Business Operations Platform for a Specialty Pharmacy

The situation

A specialty pharmacy was running business operations and marketing workflows across disconnected tools. Administration tasks, customer communications, and marketing operations each lived in their own system with no shared data layer and no single place to manage the full picture.

They needed a custom platform — not another off-the-shelf SaaS subscription — because their workflows did not fit standard templates. The application had to integrate tightly with HubSpot, where their CRM and marketing operations already lived, while giving their team a purpose-built admin interface designed around how they actually work.

What we built

An Azure-hosted application that serves as the operational hub for administration and marketing, connected to HubSpot through a custom integration layer.

The architecture runs on Azure Container Apps, which gives the client a scalable, containerized hosting model without the overhead of managing infrastructure directly. On the HubSpot side, we built a companion app that uses HubSpot's API to expose pharmacy-specific workflows — data surfaced in the right context, not buried in generic CRM views.

[Azure Container Apps — ops platform]
          ↓
[Custom HubSpot integration layer]
          ↓
[HubSpot CRM + marketing operations]

The two systems stay in sync. Changes made in the ops platform propagate where they need to go. HubSpot remains the source of truth for contact and campaign data; the custom platform handles the domain logic that HubSpot alone cannot.

Decisions that mattered

Azure Container Apps over managed PaaS. The client's other infrastructure is Azure-native. Staying in that environment meant no new cloud accounts, no new IAM model to reason about, and a hosting tier that scales without paying for reserved capacity they do not need.

A custom HubSpot app, not just API calls. Off-the-shelf HubSpot integrations are built for generic workflows. Pharmacy administration has specific shapes — specific data fields, specific approval sequences, specific reporting needs. We built a companion app that makes those domain-specific workflows first-class inside HubSpot rather than grafting them on top.

Scope discipline on the initial build. The client had a long list of eventual requirements. We agreed on a clear first-delivery scope, shipped it, and structured the retainer to evolve the platform from there. Shipping something real and iterating is more valuable than spending months on a specification that will change anyway.

Monthly retainer from day one. Business operations platforms are not fire-and-forget. Workflows change, HubSpot updates its API, new requirements surface. The engagement was structured as build-then-evolve, not build-then-hand-off.

Outcome

The platform shipped in December 2025 against the agreed timeline. Business administration and marketing operations are now running through a single application, with HubSpot as the underlying data backbone.

The client did not have to compromise on how their workflows work to fit a product someone else designed. The platform reflects their actual process — and when that process changes, the retainer structure means it can be updated without starting over.

Working with us

This engagement started with a scoping conversation about what the client actually needed versus what they thought they needed. The architecture decisions followed from that — Azure because they were already there, a custom HubSpot app because generic integrations would not do the job.

If you need a purpose-built operations platform and want engineering that is designed to last rather than demo well, let us know.