To HubSpot — for building a platform worth fighting for. To the HubSpot partner team — for the thankless work of holding an ecosystem together while it evolves beneath you. To the practitioners who never stopped showing up for their clients, even when the infrastructure didn’t show up for them. And to Gregory Dirick — for saying clearly what many people were thinking quietly.
This is not a critique of what exists. It is an addition to it. The goal has always been the same: help more organizations get real value from an extraordinary platform. We are all rowing in the same direction. Some of us just needed a different boat.
The Question That Started Everything
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Two years ago today, I published the first episode of Let’s Build Daily.
The agency I had co-founded was struggling. The model I had bet on wasn’t working. I didn’t have a plan — I had a question: why the hell are we all building in silos?
I didn’t know where that question would lead. I just knew that sitting still wasn’t an option.
Here is what I’ve come to believe: the disruption is rarely the end of the story. It’s usually the beginning of a better one.
The Letter That Arrived Two Years Later
Two years later, Gregory Dirick published an open letter to HubSpot. I read it twice. Not because it was hard to follow — because I recognized every word of it.
Forty-five HubSpot certifications. Certified Trainer. HubSpot Academy instructor for the French-speaking market. Work focused entirely on helping companies actually use HubSpot effectively — structuring sales processes, establishing CRM governance, training teams, and rehabilitating portals where the initial implementation didn’t deliver what was promised.
His description of the work is worth quoting directly:
Gregory, the ecosystem you helped build just looked at everything you described — and decided it didn’t fit the scorecard.
The Problem With the Ask
Gregory addressed his letter to HubSpot. I understand why. I did the same thing.
In June 2024, I walked into HubSpot’s partner team with a presentation. I called it the HubSpot Coaches Program. I identified every structural problem Gregory’s letter names — professional isolation, limited resources, an ecosystem built around agencies that sell software rather than consultants who build capability. I proposed shared resources, professional development infrastructure, a new partner type to bridge the gap. I made the case as clearly as I knew how.
HubSpot listened. They were gracious. Nothing happened.
And that’s when I learned the harder lesson: asking a platform company to build infrastructure for the population that doesn’t generate subscription revenue is asking them to act against their own incentives.
Not because the people there are indifferent. Because their business model was never designed to accommodate what Gregory does — or what I do. The partner program is an agency growth channel. It rewards organizations that sell HubSpot subscriptions at scale. If that is not your model, you are not the customer they are designing for.
No open letter will change what a system is designed to measure.
The energy spent asking “will HubSpot create a place for me?” is energy that could build something that doesn’t require their permission.
Gregory’s letter is thoughtful, precise, and addressed to the wrong audience. But there’s a second problem underneath the first one — and it has nothing to do with HubSpot.
The Word That’s Costing You
It’s the word Gregory uses to describe himself. The word most people in his position use. And it is quietly costing every one of them.
The word “freelancer” is a commodity label.
It says: I am available. I have skills. Hire me by the hour. It positions you as interchangeable labor in a market where AI is already doing the interchangeable work faster and cheaper.
If your value proposition is “I know how to set up HubSpot workflows,” you are competing with tools that do it in seconds. If your differentiator is certifications, you are competing with everyone who passed the same exams. If your pitch is “I’m more affordable than an agency,” you have already entered a race with no good ending.
But Gregory’s own letter contradicts the label he gave himself.
That is not freelancing. That is consulting. Coaching. Strategic enablement. And it is precisely the kind of value that no AI tool can replicate, no agency will stay for, and no partner scorecard was ever designed to measure.
This is what we call the Measurement Trap: optimizing for what is easy to count instead of recognizing what actually creates value. Portal rehabilitations don’t register as new activations. Coached adoption doesn’t generate new recurring revenue. The value is real. The system cannot see it.
Stop measuring yourself by their scorecard. You are not a freelancer. Define what you actually are — and charge accordingly. I know this because I had to do it myself.
What Two Years of Building Actually Looks Like
Here is what happened after the HubSpot Coaches Program pitch went nowhere.
I stopped waiting for the answer and started building toward it. Let’s Build Daily became Let’s Build Media. Solo shows became co-hosted conversations with fellow independent consultants. A Sprocketeer Slack channel for individual practitioners grew into a community of collaborators. Trusted relationships built through content became the foundation for something I hadn’t yet named.
