structure is the résumé. Your profile is a linear progression of titles held at various companies. This model works reasonably well for traditional corporate roles but falls apart for makers.

A software engineer's profile might say they worked at "Big Tech Inc." for three years, but it won't show their thoughtful code reviews on GitHub, the elegant solution they devised for a complex bug, or the open-source library they maintain in their spare time.

A product designer's profile lists "Senior UI/UX Designer," but it doesn't convey the deep user research, countless iterations, and collaborative workshops that led to a beloved product feature.

These platforms are designed to document where you've been, not what you've built. This creates a fundamental disconnect for individuals whose professional value is intrinsically tied to their output.

The Rise of "Broetry" and Inauthenticity

Spend ten minutes scrolling through your LinkedIn feed. You'll likely encounter a deluge of sanctimonious posts, thinly veiled self-promotion disguised as advice, and viral engagement-bait polls. This "hustle culture" content often drowns out genuine discussions about craft and industry. For makers who prefer to let their work speak for itself, this environment can feel alienating and inauthentic. The signal-to-noise ratio is dismally low, making it difficult to find meaningful connections or discover genuinely skilled individuals.

The "Skills & Endorsements" Fallacy

The skills section on LinkedIn has become a box-ticking exercise. It's easy to add "JavaScript" or "Product Strategy" to your profile, and even easier for colleagues to click "Endorse" without any real verification. This system lacks depth and context. It doesn't answer the important questions:

• How did you use that skill?
• What was the outcome of the project where you applied it?
• Can you provide proof of your proficiency?

This lack of verifiable evidence is precisely the problem that new-age platforms are solving with a "proof-of-work" model.

Deep Dive: What is Peerlist?

Peerlist emerged as a direct answer to the shortcomings of traditional networks. Founded by Yogini Bende and Kushal Pisavadia, it brands itself as a "professional network for people in tech." At its core, Peerlist is built on the belief that your work should be the centerpiece of your professional identity. It's less of a social network and more of a single source of truth for your entire professional journey, verified by the work itself.

Key Features that Set Peerlist Apart

Peerlist isn't just a prettier LinkedIn; it's a fundamental reimagining of the professional profile.

Work-First Profile: Your Peerlist profile is a dynamic portfolio, not a static résumé. The platform integrates directly with services where makers do their work. You can connect your GitHub, Dribbble, Behance, Medium, Substack, and more. This automatically populates your profile with your latest projects, designs, and articles, creating a living, breathing testament to your skills.

Verifiable Proof-of-Work: When you showcase a project, you're not just describing it; you're linking directly to the source. A developer's profile features their actual GitHub contributions, commit history, and repositories. A designer's profile displays their work directly from Dribbble. This shifts the focus from "I know how to code" to "Here is the code I've written."

Meaningful Context: Instead of a generic list of skills, Peerlist encourages you to detail your role, the tools you used (Go, React, Figma, etc.), and the challenges you overcame for each project. This provides rich context that recruiters and potential collaborators find invaluable.

"Scroll" - A Curated Community Feed: Peerlist has a community feed called "Scroll," but it's intentionally different. It's a curated space for users to share project updates, ask technical questions, announce product launches, and celebrate wins. It's focused, relevant, and refreshingly free of the corporate jargon that plagues other platforms.

Peerlist Hire: For companies, Peerlist offers a powerful hiring tool. Recruiters can search for talent based on actual skills demonstrated in projects, tools used, and contribution history. It's a merit-based system that helps companies find the right person for the job, not just the person with the best-optimized profile keywords.

Who is Peerlist For?

Peerlist is a haven for developers, product managers, UI/UX designers, engineering managers, and indie hackers. It's particularly strong within the global startup ecosystem, offering a place for builders to connect, collaborate, and find their next opportunity based on merit.

Pros & Cons

Pros: Highly authentic, deep integrations for tech professionals, strong and supportive community, clean UI/UX, excellent for sourcing talent based on actual work.

Cons: The user base, while growing rapidly, is still much smaller than LinkedIn. It is heavily focused on the tech and product world, so it may be less relevant for professionals in other industries.

