Case study · Kine Buds
Rebuilt their marketing stack around AI. Gave the founder his nights back.
Kine Buds is a cannabis brand operating in the NJ / NY corridor. When we started, the founder was running everything manually — content calendars in Google Sheets, outreach copy-pasted between Gmail and the CRM, reporting nobody read. Inside 120 days we'd installed a full AI operating system. The founder was closing the laptop at 6pm for the first time in three years.
Hours / week recovered (founder)
22
Outreach response rate lift
3.1×
Content throughput per week
5×
Time to full payback
<3mo
The starting line.
A three-person team doing seven-person volume through sheer effort. Founder doing founder work + marketing lead work + the work they wished a marketing coordinator was doing. No weekends. No slack in the schedule. Growth capped by human hours.
The stack when we arrived: Google Workspace, Shopify, a Mailchimp list nobody cleaned, Alpine IQ for SMS, and a scattered collection of Notion docs. Functional. Not compounding.
Phase 1 · Coaching
Week 1–8: install fluency.
Before we built a single agent we put the team through an 8-week AI coaching intensive. Three role-specific prompt libraries built: founder, content, ops. Weekly working sessions. Async Slack reviews of the team's AI-assisted work.
By week 8 every team member could draft a month of content in an afternoon, rewrite outreach sequences from a rough brief in under 20 minutes, and use Claude to triage their own inbox. Fluency installed.
“The coaching was the unlock. Once we actually knew how to talk to the model, every problem shrank.”
Phase 2 · Agents
Week 9–16: build three agents.
We ranked every manual workflow by hours saved × ease of build. Top three became agents:
- Content Pipeline Agent. Every podcast, call, and long post becomes 8+ distribution assets — newsletter, LinkedIn, IG captions, SMS blurbs, blog digest. Matches the founder's voice. He approves in batches.
- Outreach Personalization Agent. Pulls 3 context points on each prospect (site, LinkedIn, recent news), drafts the first-touch email in-voice, drops into the rep's queue for 30-second review + send. 3.1× response lift.
- CRM Hygiene Agent. Nightly deduplication, enrichment, pipeline tagging, and stale-deal flagging. CRM reports stopped lying inside week two.
Phase 3 · Systems
Week 17–20: migrate + wire.
Mailchimp → GoHighLevel migration (kept Alpine IQ for SMS compliance). Rebuilt the email program on GHL: welcome, nurture, re-engagement, win-back, post-purchase, VIP tier. The Content Pipeline Agent writes drafts; a human still approves every send. Not full autopilot — that's the next phase, not this one.
Attribution dashboards in GA4 + GHL. Weekly leadership reports generated by another agent (they'd learned the trick by now — most new workflows turn into agents inside a month).
“The metric I care about isn't revenue. It's that I'm closing my laptop at six again.”
Where they are now.
Same three-person team. Roughly 2× the marketing output. Founder back to founder work — product roadmap, partnerships, licensing. Marketing runs without him being the constraint.
We're still involved monthly at a fractional-lite engagement — a 2-hour standing sync to pressure-test what they're shipping. They don't need daily help. That's the point.
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