Briefs

Once a week, the signals become something written. The feed is the record; the brief is the thing you actually read.

When#

Mondays at 06:00 UTC. That is early afternoon in Vietnam, breakfast in Europe, and Sunday night on the US west coast.

It covers the week that just ended. Everything goes out at once — the email, the Slack post if you have it, and the push notification on any phone signed in to the workspace all come from the same run.

The schedule is not configurable yet.

What is in one#

A brief is not a list of the signals you already saw. If it were, there would be no reason to read it.

A headline for the week. One line, the shape of what happened.

A summary — a short paragraph for someone who has not opened the app since the last brief.

The top signal, with reasoning. One event, named as the most consequential thing that happened, and an explanation of why it was picked over the others. This is the part most people read and nothing else.

The competitive nexus — a few short sections, each taking one competitor and one category and answering a specific question about it. This is where connections get drawn: a launch read against someone else's price cut, two companies moving the same direction in the same month.

Why a week can have no brief#

If there were no signals, no brief is sent. Not an empty one, not one that says it was a quiet week. Nothing.

This is a deliberate choice and it is the one people ask about most. A weekly email that reliably arrives and reliably says nothing is an email you stop opening within a month, and then you miss the one that mattered. Silence carries information here: if Monday is quiet, nothing your competitors did last week changed anything.

If you want to confirm nothing is broken rather than just quiet, open the feed. An empty week in the feed and an absent brief agree with each other; a feed with signals in it and no brief would not, and that is worth telling us about.

Reading a brief later#

Every brief is kept. The Briefs screen lists them all, and opening an old one shows exactly what was sent.

That matters more than it sounds: the most common use of the archive is going back three months to work out when a competitor actually started doing something, and briefs are a much faster way through that than the feed.

Sending one to someone else#

A brief can be exported as a standalone page with its own link, which is how most people share one with a colleague or a board.

The link needs no login. Reports covers what that means before you send one.