Top Peerlist Alternatives for Makers in 2025

Peerlist is a fantastic platform, but it's part of a broader movement. Several other services are tackling the same problem from different angles, each with a unique philosophy and feature set.

1. Nazca.my

Nazca.my positions itself as "the professional network for people who build things," with a strong emphasis on storytelling and visual presentation. If Peerlist is the data-driven log of your work, Nazca is the beautifully crafted narrative behind it. It understands that a project is more than just a final outcome; it's a story of problems, processes, and people.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): Nazca excels at helping you build a rich, visual portfolio that tells the story of your professional journey. It's designed to connect the dots between your projects, the skills you used, and the impact you made.

Key Features:

• Project-Centric Storytelling: Create detailed case studies for each project, complete with images, embedded videos, and rich text descriptions.
• Visual Portfolio Builder: The platform offers elegant templates and tools to create a stunning online portfolio that feels like a personal website.
• Skill Mapping: Visually connect skills to the specific projects where you applied them, providing clear evidence of your capabilities.
• Collaborative Spaces: Showcase team projects and credit collaborators, creating a web of interconnected talent.

Who It's Best For: UI/UX designers, product managers, founders, and creative technologists who want to present their work in a compelling, narrative-driven format. It's an excellent choice for those whose process is as important as the final product.

How It Compares to Peerlist: Nazca is more focused on aesthetics and long-form storytelling. It's the ideal platform for building a portfolio you'd share with a client or include in a high-stakes job application. Peerlist is more about real-time, verifiable data streams from platforms like GitHub, making it incredibly powerful for technical roles. Think of Nazca as your curated museum exhibition and Peerlist as your active workshop.

2. Polywork

Polywork was one of the first platforms to directly challenge the single-job-title paradigm. Its name hints at its philosophy: we are all "poly-workers," multi-hyphenates with a range of skills and interests that don't fit neatly into one box. Polywork gives you a space to share everything you do.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): It's a professional network built for the multi-hyphenate. It allows you to create a timeline of all your professional activities, not just your full-time jobs.

Key Features:

• Activity-Based Timeline: Instead of a list of jobs, your profile is a feed of updates: "Shipped a new feature," "Spoke at a conference," "Wrote a blog post," "Mentored a junior designer."
• Collaboration Badges: You can tag people you collaborated with on any activity, creating a verified web of your professional interactions.
• AI-Powered "Page" Builder: Polywork uses AI to help you quickly generate a beautiful personal website based on your profile activities.
• Opportunities Marketplace: A dedicated space for finding full-time roles, freelance gigs, and speaking opportunities that match your diverse skill set.

Who It's Best For: Freelancers, content creators, keynote speakers, and anyone with a bustling "side hustle" ecosystem. If you're a "Developer-YouTuber-Angel-Investor," Polywork is the only platform that lets you showcase all those facets equally.

How It Compares to Peerlist: Polywork is about capturing the breadth and velocity of your work. Its timeline format is dynamic and emphasizes continuous activity. Peerlist is more focused on the depth and substance of your core projects. Polywork is a journal of your professional life; Peerlist is a gallery of your greatest hits.

3. Read.cv

Read.cv brings taste and design sensibility to the world of professional profiles. It's the antithesis of the cluttered, clunky interfaces of older networks. The platform is built on the belief that how you present your work is just as important as the work itself.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): A design-first platform for creating beautiful, minimalist, and highly readable professional profiles and portfolios.

Key Features:

• Elegant & Customizable Profiles: Offers stunning, typography-focused templates that make your professional story a pleasure to read.
• Case Study Focus: The platform is structured to help you create in-depth case studies for your most important projects, similar to a high-end portfolio site.
• Curated Job Board: Features high-quality roles from design-forward companies and innovative startups.
• Community Vibe: The community on Read.cv is heavily skewed towards designers and creatives, leading to high-signal discussions about craft and aesthetics.

Who It's Best For: Product designers, brand designers, creative directors, and any professional in a visually-driven field. If you believe presentation matters and want a profile that reflects your design taste, Read.cv is unmatched.

