`marketing-director` strategist agent¶

Parked: 2026-05-26 Status: REVISIT-AT-100-paying-users OR post-October-2026-PE-cycle (whichever first) Cost-to-revive: ~3–4 hr build + ~$8/mo Anthropic API; Phase 2 adds ~$29/mo Apify

The idea¶

An agent that plays solo-founder CMO — identifies trends, ranks channels by ROI, recommends what content works, what to drop, posting frequency, media-type mix. NOT a drafter/poster (that's marketing-copywriter, already shipped to ~/.claude/agents/). This is the strategist above the drafter.

Why parked¶

n=10 external users is below the statistical floor where strategic recommendations beat coin-flip. A weekly brief that says "Reddit converted 1 of 25 — double down" is meaningless at this sample size. The agent would generate LOW CONFIDENCE flags on every recommendation, which is just noise. Build it when there's signal worth reading.

Revival trigger¶

Whichever comes first: - 100 paying users / ~$3K MRR — enough conversion volume that channel comparisons mean something - Post-October 2026 PE exam cycle — one full seasonal data point in hand - Marketing time burn exceeds 5 hr/week — at which point even crude prioritization is worth it

Research summary¶

Done 2026-05-26 via general-purpose agent. Key findings worth not re-discovering:

No off-the-shelf product fits. AI-CMO platforms (NoimosAI, Improvado AI CMO, HubSpot Breeze, Salesforce Agentic Marketing) target $1M+ ARR with 8–12 week integrations. Pricing is sales-call gated, est. $500–$2,000/mo.
Human fractional CMO is wrong tool at this stage. $1,250–$8,000/mo retainers; cheapest tier targets $500K–$2M ARR.
Indie founders all build the same shape: Monday-morning weekly brief, scheduled via cron/GitHub Actions, pulling self-data + lightly-scraped competitor data, emailed as 1-page markdown.
The carryforward log is the moat. 90% of AI marketing tools generate this-week recommendations but never check if last-week's worked. Append-only outcome log separates real strategy from vanity dashboards.
Channels ranked by activations/MRR, never impressions. Anti-vanity rule that survives compaction.
Data sources he already has paid for:
PostHog MCP (UTM cohorts, funnel)
Stripe MCP (activations, MRR delta, FIRST100 redemptions)
Supabase MCP (auth.users, tier transitions)
Reddit JSON API (free — append .json to any URL)
Manual gap: X/LinkedIn analytics have no useful free API in 2026. Weekly CSV export from native dashboards is the realistic input.
Competitive intel option: Apify Starter $29/mo + LinkedIn company actor + X profile actor pointed at PPI, School of PE, Engineering Pro Guides. Weekly JSON snapshots fed into the brief.
Skip: SparkToro ($50/mo one-shot), Subreddit Signals ($20 — redundant with free Reddit JSON), Foreplay (overkill at $0 ad spend), GummySearch (dead Dec 2025).

What I would have built¶

Agent definition: ~/.claude/agents/marketing-director.md (user-global, opus model)

Inputs (parallelized at run): 1. PostHog HogQL via MCP — last 7d UTM cohorts + funnel drop-offs 2. Supabase MCP — new auth.users + tier transitions in last 7d 3. Stripe MCP — activations + MRR delta + FIRST100 redemptions 4. Reddit JSON API via Bash curl — last 7d top posts in r/PE_Exam + r/FE_Exam + competitor mentions 5. (Phase 2) Apify scrapers — PPI / School of PE / Engineering Pro Guides LinkedIn + X 6. Static reference — NCEES exam calendar (April PE / October PE / continuous FE) 7. Read prior brief from FounderOS/marketing-briefs/ for carryforward scoring

Output: FounderOS/marketing-briefs/YYYY-MM-DD.md + email via gmail-personal MCP to [email protected].

Locked output structure:

# Marketing brief — week of YYYY-MM-DD

## Last week's recommendations — scored
1. <prior rec> — ✓/✗ (n=X, source)
2. ...
3. ...

## Channel scorecard (ranked by activations, not impressions)
| Channel | Posts | Signups | Paid | Time est | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
...

## Content theme analysis
Top 3 post types correlated with signups (cite row counts).

## This week's 3 recommendations
1. <concrete action> — confidence H/M/L (n=X)
2. ...
3. ...

## Trends + competitor moves
- ...

Anti-vanity guardrails baked into system prompt: - Rank by activations + MRR; impressions are tiebreaker only - Every recommendation cites SQL row count; n<5 → LOW CONFIDENCE flag mandatory - Seed prompt with niche context (NCEES dates, competitor names, Devin's locked positioning — no AIT parity claims, no AI tutor refs) - Carryforward forces scoring last week's recs before writing new ones

Schedule: Windows Task Scheduler Mondays 7am CT, calls claude -p "run marketing-director" or via Agent SDK headless.

~/.claude/agents/marketing-copywriter.md — the drafter (shipped, complementary)
~/.claude/agents/posthog-analyst.md — the funnel diagnostician (shipped, would feed director)
See also 2026-05-26-social-orchestrator-agent.md for the DRAFTER+POSTER variant that was also parked

marketing-director strategist agent¶