North Star
Build a self-running, self-growing newsletter company.
A human defines the niche, audience promise, paid offer, pricing, brand voice, legal posture, and approval policy. The OS then runs the weekly business loop: research useful information, produce source-cited issues, manage free and paid subscribers, invite relevant prospects, sell sponsorships, invoice customers, place approved sponsor creative, send the issue, report results, and improve the next cycle.
Business Model
Free: weekly news, resources, tips, sponsor placement, and paid upgrade prompts.
Paid: $1-9/month for deeper analysis, templates, curated resources, private archive access, or operator notes.
Sponsors: sold slots with fit checks, holds, Stripe checkout or invoices, asset collection, UTM tracking, placement rendering, and post-send reports.
Autonomy Boundary
LLMs draft, classify, summarize, rank, personalize, and plan. They should not directly send email, mutate billing, override suppressions, or access raw credentials. High-risk actions move through approvals, audit logs, and queues.
What Exists Now
- TypeScript monorepo with API, web, worker, scheduler, MCP server, and provider packages.
- Postgres and pgvector schema for sources, documents, chunks, issues, subscribers, sponsors, approvals, audit, and webhooks.
- Free and paid subscriber states with Stripe checkout scaffolding.
- Source ingestion, extraction, optional embeddings, issue drafting, citation checks, test sends, and scheduled sends.
- Sponsor slots, bookings, assets, checkout, oversell protection, and placement policy.
- Cold invitation lane and cold mailboxes are modeled but disabled by default.
What Is Missing
- Lead and sponsor CRM records with enrichment, qualification, provenance, conversations, and sequence state.
- SMTP/IMAP adapters for cold invitation mailboxes with reply parsing, mailbox health, rate limits, bounces, and complaints.
- Approval execution that turns an approved request into a queued action.
- Sponsor sales automation for prospecting, negotiation, invoice lifecycle, creative review, placement, and reporting.
- Analytics for opens, clicks, paid conversion, churn, sponsor CTR, source quality, and automation impact.
- Editorial intelligence for story clustering, source quality, evergreen resources, and paid/free section strategy.
Weekly Editorial Loop
Research agents collect approved sources, workers extract and embed documents, editorial agents draft news, resources, paid insight, sponsor, and CTA sections, then verification blocks unsupported claims before scheduling.
Growth Loop
Lead source adapters import prospects, the CRM dedupes against subscribers and suppressions, RAG scores fit against the publication promise, and cold invitation emails are prepared through separate mailboxes with opt-out and policy checks.
Sponsor Revenue Loop
Sponsor agents discover relevant brands, pitch available packages, hold slots, prepare invoices, collect assets, enforce category and payment rules, insert approved placements, and report performance.
Paid Tier Loop
The free issue builds trust while the paid issue adds deeper analysis, templates, private resources, operator notes, and measurable upgrade prompts at a $1-9 monthly price point.
Roadmap
- Make the core issue loop reliable: sections, sponsor insertion, webhook processing, approvals, and real dashboards.
- Build the CRM: leads, accounts, contacts, conversations, messages, sequences, provenance, and scoring.
- Add cold invitation infrastructure: SMTP/IMAP adapters, mailbox health, warmup, throttles, replies, and suppression updates.
- Complete sponsor automation: prospect discovery, outreach, invoices, assets, conflicts, UTM links, reports, and renewals.
- Optimize the business: paid conversion, churn, cohort analytics, source quality, sponsor fill rate, and controlled experiments.
Success Metrics
One researched, verified, sponsored, sent, and reported issue every week.
Free growth, paid conversion, and sponsor revenue tracked by source.
Suppressions, opt-outs, complaints, bounces, and approvals remain auditable.