Creative Queue marketing rules

Product-specific rules for the generic pipeline skill. Other Spark pipelines (for example Voice Align) should use their own RULES.md rather than this file.

Last updated: Thu Nov 5, 2026 (America/New_York), after the page-update rules Ittai and Adrian agreed. Newer meetings override older ones, but conflicts are flagged rather than silently overwritten.

Page goals

Agreed with Ittai and Adrian (Thu Nov 5, 2026):

1. The public site is a short hub plus one page per workstream. Every workstream page has a permanent URL that does not change (for example /linkedin/), so people can bookmark it.
2. The dashboard (/) is a short summary: the top tasks right now (owner, whether a human or an agent does it, what it is waiting on, what it unblocks, and a due date); upcoming work segmented by Ittai, Adrian, Brandon, and Agents (agent tasks name whose agent and which routine); done items in a collapsed section; the key numbers (people this week, connection requests sent and accepted, DMs, buyer calls against the target of 6 by Fri Nov 13); and one card per workstream.
3. Workstream pages hold the working detail. LinkedIn people and company research (/linkedin/) has this week's queue (a company accordion, up to five people, a why line, connection status), archived weeks, the connection tracker, and a rubric summary. The other workstreams are Warm restarts, X/Twitter, Reddit, Content/SEO, Ads (parked), and an initiatives index.
4. Open questions live at /questions/, with a copy-paste answer block.
5. Meetings live at /meetings/, one reference page per meeting (decisions and quotes), linked from the hub but not cluttering it.
6. Automations and the audit trail live at /automations/, not on the dashboard.
7. Reference pages: Offer, Session runbook, Rules & rubrics (with links to the repo sources), and Background.
8. Markdown and data files in the repo stay the source of truth. Every pipeline run regenerates the site from them. Corrections from Ittai or Adrian update RULES.md and the rubrics, and each change is logged in CHANGELOG.md.

Page updates, questions, and version history

Agreed by Ittai and Adrian:

• When something from a meeting is unclear: update the page anyway, mark the item clearly as UNCONFIRMED, and add a numbered question.
• Something only counts as a decision when it was clearly agreed in the call. Otherwise it is logged as a proposal.
• Either Ittai or Adrian can answer a question. Each answer resolves that question, clears the UNCONFIRMED mark, and adds a CHANGELOG.md entry.
• Pricing, offers, ads, and public claims stay proposals until Ittai approves.
• Newer meetings override older ones. If a newer meeting conflicts with an older written decision, flag the conflict and add a question; do not silently overwrite.
• New people go to that day's archive (pipeline/archive/YYYY-MM-DD.md and pipeline/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md). They move onto the master list (pipeline/prospects.csv and pipeline/prospects.md) only once their links check out (at least one verified LinkedIn, X, or Instagram URL; never guessed). People already on the master list stay there; this rule applies going forward.
• Git history plus CHANGELOG.md is the version history. The hub page (README.md) is updated in place.
• The hub page keeps an Open questions to resolve section: numbered questions, each linked to its source (meeting and timestamp) and the item it affects, plus one copy-paste block Ittai or Adrian can paste back into Grok chat with their answers.
• Each run writes meetings/slack-questions.md, a digest ready for the Creative Queue Marketing Bot to post to Slack #cq-marketing (C054T5XSA3W). This bot and the pipeline skill do not post to Slack.

Authority

• Nothing is ever sent, posted, DMed, published, or spent without Ittai's approval of the exact text and the account.
• Pricing, offers, ads, and public claims stay proposals until Ittai approves. Say nothing about price until Ittai approves a resolution of the conflict between Founding Access on the live site (free for 3 months, then $500/mo) and the $3k/mo + $12k setup tier, which Brandon's Oct 30 dispatch says is "above what demand has borne."
• Grok Bot drafts, researches, logs, and updates pages. It never sends or posts.
• Claim only what the product does today. Do not claim barcode-to-Capture One auto-naming, PIM sync, or Slack. Brandon's Oct 30 dispatch says barcode and PIM are not built; product/overview.md lists Slack as not built.

Who sends, and from where

• Cold LinkedIn is Adrian Nugent-Head, from his personal LinkedIn, written in Creative Queue's voice ("I'm Adrian, co-founder at Creative Queue"), sent by hand (decided Oct 29; process confirmed Nov 3).
• Use personal LinkedIn or X accounts, or a creativequeue.io email only. Never accounts of Ittai's other businesses (Culinary Cave, MWD, Good Tracker, Milli, or any other).
• On Nov 3 Adrian told Ittai not to log into Adrian's LinkedIn yet: find the URLs first. Connecting and DMing come after the URLs are on the table.
• The Nov 3 call also treated automating LinkedIn DMs with Codex as "kind of the goal." That is not the same as approval to send. Until Ittai explicitly approves automated sending, drafts stay drafts and sends stay manual.
• One follow-up per person, then stop. Honour any "no" at once.