Many of those relationships led to Profoundly — the industry’s first HubSpot-specific marketplace for HubSpot help, co-founded by Jason Azocar and Brian Garvey. I am the founding Pro. I believed in the vision then and I believe in it now. Profoundly solves a real problem: connecting vetted HubSpot talent with clients who need help, quickly and reliably. For practitioners who want inbound demand without building a go-to-market from scratch, it remains the best option in the ecosystem.
Profoundly’s response to the provider sunset is exactly right for a large population of displaced practitioners — become a vetted fractional expert, work through Solutions Partners who need specialist capacity, keep doing what you love inside a structure that supports you. It is a genuine path forward and the team is executing on it well.
But not every practitioner wants to work through a partner. Many don’t enjoy white labeling... I sure don’t. Some just want independence. That is why they chose to BE independent in the first place.
That population needs different infrastructure.
Let's Build Profoundly with George B. Thomas
The Ecosystem Responded
Here is what most people miss about this moment.
Two years ago, if you were an independent HubSpot practitioner without a clear program to belong to, your options were limited. Join an agency and work under their brand. List yourself on a general freelance marketplace and compete on price. Or go it alone with no real infrastructure behind you. That was the whole list.
Every option on that list existed before any of us built anything.
Here is what is different now. The ecosystem responded. Not HubSpot — the practitioners, the builders, the people who actually sit across from clients and do the work. They looked at the gap and built into it.
Pack of Nodes is a practitioner-owned cooperative where every member is an independent entrepreneur and co-owner. No handoffs, no intermediate layers, no agency overhead.
HubCoach Connect is building a directory of certified coaches for practitioners whose model is training and capability building rather than implementation.
And the Value-First Collective is launching this week from the Value-First Team — a constellation of independent practitioners sharing methodology, AI-native infrastructure, and partner portal access, without surrendering their brand, their clients, or their independence.
None of these existed two years ago.
Every single one was built because someone got pushed outside their comfort zone and decided that was the starting point — not the ending. That is the part worth sitting with.
The Bridge
The Value-First Collective is not an agency. Not a white-label arrangement. Not a franchise. Not a marketplace. And not a competitor to the HubSpot ecosystem — the Customer Platform is extraordinary and everything we do is built on top of it.
Here is what it is, plainly: a constellation of independent HubSpot practitioners who share methodology, AI-native operational infrastructure, and partner portal access — without surrendering their brand, their clients, or their independence.
Three things the Collective provides that are genuinely difficult to build alone:
A methodology that changes the conversation.
The Unified Customer View framework lets you walk into a room with a CFO and talk about how their customers experience their organization — without mentioning objects, properties, or pipelines. It reframes every engagement from platform configuration to business alignment.
When you lead with value instead of features, you stop competing with agencies and AI tools. You operate in a category of one. In March, UCV closed a ,995 per month coaching engagement — not because it is a sales technique, but because it speaks the language business leaders already think in.
Infrastructure that gives you agency-level capability without agency-level overhead.
Every session synthesized. Every meeting pre-briefed. Nothing forgotten. The methodology is not a PDF you download — it is built into how we operate. An independent practitioner inside the Collective has more operational capability than most mid-size agencies. Without the headcount. Without the overhead. Without surrendering your name on the door.
A community that multiplies instead of competes.
10+ weekly shows. Over a thousand episodes. Office Hours every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday — free and open to everyone. A practitioner directory. Revenue sharing on collaborative projects. Content opportunities across the entire media network. And partner portal access through the Value-First Team — the administrative capability that HubSpot’s program change took away.
Three tiers, designed for where you are right now:
Community Member — Free. Office Hours access, framework overview, ecosystem updates, community connection. There is always a place for good humans over here.
Collective Practitioner — $497 per year. Partner link access, implementation guides, practitioner directory listing, project collaboration opportunities, revenue sharing eligibility. Four hundred and ninety-seven dollars for a full year.
Founding Pathfinder — $995, lifetime. Everything in Practitioner, permanently. Founding recognition, enhanced revenue sharing, direct input on Collective direction, priority project matching, full AI infrastructure access.
The membership fee covers infrastructure. The real value is in the work — coaching engagements, rehabilitation projects, implementation collaboration, content creation. The Collective exists to make that work possible at a quality and scale that independents cannot reach alone.
