HubSpot Inspire Gallery

Built for HubSpot. Powered by HubSpot.

Industry

SaaS

Location

United States

Services

Strategy Design Development

Approvals that took weeks now run through automated checks in minutes.

Contributors manage their own content, no manual handling needed.

About the project

The Inspire Gallery is HubSpot’s official showcase of websites built on Content Hub, a space designed to highlight the creativity of agencies and inspire what’s possible on the platform. It plays an important role for HubSpot, giving their community visibility while demonstrating the strength of their CMS to a wider audience.

HubSpot asked Blend to completely reimagine the gallery. They wanted a fresh design that aligned with their updated brand, and a new process that moved away from manual bottlenecks towards automation and self-service, all built with HubSpot’s own tools.

The project delivered a gallery that inspires on the outside and runs effortlessly on the inside.

Blend's deep Content Hub expertise combined with their firsthand experience as contributors to the Inspire platform made them a perfect, strategic partner for redesigning the Inspire website. Blend didn't just give us a fresh, functional design that matched our rebrand; they built smart automation, member dashboards, and quality checks that actually solved the workflow problems that were holding the site back.

They executed everything smoothly and have revolutionized the way we manage this website, as well as the way our partners and customers experience it."

Steph Cirgler, Principal Product Marketing Manager at HubSpot

Challenges with the old website

Before our rebuild, the Inspire Gallery relied on a system that looked simple but was difficult to manage. Agencies filled out a form that fed into a HubDB table, but from there everything slowed down:

Approvals could take weeks.
Updates meant resubmitting an entirely new entry.
Contributors had no way to manage their own submissions.
HubSpot’s team had to handle everything manually.

It was a gallery that inspired on the outside, but behind the scenes it was inefficient.

Building the technical foundation

In scoping the project, we knew the Inspire Gallery needed to become self-service. The best way to give contributors control over their own entries was to use HubSpot memberships, which rely on CRM-powered pages. To make that possible, every site in the gallery had to be represented as a record inside a custom object in the CRM.

That decision meant transforming the old HubDB data into a brand-new custom object, while preserving all existing entries. Once complete, this gave us:

A structure that supports HubSpot memberships and contributor self-management.
Dynamic CRM-powered pages that automatically display gallery entries.
Associations with contacts and companies, creating a much stronger link between submissions and their owners.

By rethinking the foundation in this way, we set the stage for a gallery that could scale, and that contributors could finally manage themselves.

Planning the experience

With the technical foundation in place, we turned our attention to the bigger picture: how the Inspire Gallery should work from end to end. We mapped out the complete workflow, from the way visitors would browse the gallery on the front end, to how contributors would log in and manage their submissions, through to how HubSpot’s team would oversee approvals and administration.

This holistic view gave us the blueprint to design a seamless experience for everyone involved.

Utilising HubSpot Memberships

At the heart of the solution was HubSpot’s membership functionality. We created a secure dashboard where contributors could:

Log in or sign up with their company email.
View all past submissions from their company/agency.
Create new entries or edit and delete existing ones.
Track the approval status of each submission.

The system even recognises contributors by domain, meaning a new team member can manage an entry submitted years ago.

Building the validation engine

Outside of the front end, the Inspire Gallery is driven by a powerful automation engine. Every submission passes through a series of validations designed to keep quality high and consistency tight. The system handles a lot behind the scenes, but we built it to remain clear, maintainable, and scalable, avoiding the trap of an over-engineered “Frankenstein’s monster.”

What looks like a straightforward workflow is actually quietly orchestrating a sophisticated process.

Among the key automations are:

URL health checks to confirm that sites are live and genuinely hosted on HubSpot.
Automated screenshots generated via ScreenshotOne, ensuring every site looks consistent in the gallery.
AI-powered copy cleaning using ChatGPT to capitalise correctly, fix grammar, and filter out inappropriate content.
A master validation workflow that ties everything together, approving sites that pass and flagging those that don’t.

The result is a submission process that feels effortless for contributors while giving HubSpot’s team confidence that every new entry is vetted and ready to showcase.