The problem
A working creator's business lives in five places at once: brand emails in the inbox, briefs inside platform apps, rates in their head, contract terms in PDFs nobody rereads, and payment status in hope.
The failures are quiet and expensive. Follow ups slip and warm deals go cold. Usage rights expire unnoticed, so brands keep running a creator's content for free while the renewal check, often the biggest money in the deal, never gets asked for. And on the big creator platforms, videos get approved and only pay on sales that may never happen. My own record there: 10 submissions, 8 approved, $0.00 earned, and 9 of the 10 approved videos never ran at all.
Under the pipe, four layers do the carrying: the desk, the AI, the automations, and the VA.
What comes out the other side: a renewal sent before the window closes, an invoice out the day you deliver, a ping on your phone when a deal lands, and a follow up that fires itself on day four.
Research: what creators actually say
I didn't design this from a survey. I designed it from what creators complain about when nobody is selling them anything: 132 posts from my own saved UGC Business collection, read one by one, then sorted into six problems.
One desk. Every deal, contact, rate and date in a single CRM, with nothing living in your head or your notes app.
Exclusivity is a priced field with an end date and named competitors only. Contract Check flags it before you sign.
Contract Check reads 12 danger clauses and returns them in plain words, each with a dollar cost and the counter line to send back.
The Money recipe invoices through Wave and watches until it lands. Ownership until paid sits in the terms by default.
The VA Command Center: SOPs, a hiring checklist, defined lanes. The vision lives in the system, so help can actually help.
The Pitch Engine logs every send and every follow up, and shows your reply rate by source. Effort turns into data.
Just starting out, grow into it
- Your first deals land inside a real structure from day one, not a notes app
- It teaches the business as you go: what to charge, what usage means, when to follow up
- No rebuilding later. The desk you start with is the desk you scale on
Booked and busy, can't keep up
- Deals at $300 to $900 and up, with money leaking out of renewals nobody asks for
- Follow ups, invoices and dates get run by the VA and the automations
- You approve in minutes. The creating stays yours
Two ends of the same ladder, one system. The deal flow is labeled two ways: platform creators ride the Highway, brand deal creators take the Express.
Comparative analysis
Before building anything I looked at what a creator can already use. Some of it is good. None of it covers the whole job.
| Spreadsheet or notes appWhat most creators use | Paid Notion templateAbout $30 one time | HoneyBook$29 to $109 a month | DealKit appFree, iPhone | UGC Dashboard$199 one time | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Built for brand deals | No | Yes | No, general client work | Yes | Yes |
| Deal pipeline, pitch to paid | By hand | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes, 9 stages |
| Usage window tracked as data | No | Yes, with a renewal script | Not listed | Partly, flags perpetual clauses | Yes, with renewal copy ready |
| Exclusivity as a priced field | No | In the rate calculator | Not listed | Not listed | Yes, with end date and named competitors |
| Contract red flag check | No | Not listed | Contracts, no red flag check | Yes | 12 checks, dollar cost, counter lineIn design |
| Follow ups, invoices and alerts run themselves | No | Not listed | Yes, automations | Templates only | 4 recipesIn testing |
| Made to be run by a virtual assistant | No | No | No | No | Yes, SOPs and lanes |
| You own it and can move it | Yes | Yes | Their platform | Export only | Yes, your own Notion |
The system and how I designed it
The design decision: don't build another app. Put the system together from tools creators already trust, and give each one exactly one job.
Comes in
- Gmail
Where brand deals land - Google Drive
Contracts and deliverables, filed
Runs the business
- Notion
The desk. Every deal lives here - Claude
Drafts and checks in your voice - Make
Moves the information for you
Goes out
- Wave
Invoices and payment tracking - Telegram
Deal alerts on your phone - VAYour VA
Runs the board, you approve
Assemble, don't build an app
Apps are where creator tools go to die: another login, another subscription, your data in somebody else's database. This is owned, portable, and fixable by the person running it.
One pipe for every deal
Platform deals and brand deals look different on the way in, so they get different doors (Highway and Express) but one board. Nothing hides in a second tool.
Usage rights are data, not memory
Every usage window gets a start, an end and a renewal draft. The system watches the date so you don't have to remember it.
Nothing sends without a tap
The AI drafts, the VA preps, the creator approves. Pitches, renewals and invoices all wait for one tap. Trust is the whole product.
Plain words first
Contract flags come back as a sentence, a dollar cost, and a counter line you can paste. Not a legal summary a creator has to decode.
The product
The Usage Rights Engine
Every deal's usage window is tracked as data, not memory. When one is closing, the deal surfaces here with renewal copy ready to send. The industry's most missed check becomes a calendar event.
- Start date, end date and platforms per deal
- A renewal draft written in your voice
- Sorted by days left, soonest first
Contract Check
Any incoming contract checked against your own playbook: 12 checks across usage, exclusivity, revisions, payment terms and AI training clauses. I tested it on an agreement with five planted problems. It caught all five.
- Plain words first
- A dollar cost on every flag
- The counter line to send back
The Pitch Engine
A template library of outreach that actually landed. Every pitch passes a fit check first: if you wouldn't use the product, the pitch doesn't send. It logs every send and shows your reply rate by source.
The Recipes
Highway rolls platform deals in. Express flags big retainers and one offs. The Ping alerts you on Telegram when something lands. Money runs the payment flow through Wave. In testing
The Daily Layer
A morning card: what's overdue, which pitches need a follow up, who's in talks. A payment watch that matches money in to deals owed. And a testimonial ask that goes out right after delivery.
What you get
Everything below, set up in your own Notion, for one payment of $199.
The Deal Pipeline
A 56 field brand CRM and a 9 stage board that carries each deal's rate, deliverables, invoice and dates with it.
The Usage Rights Engine
Every usage window tracked, with renewal copy ready before it closes.
Contract Check
12 checks with plain words, a dollar cost and a counter line. Added as it goes live.
The Pitch Engine
Outreach templates that landed, a fit check, and reply rate by source.
4 Recipes
Highway, Express, The Ping and Money, built in Make.
VA Command Center
SOPs, a hiring checklist and defined lanes, so a VA can run the board in about an hour a day.
The Daily Layer
A morning card, a payment watch and a testimonial loop.
You own it. No monthly fee for the dashboard itself. The tools it connects to have their own plans.
Opens to the public in January 2027. Testers are already inside.
Join the waitlistHow it runs
The dashboard isn't software you operate. It's a small team, organized.
The creator
Creates and approves. Nothing goes out in their name without their tap. Their hands stay on the camera, not the admin.
The virtual assistant
Runs the board: platform pitching, pipeline hygiene, follow up prep. About an hour a day covers it.
The AI agent
Drafts in the creator's voice, checks contracts against their rules, and watches the payments and the dates so nobody has to.
Receipts
The builder
"I'm a product designer and a dad of two, building this at 5 AM before the house wakes up. I didn't design the dashboard I wished existed. I designed the one my own business was bleeding without, then I ran my business on it until it held."
Sharone Poole, @nowobserving. Built in public across a 90 day series.
Follow the build
I post the real version: what broke, what I changed, what the first testers said. It's how this got built, and you can watch the next parts get made.
Hiring a designer?
This is one project of mine from the first complaint to a working system. I design the system, not just the screens. Reach me at strategy.sharonepoole@gmail.com.