PORTALS: a connected HubSpot network for franchises.

01The problem

Franchises, brand networks, and global businesses run on many separate HubSpot accounts — one per location, region, or brand — with no clean way to connect them. That gets expensive fast: duplicated tooling, humans copy-pasting records between portals, no consolidated reporting for headquarters, and dismal CRM adoption at exactly the locations that were supposed to benefit. HubSpot is a great fit for a franchise; there just wasn't a great way to run it at franchise scale. That gap is the whole reason PORTALS exists.

02What I built

PORTALS is a purpose-built HubSpot app: a mothership portal that distributes to and rolls up from its child portals, with a self-serve front-end so an operator can stand up a complex sync without calling engineering. I led it 0→1 — and "led" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. It meant wearing every hat the launch needed:

• Owned the product — the platform and its toolset, the feature set, and the sync model.
• Built the pricing model — three tiers with feature gating and SLAs, sized on subscription level, sync volume, and portal count.
• Wrote the original site copy and led the getportals.io site with a designer and marketer — including the product GIFs.
• Scripted and presented the product demo, and drove the HubSpot Marketplace listing.

03The product, up close

The whole point was to keep a non-engineer in the driver's seat. Take lead routing: a franchise runs one marketing site, generates a flood of leads, and needs each one to land in the right location's HubSpot — automatically. In PORTALS you write the rule in plain language and the app wires it into the network for you; no one's Xeroxing a property by hand across fifty accounts.

Just to be transparent: I can't republish SyncSmart's actual UI, so the screens below are recreations in my own palette. The behavior is real; the pixels are mine.

Filtering works the same way. You describe the population you want to sync, PORTALS writes the filter for you, and it shows you exactly which records pass before you commit anything.

(company) => {
  const deals = company.associatedDeals ?? [];
  return deals.some(deal =>
    deal.isOpen === true &&
    deal.stageOrder >= STAGE.QUALIFIED
  );
}

Reporting, same idea: ask in plain English, get a live view back. No report-builder, no waiting on an analyst.

And underneath all of it, the sync keeps every child portal in lockstep with the mothership — companies, contacts, and custom properties landing where they belong, schema and all.

04Commercialization & the deals

A product isn't real until someone pays for it and actually uses it. So I built the tiered pricing myself — Launch, Pro, and Enterprise, priced per mothership and per child — listed PORTALS on the HubSpot Marketplace, and negotiated the anchor partnerships that put it in front of hundreds of locations: a sales-training network of 200+ franchises and a travel network of 450+ franchisees. Those two deals are where the "500+" comes from; it isn't napkin math.

05What I'd take forward

PORTALS is the clearest proof of the through-line I bring: take a product from a blank page to a commercialized, adopted platform, and own every layer it takes to get there — the sync model, the pricing table, the marketplace listing, the demo I'm presenting on camera. Any one of those is a job on its own. The rare part is holding the whole line, concept to revenue, without dropping a handoff.