← Listing Legends

Agent Newsletter

Status
in-flight
Owner
Ryan Colston
Started
2026-04-29
Target launch
2026-04-30

Linear: RYR-220 — durable Wednesday scheduling (2026-07-23 vault→Linear audit)

Weekly Wednesday newsletter to Listing Legends agents via Kit. Per-agent open/click tracking. Locked 7-section format (updated 2026-05-07 with Travis Ford insights). Skill at /agent-newsletter.

Why

Ry has 27 agents heading to 50+. One-to-many recurring team comms need tracking — open rates, click rates, who's reading. Gmail blasts can't do that at scale. Kit can.

The newsletter pulls signal from five sources every Wednesday morning: Orchard leadership notes, the Orchard agent newsletter, the midweek wins doc, the team set-to-booked rate from BigQuery, and meeting transcripts/Gemini notes (story mining). Filters corporate items through a 5-question test. Mines transcripts for teachable moments. Translates both into "what changes for you this week."

Current state

Issue #1 shipped 2026-04-30 at 8 AM CT. Kit broadcast 23919154, Ghost archive 69f299816d62840001b20275. Subject: "Hump Day | We're under our own line." 29 recipients (team:listing-legends). Tracking row in content_engine.calendar.

Issue #2 drafted 2026-05-07. Draft at /tmp/newsletter-2026-05-07.md. Sent to Travis Ford for feedback (Gmail 19e02909e5dd24a1). Waiting on review before Kit/Ghost creation.

Cron is session-only right now — /loop job dies when Claude session exits. Real durable scheduling not yet built.

Format evolution (2026-05-07)

Compared Issue #1 against Travis Ford's "Tuesday Top 5" newsletter. Key changes baked into skill:

Next 3 actions

  1. Get Travis Ford feedback on Issue #2 draft, resolve flags, send via Kit.
  2. Build durable Wednesday scheduling. Cloud Scheduler → pos-reports route is the cleanest (~1 day, independent of laptop).
  3. Diff the team:listing-legends-ramping Kit segment against pos_raw.agents_ramping every Wednesday during the agent run.

Status — 2026-08-11 (verified this session)

Issue shipped 2026-08-11 via Resend, not Kit. Subject "Please read. Important information." Delivered to 28 team-38 agents, all 28 confirmed delivered by Resend event lookup. Archive: Content/agent-newsletter-archive/2026-08-11-please-read-important-information.{md,html} plus the box score CSV and per-agent send ids. Calendar row 322a2cea-2f57-4a90-b3f8-957b99327d06 in content_engine.calendar (status shipped, channel resend).

Why not Kit: Kit's tag-membership write API returns success codes and does not apply the change — verified in both directions (DELETE tag/subscriber returned 204 with the subscriber still tagged; POST tag/subscriber returned success with the tag reading 0 members after 2+ minutes). Reads and broadcast create/send work normally. This breaks the skill's ramping-segment refresh (Step 1E), which will appear to succeed and silently no-op.

Audience drift found: both audiences had drifted from dim_agent. Kit tag 19240135 carried Travis Ford + lauren@laurengrubke.com. Resend audience 77162113-adc8-4fb0-b7ea-2a6f6466afd7 carried those two plus alex.tyler@orchard.com. Resend cleaned to 29 (28 agents + Ry) and verified; Kit still carries its two.

Format changes this issue: window widened to "since the last issue" (7/25–8/11) after the last send turned out to be 2026-07-24, not a week prior — the 7-day rule was dropping 9 closings and every win from 7/25–8/02. Added a New Listings block, per-category leader callouts, and the full weekly box score with per-agent call counts. Insights section is one-thought-per-line, matching the opener.

Resend requires self-inlined CSS. Kit inlines styles onto every element automatically; Resend passes HTML through raw. A <style>-block-only layout collapses all indentation in Outlook and the Gmail mobile app on non-Gmail accounts. Measured before/after with the style block stripped. Preview text also needs a hidden preheader div — Resend has no preview_text field.

Decisions log

Open issues

References