A year ago I shipped the first version of Howly with one goal: make it possible to actually see how your HubSpot workflows connect before you break something.
Today Howly has 125+ installs on the HubSpot marketplace, a 5-star rating, and customers who’ve cut their workflow audit time by 70% or more. I’m SO proud of that, and I wanted to share what this year looked like, what we built, and where we’re headed.
What Howly does (for anyone new here)
HubSpot’s workflow view shows you one workflow at a time. Howly shows you all of them at once -- how they connect through direct enrollments, shared lists, and property chains -- and flags what’s broken before you touch anything. It’s read-only, connects in under 30 seconds, and works with any HubSpot Professional or Enterprise portal.
The core features we shipped this year:
- Visual workflow map with live connection detection across all three connection types (direct enrollment, list-based, property-based)
- Health Checker that scores your entire portal 0-100 and surfaces stale, orphaned, empty, and duplicate workflows
- Impact Analyzer that shows you every workflow touching a given property -- so you know the blast radius before you rename or deprecate anything
- Recent Changes panel tracking everything modified in the last 30 days
- PDF audit reports formatted for client delivery
- Benchmarks that compare your portal against real data from similar-sized HubSpot portals
- And AI Export, which packages your entire portal structure into a single document you can paste into ChatGPT or Claude and ask anything.
What we learned
The use case we expected to be most popular -- visual mapping -- turned out to be just the entry point. What customers love is the confidence it gives them before making changes. “I can make changes with much more confidence” came up in review after review. That reframe shaped everything we built in the second half of the year.
Agencies and consultants became our power users in a way we didn’t fully anticipate. One customer closed $5K in MRR within 24 hours of showing Howly on a discovery call. Another told us it cut hours off every client audit, improving their margins on every engagement. That feedback pushed us to build the PDF report and LucidChart export specifically for that workflow.
Support responsiveness matters more than we expected at this price point. Being fast and personal with every support interaction has driven more word-of-mouth than almost anything else.
Partnerships
This year we partnered with MarketingOps, one of the most trusted communities for marketing operations professionals. Getting the endorsement of that community, and having the founder Mike Rizzo describe Howly as “your unfair advantage” for HubSpot consulting was a genuine milestone for us.
We also built relationships with HubSpot agencies and RevOps consultancies who’ve made Howly a standard part of their client onboarding and audit process.
Year 2
We’re excited. The roadmap is full of things our customers have asked for directly, and we’re going deeper on the features that matter most to teams managing large, complex HubSpot environments: better governance, smarter health analysis, and more ways to turn portal visibility into action.
If you’ve been on the fence, the 7-day free trial is risk-free: read-only access, no credit card required, connects in 30 seconds.
And if you’re already a Howly customer reading this: thank you.
Genuinely. Every review, every piece of feedback, every Loom you’ve sent us showing something confusing. It all went into what Howly is today.
Here’s to year 2.
- Christian, Howly founder howly.io
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