Case study · Kine Buds
Rebuilt their marketing stack around AI. Coaching, agents and automation.
Kine Buds is a cannabis brand operating in the NJ / NY corridor. When we started, the founder was running most of the marketing by hand: content calendars in Google Sheets, outreach copy-pasted between Gmail and the CRM, and reporting that took effort to produce. We worked with the team to put an AI operating system in place around how they already worked.
We publish results only when they’re measured and approved; this page describes what we built.
What we delivered
- An AI coaching program. Hands-on training that taught the team to use AI in their daily marketing and operations work.
- Custom agents. AI agents built around specific workflows in the business, with people reviewing and approving their output.
- GoHighLevel automation. Email and customer journeys rebuilt and automated in GoHighLevel.
The starting line.
A small team covering founder work, marketing lead work and the work a marketing coordinator would normally do. Growth was limited 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
Install fluency first.
Before we built any agent we ran an AI coaching program with the team. It covers role-specific prompt libraries for the founder, content and ops, weekly working sessions, and async Slack reviews of the team’s AI-assisted work.
The aim is practical: team members learn to draft content, rewrite outreach sequences from a rough brief and triage their own inbox with AI, and they review the output before it goes anywhere.
Phase 2 · Agents
Build custom agents.
We ranked the manual workflows by the time they take and how easy they are to build. The top ones became agents:
- Content Pipeline Agent. Turns podcasts, calls and long posts into draft distribution assets: newsletter, LinkedIn, IG captions, SMS blurbs and a blog digest. It drafts in the founder’s voice. He approves in batches.
- Outreach Personalization Agent. Gathers context on each prospect (site, LinkedIn, recent news) and drafts a first-touch email in the brand’s voice. The draft goes into the rep’s queue for review and sending.
- CRM Hygiene Agent. Handles deduplication, enrichment, pipeline tagging and stale-deal flagging, so people can review the flags and decide what to do.
Phase 3 · Systems
Migrate and wire.
Mailchimp to GoHighLevel migration, keeping Alpine IQ for SMS compliance. We rebuilt the email program on GHL: welcome, nurture, re-engagement, win-back, post-purchase and VIP tier. The Content Pipeline Agent writes drafts, and a person approves every send.
We also set up attribution dashboards in GA4 and GHL, and a reporting agent that drafts the leadership report for people to review.
What the business provides.
On any engagement like this, the business gives us access to the tools we work in, shares the brand voice and existing processes, and approves content, outreach and sends before they go out. The team owns the day-to-day running of what we hand over.
You next?
Same stack. Your business.
Tell us about your business and we’ll map where coaching, agents and automation could fit.