Dale runs your rhythm.
Dale is chief of staff. The Monday briefing lands at 8am with last week's revenue movement, churn, what the crew did, and what's waiting on you — and it flags the numbers that moved further than they usually do. Once a month he reads your market and writes up what moved. Every night he passes over what the other four learned and surfaces anything that only makes sense when you look at all of it together.
What Dale does.
Solo founders rarely run a real weekly review. The intent is there — "on Monday I'll look at the numbers and plan the week" — but Sunday night arrives and the prep isn't done. The week starts reactively, not informed. Three months in, the founder doesn't know whether MRR is up or down without checking Stripe directly.
The Monday briefing is Dale's main product. At 8am in your timezone he gathers the week's numbers — revenue movement, new and churned customers, what the crew ran, what's sitting in your approval queue — then compares each one against its own four-week baseline and marks the ones that moved further than usual. He writes two or three hundred words over the top of it. It lands as a card on your Today page and in your inbox. Five minutes to read.
Once a month he reads the market. Dale searches the open web for what your competitors and your category have been doing, and writes up what he found with the sources attached so you can check him. It's the reading a founder means to do quarterly and does annually.
Every night he does a pass over the rest of the crew. Lou, Frankie, Hank, and Inky each learn things about your business in the course of their own work, and those lessons sit in four separate places. Dale reads across all of them, looks for the pattern or the contradiction, and puts a tile on your Today page — but only when there's genuinely something there. Most nights there isn't, and he says nothing.
Separately from all of that, a short notice goes out once a day when something needs you: how many approvals are waiting, whether a run failed, whether a customer is at risk. It's three counts and a sentence, not a written briefing, and on a day when all three are zero it doesn't fire at all. Unlike the Monday briefing it fires on a fixed UTC schedule rather than your local morning, which is a rough edge we haven't smoothed yet.
What sets it off, what it reads, what it writes.
- Triggers
- Monday 8am, in your timezone (day and hour both configurable)
- The first of the month (the market read)
- Nightly, in the small hours (the pass over the crew)
- Manual /run from the founder
- Inputs
- Last week's revenue movement, new customers, churned customers
- Last week's runs across every agent, attributed
- What's waiting in your approval queue
- A four-week baseline per metric, to judge what's unusual
- What Lou, Frankie, Hank and Inky each pinned or learned
- The open web, for the monthly market read
- Outputs
- Monday briefing (200-300 words) as a Today card and an email
- The metrics that moved further than they usually do, marked
- Monthly market brief with its sources attached
- An overnight tile, on the nights there's something worth one
- Audit trail entry
The playbook in plain English.
Monday briefing flow. At 8am Monday, Dale assembles the briefing. The gathering step is deterministic — no model involved, just the numbers: revenue movement, new and churned customers, the week's runs attributed by agent, and what's pending your approval. Each one gets compared against its own four-week baseline, and anything that moved unusually far gets marked rather than buried. Then Dale writes two or three hundred words over the top. Mono-numerics, no marketing language.
Dale doesn't editorialize. He names the numbers and lets you draw conclusions. "MRR up $620; 1 churn ($90); 2 Hank flags awaiting review." The format is consistent week to week so you learn to read it fast.
Daily notice. Once a day, if something needs you, a short notice arrives: approvals waiting, runs that failed, customers at risk. Three counts and a sentence. It's not a written briefing and it doesn't try to be — it exists so you can tell in two seconds whether the back office needs you today. When all three counts are zero it stays quiet, which is the feature. It runs on a fixed UTC clock, so depending where you are it may not land in your morning.
Market read. On the first of the month, Dale goes out to the open web and reads what your competitors and your category have been up to, then writes a brief with the sources attached. You can follow every link and check him, which is the only way a research brief is worth reading.
Overnight pass. Each of the other four learns things in the course of their own work, and those lessons sit in four separate places where no one ever compares them. Every night Dale reads across all of it — what got pinned, what got corrected, what keeps coming up — and surfaces the pattern when there is one. Most nights there isn't and he stays quiet.
Incidents are yours, not Dale's. When something breaks, you write the status update. Dale doesn't detect the outage, doesn't start a clock, and doesn't draft the customer note. Agents can read your incident history for context in a conversation; nothing in the crew can write it. That's a deliberate line and not an oversight — the incident note is the one piece of writing where a plausible sentence from a model that has the facts slightly wrong does real damage.
The guardrails are yours.
- Turn Dale off — the per-agent switch is real and enforced. A disabled agent refuses at dispatch.
- What Dale may touch — the permissions on the installation are read on every run.
- Briefing day — Monday by default; re-anchor it if your week starts on a Tuesday or you review on Sundays.
- Briefing time — 8am by default, resolved against your workspace timezone.
- Numbers shown (designed, not yet wired) — which metrics the briefing renders, from a longer list that includes Hank's quiet customers.
- Voice slant (designed, not yet wired) — dry clipboard, pattern-observer, or founder-partner.
- Anomaly sensitivity (designed, not yet wired) — how far a number has to move from its own baseline before Dale stops and asks you about it.
Nothing here yet.
We're pre-launch, so there is nothing to put here. Customer quotes go up as design partners come online and consent to being named.
Dale on rhythm.
Dale is the chief of staff. The operating cadence: the Monday briefing, a morning notice when something needs you, a monthly market read, and a nightly pass over what the rest of the crew learned. The others run the operational layer; Dale tells you what happened and what it adds up to.
Read the rhythm pillar →Common questions about Dale.
What's in the Monday briefing?
Revenue movement, new and churned customers, what the crew ran last week attributed by agent, and what's waiting on your approval. Anything that moved unusually far from its own four-week baseline is marked. Two or three hundred words. It lands as a card on your Today page and as an email.
What's the difference between the morning notice and the Monday briefing?
The notice is three counts and a sentence — approvals waiting, failed runs, customers at risk — arriving as an in-app notification and, if you've connected Slack, a Slack message. No writing, no email, and nothing at all on a day when the counts are zero. The Monday briefing is the written one: last week's numbers with Dale's read over the top.
Does Dale write my status page or my incident updates?
No. You write those. Dale doesn't detect an outage, doesn't open the incident, and doesn't draft the customer note — the status surface is a form you fill in, and the crew can read your incident history but cannot write to it. That line is deliberate: an incident update is where a fluent sentence with a wrong fact costs more than silence.
What's the monthly market read?
Once a month Dale searches the open web for what your competitors and your category have been doing and writes it up, with the sources attached to every claim so you can check him. It's the reading you mean to do quarterly and do annually.
Where do the numbers come from?
Stripe for revenue and churn, PorchOps's own run history for agent activity, and the customer graph for signals. The gathering step runs no model at all — it's arithmetic over your events. Every figure is traceable to a specific event in the audit log; you can drill down to verify any number Dale reports.
What if I'm in a different time zone?
The briefing fires against your workspace's timezone, and you can move both the day and the hour. There's no per-recipient setting yet: the briefing has one schedule per workspace, not one per founder.
Closing
Dale's Monday brief is the simplest thing the crew does and the one I'd miss most. — A cofounder
PorchOps puts a crew of AI coworkers on your back office: recovering failed payments, sorting support, keeping the books. Everything they write waits for your approval.