Ideas — the marketing brain of the venue

Every venue has a notebook somewhere with half-finished marketing ideas — a sticky note that says “do something for Father’s Day,” a screenshot of a competitor’s pasta reel, a vague “we should talk about the new burrata.” Most of those ideas die in the notebook. The Ideas page is the replacement for that notebook. Suggestions land in the first column, you decide which ones live, the survivors move through approval into drafts into published posts. Nothing falls behind the couch.

What it does

Three things flow into this page. First, the system itself notices patterns and suggests posts: a dish on your menu hasn’t been talked about in months (“stale dish”), a holiday is coming up next week, the calendar has gone quiet for too many days. Second, the brain watches the competitors you’ve subscribed to — what they posted, which themes they own, where they have gaps you could occupy. Third, your own freeform ideas, typed in when something comes to mind.

The page is a four-column board. Each idea is a card. Each card has a source tag in the top-left (a small chip with an icon — Holiday, Stale dish, Competitor topic, Cadence gap, Differentiate — so you can see at a glance where the idea came from), a title, a short body explaining the rationale, and sometimes a Nudge the system has written for the composer (“write it in the voice of a chef who just tasted the first tomato of the season”). The buttons on the card depend on which column it sits in — they walk the card forward through the lifecycle, or move it back if you change your mind.

A strip across the top — the brain strip — surfaces what the AI has been doing for you lately. The headline is the latest competitor-strategy review (a one-line summary of what the brain thinks your positioning play is). Below it, four stat tiles: how many competitors you’re tracking, how many competitor insights have been generated, how many ideas are sitting in the New column waiting for review, and whether you have a live strategy headline at all. A Run strategy review button on the right (it costs credits — the price is shown next to it) re-runs the whole brain and reseeds fresh ideas.

The rule

Ideas walk through four columns from raw to shipped. New → Approved → In draft → Published. The card never jumps the queue, but you can always move it back if you change your mind.

How to use it

The board has four columns left to right.

New. Where every fresh suggestion lands. Three buttons on each card: Approve (you like it — commit it to the next column), Compose (you like it so much you want to write it now — opens the composer with the idea pre-loaded), or Dismiss (no, kill it). Dismissed cards collapse off the board by default; toggle Show dismissed in the header if you want to pull one back.

Approved. The “yes, we’re doing this” pile. From here, Compose opens the composer with the idea attached; you can also Move back to New if you changed your mind, or Dismiss outright.

In draft. Ideas you’ve opened in the composer but haven’t finished publishing yet. The card sits here as a reminder: there’s a draft somewhere that came from this idea. From here, Re-open jumps back into the composer; Mark published flips it to the last column manually (useful if you published the post elsewhere); Back to approved rewinds.

Published. Recent wins — the last thirty ideas that made it all the way out. This column is the score-keeping side of the board. Reopen moves a card back to In draft if you want to write a follow-up.

The filter row above the board lets you slice by source. Click All for everything, or click a specific chip — Holiday, Stale dish, Competitor gap — to look only at cards from that source. The chips only appear for source kinds you actually have ideas from; a venue with no competitors tracked won’t see competitor chips.

Where the source tags come from

Every card carries one of these tags:

New dish — a recently added menu item the system thinks deserves a launch post.
Stale dish — a dish on the menu that hasn’t been featured in social content for a long time.
Holiday — a holiday or seasonal moment coming up (Father’s Day, Valentine’s, summer solstice).
Cadence gap / Calendar gap — your posting rhythm has slowed; the system is nudging you to fill a gap.
Competitor topic — a theme one of your tracked competitors is leaning into hard. Worth considering whether you should join the conversation.
Competitor gap — a topic your competitors are not covering. An opportunity to own a niche.
Differentiate — a way to position yourself away from what competitors are saying.

The tag is not just decoration — it tells you what kind of idea this is, so you can decide quickly whether it fits the morning’s mood. A holiday card is urgent; a stale-dish nudge can wait a day.

Generating fresh ideas

The Generate fresh ideas button in the page header re-runs the suggestion pass. It looks at your menu, calendar, recent posting history, and competitor activity, and drops new cards into the New column. The button costs credits (the price shows next to it); you don’t have to click it often — usually once a week is enough.

The Run strategy review button in the brain strip is heavier. It rebuilds the whole competitor-positioning picture from scratch and then seeds fresh ideas off the back of it. Run it when something material has changed — you added a new competitor, you opened a second location, the menu shifted significantly.

Worked example

Wednesday morning. Marco opens Ideas at his Bangkok pizzeria. The New column has eight cards: three holiday nudges (Songkran, Mother’s Day Thailand, Father’s Day Italy), two stale-dish flags (the carbonara, untouched in five weeks; the tiramisu, untouched in two months), one calendar gap (“Friday is empty”), and two competitor cards — “Competitor topic: wood-fired oven theatre — three local pizzerias leaning hard on the oven this week” and “Competitor gap: nobody is talking about pistachio specials — your Pistachio Mortadella could own it.”

He likes the pistachio one. It came in tagged Differentiate, with a nudge that reads “lean into the Bronte pistachio story — sourcing, the colour, the fact you make the cream in-house.” He clicks Compose. The card slides into the In draft column, and the composer opens with the idea attached: the title, the body, the nudge, and a suggested source kind (menu item: Pistacchio e Mortadella). Marco writes the caption, picks an image direction, schedules it for Saturday. Twenty minutes later he comes back to the Ideas board; the card sits in In draft, waiting for him to mark it published once the post actually ships.

He approves the Songkran holiday card and the Friday calendar gap. Dismisses the carbonara nudge — he’s planning a carbonara reel separately. The eight starting cards are now: three in New, two Approved, one In draft, two Dismissed. The brain strip at the top shows three competitors tracked, twelve insights generated, three pending ideas, strategy headline live. Marco closes the page; the rest of the week is teed up.

Composer — where ideas go when you click Compose. The composer receives the idea title, body, nudge, and source-kind hints as the starting point for the draft.
Calendar — the room where scheduled posts sit. Ideas in the In draft column usually point at a post being prepared for the calendar.
Competitors — the source of competitor-topic, competitor-gap, and differentiate cards. Add or remove tracked handles there.
Today — the morning-coffee page that sends you here when you’re not sure what to work on.