# 6,662 Subscribers: How Lucas Walter runs his Spokane local newsletter with four AI agents in Paperclip

Lucas Walter runs Spokane Pulse, a weekly local newsletter for Spokane, with his wife. He uses Paperclip AI to orchestrate four AI agents: a CEO agent, a content director, a sales director and a growth engineer, each powered by Claude Code. The content director writes the Thursday edition on a weekly schedule. The sales director handles ad leads and drafts the ads. The growth engineer runs a daily scraping pipeline. He shows a Beehiiv dashboard with 6,662 subscribers and says the business made over $2,000 last month on less than 4 hours a week of his time.

| | |
|---|---|
| **Who** | Lucas Walter, who runs Spokane Pulse with his wife. YouTube channel Lucas Walter / AI Automation (@LucasWalterAI) |
| **Problem** | Running a weekly local newsletter, its ad sales and its content sourcing without the context bloat and poor visibility he hit with OpenClaw |
| **Stack** | Paperclip AI (runs on his computer), Claude Code, Beehiiv and the Beehiiv API, Nano Banana, a JSONL file as the content database, Node.js, Instagram, Reddit |
| **Confidence** | Medium (first-person video, auto transcript, self-reported figures, paid course on offer) |
| **Last verified** | 2026-11-02 |

## The problem
He first tried to automate the newsletter with OpenClaw. He describes hitting "skill bloat and context bloat." He had jobs running in the background alongside jobs for the sales process. He says "context would sometimes not work, and I didn't have a ton of visibility into when something was successful or when it failed." He wanted each agent to own its own routine instead of "a million cron jobs" handled by the same agents and competing at the same time of day.

## The blueprint (as he describes it)
1. **Set up an org chart of four agents.** A CEO agent sits at the top. Under it are a content director, a sales director and a growth engineer. In the demo he picks Claude Code as the adapter for each agent and says he has "had the most success with that."
2. **Talk to the CEO, and let it fan work out.** He says the CEO is the agent he interacts with day to day. In the demo he asks it to fetch Beehiiv metrics and propose three growth priorities. It pulled a trend breakdown over the last 10 weeks of sends and proposed a referral program, cross-promotion through local Facebook groups and community partners, and a midweek edition. He picked the Facebook option and commented asking the CEO to plan the work with the team and find Spokane-area Facebook groups.
3. **Give the content director a scheduled routine and its own skill.** Every Wednesday at 4:00 p.m. a routine has the content director curate stories and write the Thursday edition. The routine references a "Spokane Pulse Thursday" skill with editorial rules and his voice. Only the content director holds that skill. He says giving it to the sales director "would just cause more context bloat and more confusion." The content director also has skills for Instagram weekend events, a weekly Reddit post and a Monday edition.
4. **Hand ad leads to the sales director.** An "advertise with us" button on the site and a callout in the newsletter lead to a quote form. Submitted leads go to the sales director, which negotiates over email and presents the ad packages. For creative, it scrapes the advertiser's website and puts together several ad options. It then calls Nano Banana for the image. Each ad has a headline, image, body paragraph and call-to-action button.
5. **Let the growth engineer build the data pipeline.** It builds integrations and scraping pipelines for local news and events in a format the content director can read. Output goes to a JSONL file that holds candidate events, stories and news items.
6. **Use run logs to catch failures.** Routines can run in parallel. Past runs show whether each one succeeded, failed or needs a look. In one failed run the report showed the Gmail connection was down.
7. **Clone it for a new city (the Bend, Oregon demo).** He installs Node.js, runs the Paperclip onboarding command from paperclip.ing and creates a company called The Bend Beat with a goal of its first 1,000 subscribers. He hires the growth engineer first through the CEO, then approves the hire. The CEO researches local sources, and he gives the growth engineer a detailed pipeline spec from his course. The growth engineer built adapters for the Bend subreddit, Source Weekly News, the Source Weekly events calendar, Visit Bend and Central Oregon Daily. It reported 50 items from Visit Bend and 10+ entries from Source Weekly News. It flagged a problem with Central Oregon Daily and fixed it, after which 39 records were extracted. It also set up its own daily 6:00 a.m. pipeline run. He then hired a content director. The CEO and content director built a Thursday skill from past Spokane Pulse editions and drafted a first edition. He spot-checked a half marathon listing, and the date and 9:00 a.m. start were correct. The content director did not add a routine, so he created one for Wednesday around 3:00 p.m. The draft is Markdown that he says can be pasted into the Beehiiv editor.
8. **Fix problems inside the issue.** He goes to the ticket that failed, describes what he observed and what he expected, and gives examples. He then asks the agent to apply its learnings "either into a core memory or to create a new skill." If an agent reports results without a quality check, he suggests asking it "for evidence and a self-audit."

## Stated results
- "made over $2,000 just last month."
- "less than 4 hours a week" of his time.
- Beehiiv dashboard in the video: 6,662 subscribers, a 47.5% open rate, and "near 11%" click-through per edition.
- An Instagram account "with several thousand subscribers."
- An ad deal closed "nearly 2 weeks ago with a local insurance broker."
- The Bend demo team produced a draft edition "underneath an hour," in his words.
- His later course sales page (secondary) shows 7,183 subscribers, $2,147 revenue last month, a 49.77% open rate in the dashboard image, 3,069 Instagram followers, and a $750 Stripe invoice paid March 26, 2026. He says the sales agent closed that deal while he was at lunch.
- No figures are given for how much of the growth or revenue came from each agent.

## Caveats
- All figures are self-reported. The video promotes his paid course of about 10 hours in his Skool community, and the source prompt and pipeline spec used in the demo are course materials. The secondary source is the course sales page, which lists 100 founding seats at $497 before a price of $997. Its figures are marketing claims.
- He gives away the Spokane Pulse Paperclip company export as a free download in his community.
- He calls it "zero-person," but he says "My wife and I are running this every single week," and he reviews the agents' work.
- The sales director setup was not shown. He pushed it to another video.
- His comparison of a 47.5% open rate to an industry standard of "20 and 30%" is his own claim with no source given.
- The outcome of the Facebook groups plan is not shown.
- The source does not say whether Paperclip, Anthropic or Nano Banana are partners or sponsors.
- The transcript is auto-generated and contains errors.
- Handles (verified 2026-11-02: linked from lucaswalter.ai): X @lucas_fabric, LinkedIn /in/lucas-walter-339ba83b0, Instagram @lucas.walter.ai, TikTok @lucas.walter.ai, YouTube @LucasWalterAI. No Bluesky, Threads or Mastodon verified.

## FAQ
### What does each agent do on Spokane Pulse?
The CEO agent takes his goals and fans them out to the team. The content director writes the Thursday edition and curates Instagram weekend events. The sales director handles ad leads and drafts ads, and the growth engineer builds and runs the scraping pipeline.

### Why did he switch from OpenClaw to Paperclip?
He hit skill bloat and context bloat with OpenClaw and had little visibility into which jobs succeeded or failed. Paperclip lets each agent own its own routine and shows run logs.

### Do the agents send the newsletter on their own?
The source does not say the agents send it. In the demo the draft is a Markdown document that he says can be pasted into the Beehiiv editor, and the routine asks the agent to share the output for review.

### How does he correct an agent that gets something wrong?
He describes what he observed and what he expected, with examples, in the issue that failed. He then asks the agent to save the learning to a core memory or a new skill.

## Sources
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0MGtLce7cFE (primary: his own YouTube video, uploaded 2026-04-28, auto-generated transcript)
- https://lucaswalter.ai/100k-ai-side-business/ (secondary: his paid course sales page; later, self-reported figures)

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