Couve Culture.

The problem

Vancouver, Washington gets treated like Portland's waiting room, and its events coverage showed it. Couve Culture was the bet that Clark County deserved its own voice: a weekly guide with actual personality, written like a friend who knows what is happening this weekend.

What the agents did

Penny drafted the weekly editions from event research the pipeline gathered, in a locked brand voice that stayed consistent across 34 editions. Echo watched engagement so I saw what readers actually clicked, not what I hoped they would.

What I did

Curation, voice, and community. And eventually, the harder job: the math. The audience grew to 11,000 subscribers, the editorial engine hummed, and the business model never caught up to either.

What happened

I shut it down. An 11,000 subscriber audience is a real asset, and walking away from one is the least intuitive decision an operator makes. But growth without a model is just an expensive hobby with a deadline, and my attention was the scarcest resource across three businesses. The systems, the voice discipline, and the lessons moved straight into Park Banter.

The full postmortem is coming to the build log.