Your marketing department, documented.

01Overview — the team you hired

Most software hands you an empty dashboard and a to-do list. This isn't that. The organizing idea here is simple: you didn't buy a tool — you hired a department. Seven marketing roles are already staffed, already on shift, and already shipping work for you.

Each role is a named staffer with a job title, a short bio, a live "on shift" status, and a record of what they shipped this week. They report to one person: you. That's the whole org chart — you at the top, seven specialists underneath, and a single rule that never bends:

Your seven staff at a glance

The rest of this manual is the instruction booklet for working with them: how to read every screen, how to steer each staffer, and how sign-off keeps you in the driver's seat.

02The payroll-savings model

The plan is priced against the thing it replaces: a real in-house marketing team. Staffing these same seven seats yourself — with salary, benefits, payroll tax, tools, and overhead — runs about $32,500/month, or roughly $390,000 a year in a typical U.S. mid-market org. Your plan is a flat $2,900/month.

The per-role salary lines

The counter isn't a marketing round number — it adds up from fully-loaded estimates for each seat. These are what you'd budget to put a competent mid-market specialist in each chair (base + benefits + overhead):

How to read the savings counter

On the Dashboard, the big figure at the top of the payroll-savings card animates up to $29,600/mo when the page loads. That's the monthly gap between the in-house total and your flat fee. Below it, three numbers restate the math: the crossed-out in-house cost, your cost, and the annual savings. The same breakdown appears at the bottom of Settings, where you can see it beside your invoices.

03Getting started

Standing up your department takes four steps. Most customers are live within a week; the team starts producing before you've finished connecting everything.

Step 1 — Onboard (fill your profile)

Open Settings and complete the Business profile. This is the brief every staffer works from — business name, website, audience, brand voice, goals, and publishing cadence. For Polymagnet, the audience is "design engineers evaluating magnetic attachment, latching, and alignment," and the voice is "technical, engineer-to-engineer — lead with specs and force curves, never adjectives." Be specific. Saving the profile re-briefs all seven staff instantly.

Step 2 — Connect your collateral

Go to Connections and hand the team the tools they need: your brand kit, social accounts, CRM, email platform, analytics, and payments. Each connection you flip on unlocks a channel or a data source. You don't need all ten to start — brand kit plus one or two channels is enough for week one — but the more they can reach, the more they ship without asking.

Step 3 — Approve your first batch

Within a day, work appears in Approvals — a first newsletter, a couple of social posts, maybe an ad set. Review each, then Approve or Request changes. This first pass also teaches the team your taste: what you wave through and what you send back shapes everything after it.

Step 4 — Go live

Once you've approved the first batch, the queue starts publishing on schedule. From here the rhythm is steady: the team plans a week ahead in the Calendar, drafts and ships, routes anything outbound through Approvals, and reports the results every Friday in Analytics.

04The app, view by view

The app has eight views, reached from the left sidebar (departments). Here's what each one shows, how to read it, and what you can do there.

Dashboard

Your home screen and daily standup. It opens with a pending-approvals callout if anything needs you, then the payroll-savings card (the animated $29,600/mo counter) beside your plan card ($2,900/mo · Managed · ● Live). Below that sit four KPI cards — traffic, leads, revenue influenced, and pieces shipped this month — each with a trend percentage versus last month and a small sparkline. At the bottom, two columns: This week, from your team (the headline thing each staffer shipped) and a live activity feed that logs real actions as they happen, including your own approvals and connection changes.

The Team & the org chart

This view has two parts. At the top, the org chart: you at the top (marked "Founder · final sign-off"), with all seven staff as reports on a single rail beneath you. Click any node to open that staffer's card — bio, on-shift status, in-house salary equivalent, and what they shipped this week. It's a literal picture of the promise: everyone reports to you, and nothing publishes without your sign-off.

Below the chart, each staffer gets a full employee card: avatar, name, title, a one-line bio, an "● on shift" badge, and a list of three-to-five real things they shipped this week. Every card has a Reassign / regenerate button.

Content Calendar

A seven-day grid of everything planned this week, built a week ahead by the team. Each item is color-coded by channel — Blog, LinkedIn, Email, SEO, YouTube, Ads, Instagram, Report — with a legend across the top. Today's column is highlighted. Click any item for the full brief: which staffer owns it, the scheduled time, the channel, and a paragraph describing exactly what it is. Polymagnet's week, for example, runs from the "programmable vs conventional" decision guide on Monday to a Sunday QA pass on the following week's emails.

