PDXplore.

The problem

Flight deals are a speed game. A mistake fare or a sale out of PDX can die in hours, and the only way to catch them consistently is to watch fares all day. I have a family and other businesses. Watching fares all day was never going to happen.

What the agents do

Scout watches deal sources and fare data around the clock and files a report when something is worth a look. Penny drafts the newsletter and the Instagram caption, renders the carousel slides, and stages everything for review. The ad pipeline goes one step further: it builds creative variations, writes the copy, and uploads finished ads to Meta as paused drafts.

Paused is the key word. The whole pipeline can run overnight without me, because none of it can spend a dollar or reach a reader on its own.

What I do

I pick which deals are actually worth my readers' attention, add the local knowledge an agent does not have, like which neighborhoods to stay in and what is worth eating near the gate, and tap approve. Deals ship to subscribers, the carousel posts, and I flip the ads from paused to live when the numbers make sense.

What happened

The newsletter has shipped weekly without a miss since the pipeline went live. When I audited costs, the agents helped me swap an expensive scraping API for a flight data API that was both cheaper and better, which cut $900 a year from infrastructure. The operation now runs on a fraction of the hours it used to take, and the hours it does take are the fun ones: judgment, taste, and talking to readers.