I started in marketing automation and HubSpot is what pulled me in — not the software for its own sake, but watching a process someone ran by hand become something a machine could carry instead. Ten years later it is still most of what I do, and the part I get called in for is rarely a feature.
What that means in practice: I work the whole portal, not only the parts you can click together. Data model and custom objects, workflows and lifecycle reporting, CMS themes and templates, and the coded layer underneath — custom modules, coded actions, CRM extensions, programmable emails and serverless functions. Configuration where configuration is enough. Code where it is not.
Most of the work is Belgian and Dutch-speaking; the portals are wherever the company is. If you are weighing up an implementation, inheriting a portal that grew sideways, or trying to make HubSpot agree with an ERP that has never heard of it — that is the conversation.
What I build
A portal set up around your data model rather than the default one. Objects and properties, pipelines and lifecycle stages, workflows, permissions and the reporting that has to hold up at the end of a quarter. Done once, properly, instead of adjusted every month.
The layer most portals never reach: custom modules and CMS themes, coded workflow actions, CRM card extensions, programmable emails, serverless functions and private apps. Built when the click-together version would cost more to maintain than to write.
HubSpot agreeing with the systems around it. ERP, accounting, webshop, telephony, product database, or a warehouse it has no native connector for. Two-way where it needs to be, one-way where two-way would only create conflicts.
Portals that grew sideways for three years. What the data model is doing wrong, which workflows fight each other, what to delete, and what to rebuild before adding anything new.
Integrations
Invoices, customers and financial records kept in step with the CRM, so sales and accounting stop disagreeing about who owes what.
The warehouse side: ingestion and ETL pipelines feeding HubSpot, and HubSpot data going back out to be modelled against everything else.
Anything with an endpoint. Where no connector exists, the integration is written directly against the HubSpot API rather than bent around a tool that almost fits.
In practice
Waer Waters runs a resort on HubSpot — a portal covering bookings, campaigns and the data behind both. The project page covers what was built and why.
On the engineering side, version control for HubSpot works through putting Design Manager, projects and workflow actions into one repository, which is the fix for the single most common complaint about editing in the portal.