Trends

The Hustle had already proven they could build an audience. With over a million free subscribers to their business newsletter, they had the readership, the editorial voice, and the credibility. What they wanted next was a premium tier: Trends, a paid newsletter offering in-depth business intelligence, research reports, and exclusive community access.

The business case was straightforward. Convert even 1% of their existing audience to paid subscribers, and they would have a meaningful new revenue stream. The team had the content expertise to deliver. The problem was entirely technical.

Trends was stuck before it could start. The Hustle’s existing tech infrastructure was a patchwork of disconnected systems: a custom CMS that editors struggled to use, a separate payment platform that did not integrate properly, and an email system that felt bolted on rather than built in.

“There was our custom CMS and then there was our payment platform. Neither one were working very well together. And so even individually, they’re very challenging to manage.”

Scott Nixon, Product Owner, Trends

The integration gaps were not just an inconvenience. They were losing data. When users went through checkout, critical information about where customers came from and how they found Trends simply vanished. Marketing could not optimize what they could not measure.

“We lost a lot of information when [users] would go to check out. We weren’t able to pass on a lot of data and information that helped us understand where did this customer come from?”

Scott Nixon

With a lean in-house engineering team and a launch date that was already public, The Hustle started looking for outside help. They spoke with five different agencies. Every conversation followed the same pattern: the agencies wanted to add more layers, more customization, more complexity. Timelines stretched to two or three months. The Hustle had one month at best.

When Refact entered the conversation, we started by listening. Not to the technical requirements, but to the business situation. The Hustle did not need a perfectly architected system. They needed to launch. They needed their editorial team to actually be able to publish content. They needed payments to work and data to flow.

The temptation with any new product is to build something comprehensive. It feels safer to propose a complete solution. But for Trends, comprehensive meant delayed, and delayed meant missed opportunity.

We proposed something different: a two-week timeline. Not because we wanted to cut corners, but because we recognized that the right solution was simpler than everyone else was making it.

Instead of building yet another custom platform, we recommended WordPress. Not the WordPress of ten years ago, but WordPress as a mature, extensible publishing system that could handle exactly what Trends needed: content management their editors could actually use, native payment processing through WooCommerce, and proper integration with their email platform.

We separated short-term priorities from long-term goals. The immediate need was migration, subscription management, and editorial workflow. Conversion optimization and enhanced user experience could come later, built on a foundation that actually worked.

We rebuilt Trends’ entire publishing and subscription platform on WordPress with WooCommerce handling payments natively. The editorial team finally had a CMS they could use without submitting tickets and waiting days. Payment data flowed into the same system as subscriber data, eliminating the information gaps that had been crippling their marketing efforts.

As the engagement continued, we tackled specific challenges as they emerged. Trends was working with over 100 YouTube influencers for their launch, each requiring customized landing pages. We built templated landing pages that could be quickly duplicated and customized, supporting both their influencer campaigns and A/B testing. When they wanted to offer student discounts, we implemented email domain validation to verify educational credentials automatically.

We also identified a gap in their team: they needed product management expertise. Beyond development, we provided a product manager to help guide priorities and keep the roadmap focused on what would actually move the business forward.

Trends launched on schedule. The platform was live in two weeks.

The editorial team could publish without technical bottlenecks. Marketing had visibility into where subscribers were coming from. The checkout process no longer leaked data. The systems that had been working against each other were now working together.

Less than two years after launch, HubSpot acquired The Hustle. While many factors contributed to that outcome, the technology platform that powered Trends was no longer a liability holding the business back. It was infrastructure that could scale with the company’s ambitions.

The relationship between Refact and Trends continued well beyond the initial launch, evolving to include subscription management enhancements, payment retry systems, affiliate program development, GDPR compliance tooling, and dozens of iterative improvements that kept the platform growing alongside the business.