Partners get logins and link building gets its own tool

Between February and April 2025 the Portal became a place a partner could actually log in and request a discovery, and the first internal tool, for our guest post publishing network, went from nothing to daily use.

February to April 2025 is when the building stopped being a sketch. The Portal got real partner logins and a real first job. A second repository opened in February for the tool that manages our guest post publishing sites. Two more repositories for content work opened in April.

For our partners

1. The Portal’s first job was discoveries. From February 13 a partner with a login could see the list we were producing for their prospects, and from February 27 asking for one meant filling in a form instead of writing an email.
2. Logins were by invitation. The public register button came off on April 21, and from April 25 our team could turn a partner contact into a user directly and see which of its own people had login access and which did not.
3. Every edit to a discovery was logged from April 24, so there was a record of who changed what.

1. Discoveries

On March 13 the team began updating a discovery’s status inside the Portal itself, so what a partner saw was what our team had marked, not a status copied from somewhere else. In April 2025 the Portal was a discovery request desk with a dashboard in front of it. It was a real thing partners used, and the request form has been the front door for discoveries since.

Behind the scenes

1. The link building tool went from nothing to daily use, starting on February 4 as a registry of sites and networks.
2. On April 14 the accounting system integration came out of the Portal, which got its own tables for partners, contacts and employees and started owning data instead of reflecting it. “Admin” became “team” in the same change, which is the language we still use.
3. On April 16 the link tool moved onto the same component library as the Portal.
4. Two content repositories opened on April 18 and April 29. Neither had much in them yet; they were the first sign that content, like links, was going to get a tool of its own rather than a spreadsheet.

1. The link building tool

Link building at our scale means running a large network of publishing sites, and until 2025 that ran on spreadsheets. The new tool connected to each site through its standard publishing interface without a custom plugin, and grew a set of automatic checks from mid-March for site health; by April those checks were pulling authority metrics and recording issues. By mid-April it had an issues table, a campaigns view and the beginnings of a publishing flow.

3. One component library

The first interface was built on one component kit in late February. The switch mattered more than it sounds, because every tool we have built since shares that library, and it is a large part of why the later apps look like one product.