Collaboration Over Competition Isn't a Tagline.
Here's the Proof.
I Rebuilt My Website. The Partners Page Is the Point.
This isn’t about a website. It’s about what we’re building underneath it.
Last week I told you I rebuilt my entire company website from scratch in an afternoon. Eleven pages. Live podcast feed. Live blog feed from Substack. Clean code. Zero errors. Deployed to Vercel before dinner.
I covered the technical side of that build already. If you missed it, go read “I Built $10,000 Worth of Work in One Day.” It’s all there.
But there’s one page I didn’t talk about. And it’s the one I’m most proud of.
The Partners page.
What Most People Build
Most people build a website and put themselves at the center of it. Their story. Their offer. Their credibility. Their call to action. And look, that stuff matters. You need it. I have all of it on my site.
But if every page on your website points inward, you’ve built a dead end. You’ve built a billboard on a highway nobody’s driving on yet.
The Partners page is different. It points outward. On purpose.
What I Actually Built
Here’s what’s on thestrategicveteran.com/partners right now:
Heroes Media Group - the veteran-founded podcast network behind The Strategic Veteran. They gave me a platform before I had any business having one.
mowPod - Joe Rubin and his team. Performance-based podcast growth. Real downloads. Real followers. No guesswork. Joe was one of the first people to sign up for the Academy, and he sat next to me at MCC while I was building the landing page in 45 minutes.
Deploy UGC - the brand I co-founded with Trish Leto. We met at MCC in April. By the end of the week, we had a partnership agreement. A month later, we have a live site, Stripe payments, and a masterclass ready to sell.
Military Creator Con - I spoke on the main stage in April 2026. A year earlier, I was sitting in the back row trying to figure out what I was even doing there.
Bombshell Suds Co - Justin Williams. Veteran owned. Family operated. Small-batch handcrafted soap. Justin and I co-branded a bar together because we wanted to prove that two veteran-owned brands could build something together instead of treating each other like competition.
Ramshorn Coffee - veteran owned, small batch, no gimmicks. The kind of brand that doesn’t need to tell you it’s good because the product does the talking.
Amakaya - a plant medicine retreat in the Peruvian Amazon working with the Shipibo people. I’m a partner at Amakaya. Healing looks different than they told you it would.
The Standard - Riley Gruppo. Former Army infantry officer and company commander. She built a human performance framework called The Standard anchored in Mind, Body, and Mission. When I told her the page was live and linked to her site, she was genuinely surprised. “It links directly to your site,” I told her. “So you get backlink scores too.”
Tier One Coaching - Brandon “Jenks” Jenkins. Retired Naval Aviator, 26 years of service, ICF-certified executive leadership coach. A TSV podcast veteran. The day I posted about the website rebuild on LinkedIn, Jenks commented that he was doing the same thing. Building his own partner page. Creating backlinks to other veterans.
That’s nine partners. Nine veteran-led or veteran-adjacent brands and organizations. Every single one of them links out to a real website, a real person, a real mission.
Here’s the Part Nobody’s Talking About
Every link on that page is a backlink. And in the SEO world, backlinks are how the internet decides who matters.
When thestrategicveteran.com links to bombshellsudsco.com, Google sees that as a vote of confidence. It says: this site trusts that site enough to send its audience there. That signal boosts Justin’s domain authority. It makes his site rank higher in search. It puts him in front of more people.
And when Justin links back to me from his site, the same thing happens in reverse.
Now multiply that across nine partners. Then imagine those nine partners each build their own partner pages and link to each other. And to other veterans doing incredible things in their communities.
What you get isn’t a page. It’s an ecosystem.
A flywheel of collaboration, referrals, backlinks, and shared audiences that lifts everyone involved. No VC funding. No accelerator. No gatekeeper deciding who gets in. Just veteran entrepreneurs linking directly to one another from their own websites because they decided to build together instead of build alone.
That’s the play.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
The veteran entrepreneurship space has no shortage of organizations trying to help. Syracuse runs Veteran EDGE. SBA has VBOCs in every state. There are accelerators, grants, networking events, and conferences.
All of that is valuable. None of it gives you this.
Because what I’m describing doesn’t require an institution. It doesn’t require a membership fee. It doesn’t require a government program. It requires exactly two things: a website you own and a willingness to point your audience toward other veterans doing real work.
That’s it.
You don’t even need to know how to code. I didn’t six months ago. I built this site with Claude Code, a spec document, and the same stubbornness that got me through four deployments.
The tools are free or close to free. The websites can be built in a day. The only thing missing is the decision to actually do it.
What This Looks Like at Scale
Right now, nine brands are on my page. But here’s where it goes.
I don’t envision 20. I don’t envision 50. I envision thousands.
Thousands of veteran-owned and veteran-adjacent ventures, each with a partner page and linked to one another, form the largest organic referral network the veteran community has ever built. Not managed by a nonprofit. Not funded by a grant. Not dependent on a single platform. Built by us, for us, on websites we own.
What if every veteran entrepreneur with a website built a partner page?
Not a generic directory. Not a link farm. A curated, intentional list of the people and brands they know, trust, and want to lift up. Real descriptions. Real links. Real endorsement.
A thousand veteran-owned businesses, each with partner pages linking to ten others. That’s 10,000 backlinks circulating through a network that Google treats as increasingly authoritative with every connection. It’s free podcast cross-promotion. It’s organic referrals. It’s shared audiences compounding over time.
And here’s the part that should hit you in the chest: nobody can take it from you.
This isn’t algorithm-dependent. It’s not platform-dependent. It’s not some middleman deciding your content gets shown to 2% of the people who already follow you. This is veteran-to-veteran, website-to-website, direct.
Your audience sees my page. They find Bombshell Suds. They buy soap. Justin’s audience sees his page. They find The Strategic Veteran. They subscribe.
The flywheel spins. And every revolution makes the next one easier.
Want to See How I Actually Built This?
I recorded a 46-minute Loom of the entire workflow. No narration. No explainer. No music. Just me, moving back and forth between spec documents, Claude Code, and my terminal, doing the exact things that turned a blank screen into an 11-page website in one session.
This is how I build everything. Every project. Every client deliverable. Every product launch. The same process, every time.
That video is now available to paid subscribers. If you want to see the actual workflow behind everything I write about in this newsletter, not the polished version, but the real one, this is it.
Watch the full 46-minute build session here (paid subscribers only)
The Ask
If you’re a veteran entrepreneur and you don’t have a partner page on your website, build one.
Start with three people. Three brands. Three organizations you trust. Write a sentence about each one. Link to their site. Tell them you did it.
Then tell them to do the same.
This isn’t charity. This is a strategy. The most effective kind. The kind that makes everyone in the room better by making the room bigger.
Collaboration over competition isn’t a tagline. It’s not a hashtag. It’s how I build. It’s how Justin builds. It’s how Riley builds. It’s how Jenks builds. It’s how Trish builds.
It’s how we all should be building.
If you want to see the page, it’s live right now: thestrategicveteran.com/partners
If your brand is veteran-owned or serves the veteran community, and you want to be on this page, reach out to me. Reply to this email. DM me on LinkedIn. I don’t care how. I want this page to grow. I want your page to exist. I want us to build an ecosystem so big and so connected that Google can’t ignore the community, and we can’t outgrow ourselves.
Nine partners today. Thousands eventually. And it starts with you hitting reply.
My name is Adam Peters, and I’m here to unfuck the transition.