We just became a Laravel Community Partner, here's what the process actually looked like

We just became an official Laravel Community Partner, and you can now find us listed on laravel.com/partners.

Instead of writing a press release nobody asked for, I figured the more useful version of this post is a behind-the-scenes one: what the process actually looked like for a small agency, what they ask you, and what it quietly made us realize about ourselves. If you're an agency thinking about applying, this is the post I would have wanted to read first.

#What the program actually is

Laravel runs a partner program for agencies and studios that build serious work on top of the framework. Being listed means your name sits in the official directory, so people looking for a trusted Laravel team can find you directly, and leads can get routed your way.

The honest framing: it's not a secret certification you cram for, but it's also not "submit your URL and you're in." It's a real vetting process, and the bar is essentially are you a genuine Laravel shop people can trust with their codebase.

#How it actually works, step by step

Here's the path we went through, start to finish:

1. Apply. You start at laravel.com/partners/join.
2. An intro call. Then you have a conversation with the Laravel agency partnerships team, for us that was Dave Hicking. It's a genuine chat about who you are and how you work, not a sales pitch.
3. References. This was the part that surprised me most: they ask for two to three references from clients and agencies you've worked with, and they actually follow up and check them. So it's not pay-to-play, your real track record is what gets you in.
4. Onboarding email. Once you're through, you get an email with what they need to add you to the site: a transparent PNG logo (ideally 1:1 or 4:3), the email address to add to the shared partner Slack channel, the URL you want your listing to link to, and your pick of up to five specialties.
5. The sales profile. Finally, a proper sales-profile form so their team understands your ideal customer and can route the right leads your way.

#The part that surprised me: a real sales profile

I expected a thin "company name + website" form. What we actually filled out was a proper sales profile, and the questions were genuinely good, the type that force you to stop hand-waving about your own positioning.

Roughly, here's what they asked:

• Describe your ideal project. Not "we do everything", they want your sweet spot.
• Your ideal customer profile, and the industries you like (or refuse) to work with.
• How far in advance you typically schedule projects, i.e. your real lead time.
• Your preferred front-end stack (React, Vue, Livewire, Svelte) and whether you have a go-to CMS.
• If you do mobile, what you build with (React Native, NativePHP, Flutter).
• Whether you offer adjacent services like branding, UX, marketing, or SEO.
• Greenfield, brownfield, or both? New builds, rescue/modernize work, or all of it.
• How likely you are to do a staff augmentation vs. a project-team engagement, each on a 1-to-10 scale. In other words: do you embed devs into someone else's team, or take ownership of a whole project as a team?
• And the open one: anything else you'd like the sales team to know.

If you've never written down the answers to those, doing it in one sitting is weirdly clarifying.

#The specialties we picked

You get to choose up to five, and the choice is basically a public statement of what you want to be known for. We went with:

• Laravel Ecosystem (the obvious one, it's our whole identity)
• Product Development (most of our work is custom apps built from scratch)
• Rescue, Review, Modernize (we love taking over and fixing existing Laravel codebases)
• API Development and Management (a lot of our projects live or die by integrations)
• Enterprise Solutions (ERP and serious business applications)

Picking five out of fifteen is the interesting constraint. It's less "what can we technically do" and more "what do we want to say yes to."

#What it made us realize

The unexpected value wasn't the badge, it was being forced to answer "who is this actually for?" in plain language. We came out of it with a much sharper description of our ideal client: established small and mid-sized B2B businesses that treat software as core to their operations, value clean and maintainable code, and want a long-term technical partner rather than the cheapest one-off build. Industry matters less to us than mindset.

Becoming a partner didn't change our direction. It just made us put into words something we'd been doing for years: building custom Laravel applications the Laravel way, staying close to framework conventions and embracing the ecosystem instead of fighting it. If anything, the application is a decent free exercise even if you never submit it.

#If you're thinking about applying

A few takeaways for fellow agencies:

• Line up your references early. They're checked, and they genuinely matter.
• Write your answers like a human, not a brochure. The specific, honest answers are the ones that route the right leads to you.
• Pick specialties you actually want more of, not everything you're capable of.
• Treat the "ideal customer" question seriously. It's the most useful thing you'll get out of the whole process.

That's it. We're proud to be in the directory, and equally happy with what the exercise taught us about our own positioning. If you're building or rebuilding something on Laravel and want a partner who treats your codebase like our own, we'd love to hear from you.