The Portal starts as a sketch

In October 2024 we opened a repository for an agency-facing portal, drew a dashboard, wired up sign-in, and made the decisions about its shape that have held ever since.

From October 2024 through January 2025 the Portal existed only as a repository and an idea. It is the quiet start of everything that came after.

For our partners

Nothing yet. No partner logged into anything we built during this period, and working with us still meant email, calls and spreadsheets. What was decided in these months did shape what partners eventually got.

The first two days, October 3 and 4, 2024, produced a placeholder app, a logo, dark mode, a dashboard mockup, a campaigns page with nothing behind it, and a sign up page that went nowhere. By October 16 there was sign-in, protected pages that bounced you to it, and a decision that has held ever since: two separate dashboards, one for a partner and one for our team, in the same app. The partner never sees the team’s view and the team can see everything.

Behind the scenes

November and December went to editor and preview configuration, a few fleshed-out pages, and code to talk to our accounting system, because at the time the accounting system was where the record of a deal actually lived.

The first real object in the Portal was the discovery: the research report we produce on a prospect before an agency pitches them. On January 8, 2025 the team side got a bare list of discoveries, with each one’s status read from the accounting system rather than kept in the Portal. That was the honest state of things. The Portal did not yet own any data. It was a window onto systems that already existed.

Two other choices from this period stuck. The app was built on the same component library and framework we still use, upgraded to the stable release at the end of October, and every list in the Portal has been a sortable data table since the starter for it landed on October 29. Neither was a big decision at the time. Both saved us from rebuilding later.

We had a service business to run, and the Portal was built alongside it. What these months produced, sign-in with protected pages, the split between a partner’s dashboard and the team’s, sortable tables on every list, and a first list of discoveries, is what a partner logged into when the Portal opened to them in February.