Two motions, kept separate

• Qualified buyers — brands that would pay. The buyer is the founder or CEO; at bigger brands, the head of creative or marketing. segment is single (one brand) or portfolio (multi-brand or holding group). Size ceiling is about $100M revenue (an estimate, with its source). Rows that may be over the ceiling stay on the list but are flagged for Ittai; they are not contacted without his yes.
• Build partners — agencies, studios, and production people. They bring referrals and design feedback. They are never counted as buyers. A session counts toward the 6-call target only when the brand's buyer joins.
• Keep buyers and partners in separate sections of every list, review, and scoreboard.

ICP (do not silently widen)

Canonical detail lives in icp.md. In short:

• Fashion-first within an e-commerce frame. Founder-led or newly scaling brands whose existing content process is breaking under growth are the primary fit.
• Economic buyer: founder (emerging/scaling) or head of creative / head of marketing (larger brands). Champion: producer, production manager, art director, and similar.
• Stage is a gate: they already have a process that scale is breaking. Early-stage / first-sales / choosing a first platform is a hard exclude.
• Footwear, homegoods/lifestyle, jewellery, and beauty are unvalidated expansion hypotheses until Ittai says they are in.
• Multi-brand / portfolio is the least-validated buyer path. Keep it labelled as such.
• The Nov 3 call did not rewrite ICP. It did change who to list per brand: not only the founder, but 3–4 people who are a good fit (founder plus head of production, head of marketing, and similar).

Daily and weekly pipeline loop

• Target about 15–20 contactable people per run (contactable = at least one verified LinkedIn, X, or Instagram URL). Never invent or guess a URL; leave it blank.
• Each run that finds new people writes pipeline/daily/YYYY-MM-DD.md and a copy at pipeline/archive/YYYY-MM-DD.md. New people move onto the managed master list (pipeline/prospects.csv and pipeline/prospects.md) only once their links check out. Then update numbers on the README and append CHANGELOG.md.
• Include brand_url (the actual website) on the table. Nov 3: Adrian asked to make sure websites are linked.
• Weekly: a new cold-outreach list; when a brand is added, find the 3–4 people at the same time, with hyperlinked LinkedIn URLs so Adrian can open the profiles and connect with the people that make sense.
• LinkedIn first. Then connections, a look at feeds, then DMs.
• Reddit may be rerun with Grok (Nov 3 request) as research only until Ittai approves any public comment or post.
• notion_crossref stays pending: Notion not connected until Notion is connected. Then check every row against Ittai's manual list before anyone is contacted.

Scoreboard

• North-star: 6 qualified buyer calls by Friday Nov 13, 2026 (a target, not a forecast).
• Qualified means all of: the buyer is live; they work on their own real shoot or project; the call ends with a dated next step with that same buyer.
• Calls with only a producer, coordinator, or build partner are logged and marked n.

Warm list (as of the Nov 3 call)

• Decision (Nov 3): start with cold outreach, not warm restarts of KYODAN or Manhattan ("doesn't feel that viable to reach back out"; Ittai agreed: "Totally").
• UNCONFIRMED / proposal (Nov 3, Adrian): Rachel is "not really a viable customer anymore." Alexandra Vasquez is "also not really viable." See questions 7.
• UNCONFIRMED / proposal (Nov 3, Adrian): mine Adrian's network again; reconnect with Claire Carter-Jenn (identity not given). See questions 6 and 7.
• UNCONFIRMED (Nov 3): James Alley — Adrian said he was connecting on LinkedIn and that he sent her a WhatsApp; later he said "one of the guys." Pronouns and who owns the thread are unresolved. See question 5.
• MIKUTA / Isis was not discussed on Nov 3. Do not invent a new status for it.

Privacy and quotes

• Use customer quotes (MIKUTA, James Alley, and anyone else) publicly only with permission, anonymised unless they agree to be named.
• Draft privacy line, still awaiting Ittai: "We only use your shoot materials for this session and delete them on request."

What this bot must never do

• Never send, post, DM, or contact anyone.
• Never print secrets (API tokens, .env values, credentials).
• Never invent people, URLs, revenue, statuses, or quotes. If a source does not say it, say it is unknown and add a question.