Creative Queue · through Nov 13, 2026
Background
Background
Permanent URL: /background/.
8. Background for a new teammate
| What Creative Queue is | One shared plan for a photo or video shoot: the brief becomes Sources (products, talent, locations), the shot list becomes Cards, each card is cast to its product and talent, and finished images become tracked assets. Not a project manager, DAM or PIM; it sits between them |
| Who it's for | Founder-led, fast-growing fashion brands whose existing content process is breaking under growth. Buyer: the founder (bigger brands: head of creative or marketing). Champion: producer, production manager or art director |
| Where it stands | Beta. Brandon's Oct 30 dispatch: Manhattan closed, MIKUTA on hold, Rachel and Alexandra in nurture (Nov 3: Adrian called both not viable — UNCONFIRMED / proposal, Q7), and no team sale has ever closed. Warm producer outreach was drafted Oct 20 and not sent |
| What killed past deals | The person who could pay never saw the product working (MIKUTA, Manhattan) |
| Live site (Oct 22) | creativequeue.io: "See your fit" Tally form, Calendly demo booking, team@creativequeue.io; promises every demo is with a founder |
So I spend a lot of time just trying to understand what is what. What is what.
— Isis Souza, MIKUTA producer, Nov 13, 2025
Historical plan (from the Oct 30 Grok Page, later updated in git)
Review for the Oct 30 call
Status as of Fri Oct 30, 2026, 4:40 PM ET, as written on the Grok Page. Nothing had been sent by anyone yet.
Pipeline first: the goal is 6 qualified buyer calls by Fri Nov 13, then revenue as soon as possible. The list and the drafts were ready. Nothing had gone out, so the calls depended on that day's approvals and Adrian sending by hand from Monday.
| Metric (Oct 30) | Value |
|---|---|
| Qualified buyer calls | 0 of 6 |
| People in the pipeline | 56 (41 brands, all not contacted) |
| With a verified link | 49 (40 buyers, 9 build partners) |
| Working days left | 10 (Nov 2 to Nov 13) |
What's done (as of Oct 30)
- Pipeline built: 56 people across 41 brands, all
not_contacted. Oct 29: 36 people (29 buyers, 7 build partners); Oct 30: 20 people (17 buyers, 3 build partners). - Oct 30 batch: STAUD, Faherty, Djerf Avenue, Rouje, Missoma, Disturbia, NYC Alliance, plus 3 Hyperblack Studios co-founders (LA). Strongest: Jennifer Berk (Faherty, Director of Creative Production) and Wyatt Hough (STAUD, Creative Director). Faherty and NYC Alliance are likely over the ~$100M ceiling; Missoma (jewellery) is unvalidated.
- Daily prospect batch runs weekdays at 8:30 AM ET (research and drafts only, never sends).
- Sender decided: Adrian's personal LinkedIn, in Creative Queue's voice ("I'm Adrian, co-founder at Creative Queue"), sent by hand. LinkedIn gives a Company Page no way to start a conversation (details in outreach/archive/2026-10-29-top5-cq-linkedin.md).
- Top-5 drafts written (note, DM, nudge), with a send checklist for Adrian. Order: Kris (PAKA), Jen (NOOWORKS), Emma (Damson Madder), Aimee (Odd Muse), Mike (Abbreviated). File: outreach/2026-10-29-top5-adrian.md.
- Competitor scan: the real incumbent is the free stack (Sheets, Airtable, Notion, monday). Creative Queue's angle: planning first, for brands without a studio (research/competitor-scan.md).
- Analytics parked; Brandon owns Vercel and the code.
- Top-5 drafts approved by Ittai: not done (still true on Nov 5).
- First LinkedIn note sent: not done for the top-5 set (still true on Nov 5).
Call takeaways (as written on Oct 30)
No notes from an Oct 30 call were found then (spark-brain through commit c9032b0, Oct 30, 10:28 AM ET, and the Mac mini working copy). The latest team input at that time was Brandon's Oct 30 CQ dispatch, products/creative-queue/briefs/2026-10-30.html:
- Blocker: barcode scanning and Capture One auto-rename are not built. No $3k/mo deal closes without proof of scan, shoot, move on.
- Also not built: PIM webhook sync (Plitix); self-serve signup is blocked (manual approval); PR #347 and #348 are on dev, not merged.
- Pricing: the $3k/mo + $12k setup tier "is above what demand has borne."
- Manhattan closed (CRE-266 retro in progress); reopen only after a working barcode demo. MIKUTA check-in is overdue.
- That week: message Isis (MIKUTA); send the warm producer outreach (3 contacts); merge PR #347 and #348.
The Nov 3 Ittai + Adrian call is now ingested separately: meetings/2026-11-03-ittai-adrian.md.