Approvals

Your sign-off queue — the control room. Each pending item is a full card: type (Email, Social, Ad, Content), the owning staffer, the schedule, and the actual draft — subject lines, ad targeting, thread copy, slide flow. Three actions per item: Approve (queues it to publish), Request changes (sends it back for a same-day revision), or, once decided, Undo (returns it to the queue). Every decision updates the Approvals badge in the sidebar, logs to the activity feed, and pops a confirmation toast. When the queue is clear, the view says so. Full detail in §06.

Analytics

Jordan Blake's weekly report, rendered as four hand-drawn charts plus a stat strip. The strip up top gives you six headline numbers (sessions, leads, revenue influenced, landing-page conversion, average email open rate, and the technology-to-kit funnel rate). Below: a 12-week traffic line, a 12-week leads bar chart, a revenue-influenced line, and a channel-mix donut with a legend. How to interpret each is in §08.

Content Library

Everything the team has ever shipped, in one searchable table — around fourteen pieces in the demo. Columns: piece (with type), channel, owner, status, and date. Search by keyword and filter by channel using the chips; the count updates live. Click any row for the full story on that piece — what it was, who made it, and how it performed. This is your institutional memory: the twist-release demo, the tolerance-stack newsletter, the multipole explainer, all findable in seconds.

Connections

The ten tools you can hand the team, each a card with a connect/disconnect toggle and a live "● connected / ○ not connected" state. A meter at the top shows X of 10 connected and how well-equipped the team is. Toggling a connection is instant, persists, and logs to your feed. Details on each integration are in §07.

Settings

Two halves. On the left, your editable business profile — name, website, audience, brand voice, goals, and a cadence dropdown. Edit and Save profile to re-brief the whole team. On the right, plan & billing: your $2,900/mo Managed plan, three invoice rows (paid), and the full in-house salary roster restating your payroll savings. This is where onboarding starts and where you manage the relationship.

05Meet your team, in depth

Seven specialists, each with a clear remit. Here's what each produces, how to steer them, and what good output looks like — with the real Polymagnet work as the example.

06How approvals work

Approvals is the single most important habit in the app, because it's where the promise lives: nothing customer-facing ships without a human saying yes.

What needs your OK

Anything outbound — anything a customer or prospect would see:

• Email — newsletters and nurture sends (e.g. Field Notes #12, "Why haptic detents feel expensive (and cost less)")
• Social — LinkedIn posts and carousels, X threads, Instagram reels (e.g. the 7-slide spring-latch carousel)
• Ads — paid campaigns and their budgets (e.g. the $1,400/mo self-aligning-connector ad set)
• Content — new articles before they publish (e.g. the "programmable magnets and total cost of assembly" blog)

Internal work — keyword research, list cleaning, analytics, diagrams in progress — doesn't need sign-off. Only what goes out the door does.

Your three actions

Why nothing outbound is automatic

The team can draft and schedule at machine speed, but speed without judgment is how brands embarrass themselves. Sign-off is the deliberate friction that keeps your name safe: you see the actual copy, the actual targeting, the actual budget before any of it reaches a customer. The Dashboard nudges you when items are waiting, and the sidebar badge keeps a running count so nothing sits forgotten.

07Connecting your collateral

Connections are the tools you hand the team. Each one you turn on unlocks a channel to publish through or a data source to report from. Here's what each of the ten does.

Connecting and disconnecting

Flip the toggle on any card. The state updates instantly ("● connected"), the X of 10 meter fills, and the change logs to your activity feed. Disconnecting is just as easy and just as instant — the team simply stops using that channel until you reconnect it. You're never locked in.

08Reading the analytics

The Analytics view is Jordan Blake's weekly report. Four charts, one stat strip. Here's how to read each and what to do about it.

The stat strip

Six headline numbers: sessions (24,318), sample-kit leads (142), revenue influenced ($86.4k), landing-page conversion (4.7%), average email open rate (39%), and the technology→kit funnel rate (12.4%). Glance here first — it's the whole quarter in one line.

Traffic — sessions (12-week line)

Your audience size over time. A line climbing steadily (Polymagnet's went 14k → 24k) means content and SEO are compounding. Act on it: if traffic rises but leads don't, the problem is conversion (send Elena to the landing page); if traffic is flat, feed Maya and Derek more topics.

