Your marketing department, running the day for you.
This is the manual for The Department — a live, 24-hour marketing operations room. It drafts, schedules, and ships work on a fixed daily run-sheet; you approve anything that goes out under your name. This guide covers every view, every desk, and every decision you'll make.
01Overview
The Department is a marketing team delivered as software. Instead of a dashboard of buttons you have to push, it's a live operations room that already knows what to do today — and does it, hour by hour, whether or not you're logged in.
The 24-hour operations room
Most marketing tools wait for you. The Department doesn't. It runs on a day rail — a fixed schedule of fourteen operations spread from 05:30 to 23:00 — and moves through it in real time. When you open the app, a live clock is ticking in the top bar, a "Happening now" banner tells you which desk is working this minute, and a glowing cyan now-line sits on today's run-sheet at the current time. You're not looking at a report of what happened last month. You're looking at the department, mid-shift.
The core promise
The deal in one sentence
The department runs the day on a schedule; you approve anything that goes out. Content gets drafted, SEO gets fixed, posts get staged, analytics get swept — automatically, every day. But nothing that carries your brand into the world — no email, no social post, no ad — ships until a human clicks Approve. That gate is the product, not a limitation.
What you get for $2,900/month
- Seven desks working every day: Content, SEO, Social, Email, Revenue, Analytics, and Creative.
- Roughly 70 scheduled operations a week — about 14 a day — all visible on the calendar before they run.
- One human approval gate that every outbound item passes through.
- A live dashboard of your own numbers: sessions, qualified leads, revenue influenced, and everything published this month.
- A full content library — every piece the department drafts, stages, or ships, searchable and dated.
Flat fee. No per-seat pricing, no per-post metering, no surprise overage. For comparison, one mid-level marketing hire runs $6,200+/month fully loaded — and clocks out at five.
Throughout this manual the examples come from the live demo workspace, Polymagnet — a maker of programmable (coded/correlated) magnets selling to design engineers. Its content is deliberately technical: force curves, torque in newton-metres, twist-release phone mounts, haptic detents, self-aligning connectors. That's the point — the department writes engineer-to-engineer, not in marketing filler.
02The day, hour by hour
The heart of the app is the run-sheet — the day rail on the Today view. It's the single most important thing to understand, so here's the whole day, exactly as the app schedules it.
How to read the rail
- Each row is a scheduled operation with a time, a title, the desk that owns it (the coloured chip), and a one-line detail.
- Operations already past this moment show as done (dimmed, green node). The one running now is highlighted in violet. The following one is tagged "up next."
- The dashed cyan now-line is the current time. It moves down the rail continuously — reload at 3pm and it sits lower than at 9am. It's driven by your browser clock, so it's always honest about "now."
The "Happening now" banner at the top of the app is the rail, summarised to one line. In quiet hours (before 05:30) it tells you what's up first; after 21:00 it confirms the day is done and tomorrow's sheet is locked. Watch it for ten seconds and you'll see the department is genuinely on a clock.
03Getting started
Onboarding is deliberately short. The department can start producing on day one; the quality climbs as it learns your collateral and your voice.
- Onboard your business profileOpen Settings and fill in your name, website, audience, brand voice, goals, and daily cadence. This profile is the brief every desk works from. Polymagnet's voice, for example, is “technical, engineer-to-engineer — lead with physics and measured numbers, never hype.”
- Connect your collateralIn Connections, switch on your brand kit and the channels you actually use — LinkedIn, X, your ESP, Zoho CRM, Google Analytics, Stripe. Each connection unlocks a desk's reach. You'll see an “X of 10” meter fill as you go.
- Review the first batchWithin the first day the department stages its opening run: a cornerstone article, a couple of social posts, and its first email digest. They land in Approvals. Read them, then Approve or Request changes.
- Go liveOnce you approve the first batch, the department is running your day. From here it works the run-sheet automatically and only interrupts you for the next thing that needs a signature.
What day 1 looks like
The department pulls whatever data your connections expose, drafts a cornerstone piece (Polymagnet's is “What is a programmable magnet? An engineer's definition”), stages one or two social posts, and assembles its first email digest — all held for your approval. You'll approve, tweak, or reject. Nothing has shipped yet.
What week 1 looks like
By the end of the first week you've approved a handful of pieces, the Analytics view has a few days of your real numbers, and the calendar shows next week fully scheduled. The SEO desk has filed its first keyword-gap brief; the Revenue desk is scoring inbound leads. The rhythm is now visible and predictable.