1. Summary
Goal: 6 qualified buyer calls by Friday Nov 13, 2026 (a target, not a forecast).
Creative Queue's bottleneck is real conversations with the people who can pay, not the landing page. So the north-star metric is qualified buyer calls: a live call where the founder or budget owner (at bigger brands, the head of creative or marketing) works on one of their own real shoots or projects in Creative Queue, and the call ends with a dated next step with that same person. Every channel below is judged only on whether it produces those calls. We are not doing headline tests, SEO pushes, ads or Reddit posting yet, because with almost no buyer conversations there is nothing for them to learn from or convert: the repo's Aug 29 brief says "No qualified prospect has seen the product since April."
Counts:
- Buyer live on the call; their own live shoot or project, not a demo; at least 30 minutes for a session or 15 for a readiness-check walkthrough; ends with a dated next step with the same buyer.
- Why 6: the repo records 5 outside prospect conversations from January to June 2026, and in both deals that reached a proposal the buyer never saw the product. Six in three weeks is two a week, each with the buyer present.
Does not count: calls with only a producer or coordinator (log them, then ask for the buyer), email or DM threads, intro chats where the product is not used, form fills, signups.
5. Weekly cadence and scoreboard
Adrian signed off on this cadence as a starting point on Nov 3.
| When | What | Who |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Review last week's scoreboard; pick 15 brands for the week; Ittai approves the week's drafts | Ittai, coworker, Grok Bot |
| Every weekday | 3 cold founder messages; 2 X replies; up to 1 X DM; due follow-ups | Named senders |
| Tuesday and Thursday | Hold session slots (30 minutes each) | Brandon or Adrian |
| Wednesday | Reddit and X listening pass; add brands and quotes | Grok Bot |
| Within 48 hours of any material | Return readiness checks | Brandon or Adrian |
| Friday | Fill the scoreboard from senders' reports; flag calls without the buyer | Coworker with Grok Bot |
| Wed Nov 4 | Midpoint: are buyers on the calls? Change the offer or the list, not the landing page | Ittai and coworker |
| Fri Nov 13 | Target closes: 6 qualified buyer calls | Everyone |
Live tally: pipeline/scoreboard.md. As of Thu Nov 5, 2026, no outreach from this plan's top-5 drafts is recorded as sent, and buyer calls remain 0 of 6.
Nov 3 addition: each weekly cold list should include the company, its website, the page the person was found from, and 3–4 hyperlinked LinkedIn profiles.
6. Roles
| Who | Role in this plan |
|---|---|
| Ittai Korman | Approves every message and account; makes the open decisions. His title at Creative Queue is not stated in the repo |
| Adrian Nugent-Head (cofounder) | Sender for remaining warm accounts he still wants to work (network, Claire Carter-Jenn, James Alley as of Nov 3); sender for cold LinkedIn notes (by hand, Creative Queue voice); runs sessions pending his confirmation |
| Brandon (cofounder per the site) | Named in the Oct 30 plan as sender for James Alley; runs sessions and readiness checks; confirms what's shipped; owns Vercel and the code (analytics parked) |
| Coworker | Runs the weekly cadence and scoreboard with Ittai (exact role to agree) |
| Grok Bot | Daily prospect batch, URL finding, drafts, listening passes, scoreboard upkeep. Never sends or posts |
Open from the Oct 30 Page and still open where not overridden: who runs X for CQ; does Ittai send anything himself, under what title?
Sources
- Grok Page "Creative Queue: User Acquisition Plan" (canvas
dcb876ef-9a69-45b3-8fe3-70ec5c0fbcf2), rebuilt here. - Pipeline files (prospects.csv, daily batches for 2026-10-29, 2026-10-30, 2026-11-02, 2026-11-05, drafts, competitor-scan, scoreboard, search-queries, analytics-proposal, review-2026-11-03, review-next).
- Nov 3 Ittai + Adrian transcript and Grain share (captured by Adrian's Zoom bot). Ittai's personal-scope Grain PAT cannot see recording
bdcecd68-a001-4843-8368-6847f88eb0a4. - Brandon's CQ dispatches of Oct 29 and 30 (
products/creative-queue/briefs/). - Earlier repo sources:
marketing/pipeline.md,marketing/icp.md,marketing/customer-voice-james-alley.md, the Aug 29 war-room brief,strategy/2026-06-27-wedge-and-mikuta-postmortem.md,strategy/positioning.md,product/overview.md. - LinkedIn Help a6239760 (invite note limits). The X search queries and the X automation note on the original Page are unverified.
- Live site: https://www.creativequeue.io (checked Oct 22, 2026).
- Reddiquette · Reddit for Business learning hub · X automation rules