Leads — sample-kit requests (12-week bars)

The number that pays the bills — qualified requests, not raw clicks. The latest bar is highlighted. Act on it: a rising lead line validates the current content mix; a stall usually means the offer needs a refresh, not more traffic.

Revenue influenced (12-week line)

Pipeline that marketing content touched before it closed, pulled from CRM stages. It's the bridge between "we published things" and "it made money." Act on it: compare its slope to the leads chart — if leads climb but revenue-influenced lags, the leads may be lower quality (tighten ad targeting or lead scoring).

Channel mix (donut)

Where your sessions come from: organic 38%, LinkedIn 22%, email 16%, direct 12%, paid 8%, other 4%. Act on it: a healthy B2B mix leans on organic and one strong social channel. If paid dominates, you're renting your audience; shift investment toward the owned channels (SEO, email) that keep working after you stop paying.

09Billing & plan

One plan, one price, no surprises.

What's included

• All seven staffed roles — content, SEO, social, email, demand gen, analytics, creative
• Unlimited items through the approval queue; the team plans and ships continuously (31 pieces in the demo month)
• All ten connections, weekly analytics reporting, and the full content library
• No per-seat, per-post, or per-channel fees — the $2,900 is the whole cost

Invoices

Your invoice history lives in Settings, on the right. Each row shows the invoice number, date, a paid status, and the $2,900 amount (the demo shows three months: INV-2026-0005 through 0007). Your next invoice date is shown on the Dashboard plan card.

Cancellation

The plan is cancel-anytime, stated on the Dashboard plan card. There's no annual lock-in — you keep the department as long as it's earning its keep, and you can stop whenever it isn't.

The savings, restated

It bears repeating because it's the whole point: staffing these seven seats in-house runs about $32,500/mo (~$390K/yr). At $2,900/mo you're saving roughly $29,600 every month — about $355,200 a year. That figure sits at the bottom of Settings next to your invoices so the trade is always in view.

10The weekly rhythm

Left to run, the department keeps a steady cadence. Here's a representative week from the Polymagnet calendar so you know what "on shift" actually looks like day to day.

Your part of the rhythm is small and fixed: review Approvals once a day (about two minutes), skim the Friday report, and adjust the brief in Settings when your priorities shift.

11FAQ & troubleshooting

12Glossary

Cadence

How often the team publishes — set in Settings (e.g. "2 long-form pieces / week"). It governs the calendar's fill rate.

Channel mix

The share of your traffic coming from each source (organic, LinkedIn, email, direct, paid, other). Shown as the Analytics donut.

Demand generation (demand gen)

The discipline of creating and capturing buyer interest — ads, landing pages, and offers that turn readers into leads. Elena's remit.

MQL — Marketing-qualified lead

A lead that has shown enough intent (for Polymagnet, a sample-kit request) to be worth handing to sales. The "leads" KPI counts these.

Nurture flow

An automated sequence of emails that moves a contact toward a decision — e.g. spec sheet → CAD files → design-review offer.

Revenue influenced

Pipeline value that marketing content touched before it closed, attributed via CRM stages. Not the same as revenue marketing "owns" — it's the pipeline it helped.

Conversion rate (CRO)

The percentage of visitors who take the desired action (e.g. 4.7% of landing-page visitors request a kit). CRO is the practice of improving it.

LCP — Largest Contentful Paint

A page-speed metric: how long until the main content renders. Derek cut Polymagnet's from 3.1s to 1.9s. Lower is better for both users and SEO.

Featured snippet

The answer box at the top of a Google results page. Winning one (as Derek did for "what are multipole magnets") captures outsized clicks.

Schema / FAQPage schema

Structured markup that helps search engines understand a page — FAQPage schema makes an FAQ eligible for rich results.

Open rate / click rate

The share of email recipients who open a send / who click a link in it. Polymagnet's Field Notes averages 39% open, 6.2% click.

Retargeting

Ads shown to people who already visited but didn't convert — e.g. technology-page visitors who didn't request a kit.

Intent scoring

A rule that flags a lead as "hot" based on behavior (e.g. a CAD download plus a pricing-page visit within seven days).

Payroll-savings model

The pricing logic here: the flat $2,900/mo fee measured against the ~$32,500/mo it would cost to staff the same seven roles in-house.

On shift

The status badge meaning a staffer is active and producing. All seven show "● on shift" in a running workspace.