04The app, view by view
Eight views, reachable from the left sidebar. Here's what each one shows, how to read it, and what you can do there.
Today dashboard
Your home base. It opens with the plan badge ($2,900/mo · Managed · ● Live), then the pending-approvals callout, then four KPI cards — sessions, qualified leads, revenue influenced, and pieces published this month — each with a 30-day trend and a sparkline. Below that sit the two anchors: today's run-sheet (the day rail with the live now-line) on the left, and the activity feed on the right. The feed only shows entries whose hour has already arrived, and your own actions — approvals, edits, toggles — drop in there too.
The Department 7 desks
One card per desk. Each shows what that desk did today, a short list of the real items it produced, and a Regenerate button that swaps in the desk's alternate production run (there are two full sample sets per desk). Use it to see the range of what a desk makes without waiting for tomorrow.
Calendar
A seven-day grid, today highlighted, with every scheduled item placed by time and channel. Above it, the daily rhythm strip shows the fixed heartbeat that repeats every day. Click any item for its working detail — the brief, the target query, the specs.
Approvals the gate
The human gate. Each card shows a staged outbound item in full — subject lines, caption, ad copy, reply drafts — with Approve and Request changes buttons. Acting on one updates the sidebar's approval count and drops a note into the activity feed. A settled item can be Reopened. See section 06 for the full workflow.
Analytics the numbers
Five hand-drawn charts of your own demo numbers: a 12-week sessions line, a qualified-leads bar chart, an influenced-revenue line, a channel-mix donut, and a “today by the hour” chart with the current hour marked in cyan. Every chart has a legend and a plain-language note telling you what to read from it. Full guide in section 08.
Content library the record
A searchable, filterable table of every piece the department has touched — roughly fourteen at any time in the demo — with type, channel, status (published, scheduled, pending, draft), and a date and time. Search by keyword, filter by type or status, and click any row for its full brief.
Connections your stack
Ten integrations with connect/disconnect switches and an “X of 10” meter. Toggling one is instant and persisted; the department picks up a new connection on its next cycle and notes the gap if you remove one. Details in section 07.
Settings workspace
The editable business profile (name, site, audience, brand voice, goals, cadence), the plan & billing panel with the flat $2,900/mo fee and three invoices, and the human-approved note. Save the profile and the next run-sheet reflects it; “Restore demo defaults” puts Polymagnet's settings back.
Everything you change — approvals, connection toggles, profile edits, which sample set a desk shows — is saved in your browser under the autom-ma namespace. Reload the page and your state is exactly where you left it. This is a demo, so state lives locally rather than on a server.
05The seven desks in depth
Each desk is a role on the team. Here's what each produces, when in the day it runs, how to steer it, and what good output looks like — using Polymagnet's real material.
How to steer any desk
Two controls shape everything the desks make, both in Settings: brand voice (the tone and rules — Polymagnet's is “short sentences, assume the reader owns a force gauge”) and daily cadence (which desks run when). Change either and the next day's run-sheet obeys it.
Content
Runs 06:00 & 13:30 · writes the recordProduces: long-form articles, engineering case notes, guide updates, glossary entries, comparison pieces, FAQ pages.
What good looks like: the 06:00 draft “Multipole vs conventional magnets: holding force at 1 mm gap” — 1,900 words built around a real force-vs-gap table for N42 reference pairs, explaining why a multipole array wins inside 2 mm and loses past 8 mm. The 13:30 case note carries measured numbers: 4.2 N axial hold, 0.18 N·m release torque at 15°, with the fixture drawing attached. Good content here is specific and measured, never adjectival.
SEO
Runs 07:00 & 08:00 · earns the rankingsProduces: on-page passes, FAQ/product schema, internal-link repairs, keyword-gap briefs, rank tracking, technical crawl audits.
What good looks like: the 07:00 pass on /magnetic-latch-design retitles the H1, adds FAQ schema for “how strong is a magnetic latch,” and fixes two orphaned links. The 08:00 gap review confirms “self-aligning connector” sitting on page 2 against thin competitor content and files a brief to Content. Real target terms in rotation: programmable magnets, coded magnets, multipole magnets, magnetic latch design, self-aligning connector.
Social
Runs 09:30 & 19:30 · runs the feedsProduces: LinkedIn posts and carousels, X threads and posts, comment replies, polls — all staged, never auto-posted.