How It Compares to Peerlist: Read.cv is primarily a portfolio and CV builder with a community layer attached. Its networking features are secondary to the goal of creating a perfect, shareable profile. Peerlist is a community and network first, with profiles that happen to be very powerful. You go to Read.cv to present; you go to Peerlist to participate.

4. Braintrust

Braintrust takes a radically different approach by leveraging Web3 and blockchain technology. It's not just a platform; it's a decentralized talent network owned and controlled by its members.

Unique Selling Proposition (USP): A user-owned, decentralized network that connects elite tech talent with enterprise-level clients, cutting out the traditional middlemen.

Key Features:

• Decentralized Model: The network is controlled by its community of talent and clients, not a central corporation.
• BTRST Token: Users earn the BTRST token for referring clients and talent, screening candidates, and participating in governance. This token gives them a stake in the network's success.
• Rigorous Vetting: Unlike open platforms, Braintrust has a stringent screening process to ensure only top-tier talent is accepted.
• Enterprise Clients: Braintrust focuses on connecting freelancers with major companies like Nike, Deloitte, and Porsche for high-value, long-term contracts.

Who It's Best For: Experienced, high-end freelance developers, designers, project managers, and marketers who are tired of traditional freelance marketplaces and want direct access to top-tier clients without exorbitant fees.

How It Compares to Peerlist: This is the most distinct alternative. Braintrust's primary purpose is transactional—it exists to help you find high-paying work. Peerlist's purpose is relational—it exists to help you showcase your work and build your professional reputation and network. You join Braintrust to get a gig; you join Peerlist to build a career identity.

Feature Comparison: Which Platform is Right for You?

Feature	Peerlist	Nazca.my	Polywork	Read.cv	Braintrust
Primary Focus	Verifiable Proof-of-Work	Project Storytelling	Timeline of Activities	Aesthetic Presentation	Talent Marketplace
Target Audience	Developers, PMs, Designers	Visual Creators, Founders	Multi-hyphenates, Freelancers	Designers, Creatives	Elite Freelancers
Key Integration	GitHub, Dribbble, Medium	Visual media uploads	Socials, Calendar	Figma, Dribbble	N/A
Hiring Model	Recruiter Platform	Job Board / Discovery	Opportunities Marketplace	Curated Job Board	Direct Client Matching
Unique Feature	Automated Work Profile	Narrative Case Studies	Multi-hyphenate Timeline	Minimalist Design	Decentralized & User-Owned

How to Choose Your Maker Hub

With so many excellent options, how do you decide where to invest your time? The answer is likely not "choose one." Many makers will benefit from using a combination of these platforms for different purposes.

If you're a software developer who lives and breathes code, Peerlist is non-negotiable. Its deep GitHub integration provides the most authentic proof of your skills.

If you're a product designer preparing a portfolio for job applications, Read.cv or Nazca.my will allow you to present your case studies in the most professional and visually compelling way.

If you're a freelancer juggling multiple roles—writing a newsletter, shipping a SaaS product, and consulting—Polywork is the perfect platform to capture the full spectrum of your professional life.

If you're an elite, established freelancer looking to land a six-figure contract with a Fortune 500 company, getting vetted and accepted into Braintrust should be your primary goal.

The modern professional strategy is about building a distributed identity. You can use Peerlist as your central, verifiable hub of work, link to a detailed Nazca.my case study for your flagship project, and use Polywork to share day-to-day updates. They all serve the same ultimate goal: to create a holistic, authentic, and verifiable picture of who you are and what you can do.

The Future is Verifiable and Community-Driven

The tectonic plates of professional identity are shifting. The era of the one-page, text-based résumé as the sole representation of your career is over. For makers, builders, and creators, your work is your résumé, your portfolio is your profile, and your community is your network.

Platforms like Peerlist, Nazca.my, and their contemporaries are not just building better tools; they are fostering a new culture. A culture that values verifiable contributions over vague claims, authentic connections over empty networking, and community collaboration over cutthroat competition.

So, take a moment to look at your professional profile. Does it tell the story of what you've built? Does it reflect the pride you take in your craft? If not, it's time to make a change. Stop just listing your skills. Start showcasing your work. Join the community that best helps you tell your professional story.