There Is Always a Place for Good Humans Over Here
Gregory ended his letter with this:
HubSpot’s ecosystem has always been particularly strong because it brought together different types of actors. Each playing a specific role in helping customers succeed with the platform.
He is right. And the actors he is describing — the ones doing the adoption work, the rehabilitation work, the human work that does not fit in a partner scorecard — now have a home that was built specifically for them.
This piece is addressed to Gregory. But it is also for every independent HubSpot practitioner who read his letter and felt the recognition settle in their chest. The ones with deep expertise and no infrastructure behind them. The ones rehabilitating portals that agencies configured and abandoned. The ones coaching teams through adoption because nobody else will stay for that work. The ones who are excellent at what they do and invisible to the ecosystem that benefits from it.
The moment you have been dreading might be the best thing that has happened to your practice.
Two years ago today I asked a question. I didn’t know where it would lead. What I know now is that every practitioner who showed up — on a show, in a community, at an event, in a Slack channel at midnight — was part of building the answer.
The bridge exists. The question is whether you will cross it.
Office Hours are free, open, and happen every week. No commitment. No application. Just show up and see if this is what you have been looking for.
Office Hours
Live Q&A with the Value-First Team
Two Years in the Making
Milestone Episodes: Two Years of Building
Let's Build Daily - Sync Properties in HubSpot
Let's Build Community Content with Rob Jones - Creating Value in the HubSpot Ecosystem
Let's Build 2025: 5 Revelations That Will Transform the HubSpot Ecosystem
Let's Build Profoundly with George B. Thomas
Value-First: Breaking Free From The Authority Trap with Tony Dowling
Let's Build The Road to INBOUND 2025 - Session Registration Opens Today!
Value-First Partner: Shared Success Over Competitive Positioning
A chronology of the work behind the Value-First Collective — from a question asked on March 18, 2024 to the answer delivered two years later.
2024
March 18, 2024 — Let’s Build Daily launches.
The question that started everything: “If practitioners like us are all solving the same problems with the same tools, how much time could we save if we worked together?”
June 2024 — HubSpot Coaches Program Pitch.
Presented to HubSpot’s partner team: shared resources, professional development, a new partner type for independent consultants. HubSpot listened. Nothing happened. Sprocketeer channel launched the same month.
July 2024 — Let’s Build Daily becomes Let’s Build Media.
Expanded from solo shows to co-hosted shows with Bryan Ossa, Danielle Urban, Joshua Oakes, Matthew Alex Ruxton, Madelyn Donovan, and Casey Hawkins.
Rest of 2024 — The community builds through content.
Trusted expert relationships formed through collaboration with Max Cohen, Willem Reus, George B. Thomas, Nick L., Lucila Abal, Anton Bujanowski, Rob Jones, Sarah Lane-Hawn, Matt Bolian, Stefan Loncar, Erin Wiggers, Rashida Goryawala, Chad Hohn, Mattheus Swinkels, and Bill Barlas.
November 2024 — Two daily shows launch.
Daily AI show with George B. Thomas and Nico Lafakis, and Wake Up Customer Platform.
December 2024 — Profoundly soft-launches + Value-First Framework begins.
2025
January 23, 2025 — Profoundly officially launches.
Let’s Build Profoundly: a 30-episode series introducing the first Pro cohort. Combined reach: 125,000+ LinkedIn followers.
March 6, 2025 — Profoundly Kickoff 2025.
The first event of its kind focused entirely on the HubSpot expert.
March 18, 2025 — Let’s Build Value-First series begins.
May 2025 — Road to INBOUND 2025 series.
June 2025 — Value-First Trap series. HubSpot AI Summit.
August 2025 — Value-First Data Summit. INBOUND 2025.
AI as infrastructure, not add-ons. Precursor to the Agentic Customer Platform.
October 2025 — Value-First Team takes shape.
November 2025 — AI-native transition.
Learned to vibe code. Transitioned to daily AI-native workflow from Claude Code. Started building like crazy.
2026
Q1 2026 — The SaaSpocalypse begins.
HubSpot becomes an Agentic Customer Platform. Solutions Provider program sunset announced. Profoundly Kickoff 2026 focused on AIRops.
March 18, 2026 — Value-First Collective launches.
Two years after the first question. The answer.