What good looks like: the 09:30 queue stages a 12-second haptic detent demo clip for LinkedIn and a seven-post X thread on why coded magnets don't wipe hotel keycards (18 gauss at 20 mm vs the ~600 a card needs to die). The 19:30 engagement pass drafts six comment replies, two answering torque questions with force-curve links. Everything Social makes waits in Approvals.
Produces: the monthly Engineer Digest, nurture sequences, welcome triggers, list hygiene, subject-line A/Bs.
What good looks like: Engineer Digest #47 to 2,418 opted-in engineers, with a subject A/B staged (“Holding force at 1 mm: the table” vs “Multipole vs conventional, measured”) — concrete-number subjects keep winning. It is always held for approval; the Email desk has no authority to send on its own.
Revenue
Runs 10:30 · minds the pipelineProduces: lead scoring, routing, pipeline reporting, attribution, stalled-deal alerts, search-ad copy.
What good looks like: the 10:30 CRM sweep scores 14 form fills and tags 5 engineering-qualified — the signal is a spec mentioned: gap distance, torque, or an eval-kit request. Qualified leads route to the Zoho sales queue; enterprise domains fast-track. Revenue also drafts ad copy (e.g. the “self-aligning connector” search group), which goes to Approvals like anything outbound.
Analytics
Runs 05:30, 15:00 & 21:00 · keeps the scoreProduces: the overnight data pull, the afternoon anomaly sweep, the nightly report, cohort and funnel reads, GA4 annotations.
What good looks like: the 15:00 sweep catches the “magnetic phone mount” query cluster up 38% week-over-week, traces it to a forum thread, and annotates GA4 so next week's read is clean. The 21:00 nightly report puts the whole day on one page. Analytics is the desk that feeds every other desk its brief.
Creative
Runs 16:30 & 18:00 · makes it visibleProduces: technical diagrams, field-map figures, storyboards, animation loops, carousels, photo shot-lists, image re-exports.
What good looks like: the 16:30 block builds three labeled haptic detent field maps (attract, repel, detent zones) at 2× for the article and a LinkedIn carousel. The 18:00 block storyboards a 40-second self-aligning connector demo — six frames from misaligned drop to shear release, with a VO script for engineer review. Creative also cleans up: slow hero images from the SEO crawl get re-exported as AVIF.
06Approvals & sign-off
This is the safety mechanism that makes an automated department trustworthy. Understand it once and you'll never worry about what the department might say in your name.
What needs your OK
Anything that leaves your building. In the demo that's five kinds of item, all visible in Approvals:
| Item | Desk | Why it holds |
|---|---|---|
| Engineer Digest #47 | Goes to 2,418 real inboxes under your name | |
| LinkedIn detent clip | Social | Published to your company page |
| X keycard thread | Social | Posted to your public feed |
| Search ad copy | Revenue | Spends money and represents you in results |
| Comment reply pack | Social | Speaks to customers as you |
Internal work — drafts, briefs, lead scoring, analytics, diagrams — does not wait for approval. It's the outbound gate only.
Approve vs Request changes
- Approve — the item ships on its schedule. The approval count in the sidebar drops by one, a green “Approved — shipping on schedule” status replaces the buttons, and the activity feed logs your sign-off.
- Request changes — the item goes back to its desk to be revised and re-staged. The feed notes it; the count drops because it's no longer waiting on you.
- Reopen — changed your mind? A settled item can be reopened and put back in the queue.
Why nothing outbound ships without a human
An automated department that could email your list or post to your feed unsupervised would be a liability, not an asset. The approval gate is a hard rule, not a setting you can switch off: the Email desk has no send authority, the Social desk has no post authority. They draft and stage; you decide what the world sees. That's what makes it safe to let the rest run on autopilot.
07Connecting your collateral
Each connection unlocks a desk's reach. You control all ten from Connections, and you can disconnect anything at any time.
| Connection | What it unlocks |
|---|---|
| Brand kit | Logo, palette, type, and voice rules — feeds every desk so output looks and sounds like you |
| Company-page publishing and the comment-reply queue for the Social desk | |
| Reels and carousel publishing | |
| X | Threads, replies, and post scheduling |
| YouTube | Demo-video uploads with chapters |
| Page posts and community replies | |
| Zoho CRM | Lead scoring, routing, and pipeline sync for the Revenue desk |
| Email / ESP | Digest and nurture sends — human-approved, always |
| Google Analytics | Sessions, funnels, and annotations for the Analytics desk |
| Stripe | Order data that becomes the “revenue influenced” number |
Connecting and disconnecting
Flip a switch to connect; the meter climbs toward “10 of 10” and the relevant desks pick it up on their next cycle. Disconnect and the department degrades gracefully — dependent operations pause and the desk notes what it can no longer do, rather than failing silently. Nothing breaks; the day just gets shorter.
Data & privacy
The department reads only what a connection exposes, and only to do its job — the Analytics desk reads sessions, the Revenue desk reads pipeline stages. It never sends on a channel you haven't connected, and outbound channels still pass through the approval gate. Disconnect a service and its access ends immediately. In this demo, all connection state is stored locally in your browser; nothing is transmitted.
08Reading the analytics
The Analytics view answers one question: is the department compounding? Here's how to read each chart and what to do about it.
Organic + all-channel sessions (12 weeks)
The headline trend line — Polymagnet's demo runs from ~6,180 to 10,560 weekly sessions. Look for step changes, not day-to-day wobble: the W-5 jump is annotated as the latch-guide FAQ schema going live. Act on: a flat or falling line for two-plus weeks is a signal to steer the Content and SEO desks toward new terms.
Qualified leads (12 weeks)
Bars, rising from 31 to 61 a week. A lead counts as qualified only when it names a spec — gap distance, torque, an eval-kit request — so this is a quality number, not a form-fill vanity count. Act on: rising sessions but flat qualified leads means traffic is arriving but not the right traffic; tighten targeting.
Revenue influenced (12 weeks)
Dollars, in thousands per week ($4.9k → $8.6k). This is Stripe eval-kit orders plus any Zoho pipeline the department's content touched within 30 days. Act on: this is the number to quote when justifying the $2,900 — watch its slope against the flat fee.
Channel mix (30 days)
A donut of where sessions come from — organic search carries 46% in the demo. Act on: a healthy mix leans on organic (the department's thesis is owning the terms engineers type); an over-reliance on one paid channel is a concentration risk worth diversifying.
Today by the hour
A live bar chart of sessions across the 24 hours of today, with the current hour marked in cyan and future hours dimmed. The 09:00–16:00 plateau is engineers at their desks — which is exactly why the Social desk fires its queue at 09:30. Act on: if your audience's active hours differ from the demo's, adjust the daily cadence in Settings so posts land when people are looking.
Every chart is drawn as inline SVG — no third-party analytics scripts, no tracking pixels loaded to render your own dashboard. The numbers shown are your workspace's own demo figures, not fabricated third-party benchmarks.
09Billing & plan
One plan, one price. The Settings view holds the billing panel and invoice history.
The plan
$2,900/month · Managed. Flat fee. It includes all seven desks, roughly 70 scheduled operations a week, the human approval gate, the live dashboard, and the full content library. No per-seat charges, no per-post metering, no overage.
Invoices
The billing panel lists your recent invoices — three in the demo (INV-2045 through INV-2047), each $2,900.00, each marked ● paid. Every invoice is the same flat amount, which is the point: your marketing cost is a line you can plan around.
What's included vs a hire
| The Department | One mid-level hire | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $2,900 flat | $6,200+ loaded |
| Hours | 05:30–23:00, every day | ~9–5, weekdays |
| Disciplines | 7 desks | 1 person's skill set |
| Ramp time | Producing day 1 | Weeks to months |
Launch coupon
New workspaces can apply the launch coupon DAYONE for a reduced first month while you onboard and approve your opening batch. It's a one-time credit against your first invoice; every invoice after that is the standard flat $2,900.
Cancellation
Month-to-month. Cancel any time and the department finishes the current billing period, then stops. There's no lock-in and no termination fee — the flat plan is designed so you stay because it's working, not because you're trapped.
10The daily & weekly rhythm
The deliverables change; the heartbeat doesn't. This is the fixed rhythm the department keeps every day, visible as the strip above the calendar.
| Time | What runs | Desk |
|---|---|---|
| 05:30 | Overnight data pull | Analytics |
| 06:00 | Content drafts | Content |
| 07:00–08:00 | SEO passes | SEO |
| 09:30 | Social queue staged | Social |
| 10:30 | CRM sweep & lead scoring | Revenue |
| 12:00 | Email → approval gate | |
| 13:30 | Case-note publishing | Content |
| 15:00 | Analytics sweep | Analytics |
| 16:30–18:00 | Creative block | Creative |
| 19:30 | Engagement pass | Social |
| 21:00 | Nightly report | Analytics |
| 23:00 | Housekeeping & lock tomorrow | Ops |
Across the week
The daily rhythm repeats Monday through Friday at full intensity, with lighter weekend passes — a Saturday bench-cam post, a Sunday-night lock of the coming week's ~70 operations. Mid-week (Wednesday 15:00) the Analytics desk runs a deeper review beyond the daily sweep, and Friday 17:00 compiles the week-in-review that lands in your Monday inbox. The Calendar shows it all a week ahead.
11FAQ & troubleshooting
Is this AI or real people?
It's an automated department — software that does the drafting, scheduling, scoring, and reporting on a fixed daily schedule. The one thing it deliberately does not automate is the decision to publish: a human approves everything outbound. Think of it as a full team's output with a single, non-negotiable human sign-off.
Do I keep control?
Completely. Nothing reaches your email list, your social feeds, or a paid placement without you clicking Approve. You also control the brand voice, the daily cadence, and which channels are connected. The department runs the routine; you own every outbound decision.
What if I don't approve something?
It doesn't ship. Choose Request changes and it goes back to its desk to be revised and re-staged for another look. There's no deadline pressure and nothing goes out by default — an unapproved item simply waits or gets reworked.
Does it really run overnight?
Yes. The run-sheet spans 05:30 to 23:00, and the 23:00 housekeeping pass backs up content, checks 214 URLs, and locks tomorrow's sheet. Open the app at any hour and the live clock, the “Happening now” banner, and the now-line will show you exactly where in the day the department is.
Is the content generic?
The opposite. Look at the Polymagnet examples: force-vs-gap tables for N42 pairs, 0.18 N·m release torque, 2.1 mm capture radius, gauss readings at measured distances. The department writes to your audience's actual vocabulary using your brand voice. Generic filler is what it's built to avoid.
How fast can it start?
Day one. It stages an opening batch — a cornerstone article, a couple of social posts, a first email digest — within the first day for you to approve. Quality climbs over the first week as it learns your collateral, but it produces immediately.
Can I cancel?
Any time. It's month-to-month with no lock-in and no termination fee. Cancel and the department finishes the current billing period, then stops.
The clock or now-line looks off — what's wrong?
Both are driven by your browser's clock, so they reflect your local time. If they seem wrong, check your device's time and time zone. The now-line's position updates every second; if it isn't moving, refresh the page.
I made changes and they disappeared.
The demo saves your state locally in your browser (namespace autom-ma). Clearing site data, using a different browser, or a private window will start you fresh. Use Restore demo defaults in Settings to reset the Polymagnet workspace deliberately.
What happens if I disconnect a service?
The department degrades gracefully: operations that depended on it pause, and the responsible desk notes what it can no longer do. Nothing crashes. Reconnect and the desk resumes on its next cycle.
12Glossary
- Day rail / run-sheet
- The fixed daily schedule of ~14 operations shown on the Today view, from the 05:30 data pull to 23:00 housekeeping.
- Now-line
- The dashed cyan marker on the day rail that sits at the current time and moves down the rail continuously, driven by your browser clock.
- Happening now banner
- The one-line summary in the top bar naming the desk and operation running at this moment.
- Desk
- One of the seven roles on the department: Content, SEO, Social, Email, Revenue, Analytics, Creative.
- Approval gate
- The rule that every outbound item — email, social, ads — waits for a human Approve before it ships.
- MQL (engineering-qualified lead)
- A lead the Revenue desk tags as serious because it names a spec: a gap distance, a torque value, or an eval-kit request.
- Channel mix
- The share of sessions coming from each source (organic, LinkedIn, direct, email, X, referral), shown as the Analytics donut.
- Cadence
- Which desks run at which times through the day — an editable setting that shapes the run-sheet.
- Revenue influenced
- Stripe orders plus Zoho pipeline that the department's content touched within a 30-day window.
- Regenerate
- The button on a desk card that swaps in that desk's alternate production run (each desk has two full sample sets).
- Programmable / coded magnet
- Polymagnet's product: a magnet whose magnetization pattern is designed to control its force curve, alignment, and release behaviour — the subject the demo's content is written about.
- Multipole array
- A magnet with many alternating poles in a pattern; it trades reach for grip and is a recurring topic in the demo content.