IdeaStack, Automated Publishing Site

Why I Built It

I like building businesses more than I like running them. The bottleneck has never been execution; it has been finding ideas worth executing on. What I actually wanted was a researched stack of ideas already vetted, scored, and ready to pick up — somebody else's homework that I could trust.

So I built it. IdeaStack is a free publication that produces exactly that: a daily flow of fresh business ideas, deep-dive research reports, and ready-to-go builder prompts. It exists because I wanted it to exist. The fact that it works as a marketing asset for Pixelshed is a happy accident.

What It Actually Does

Every day, IdeaStack runs an autonomous pipeline that discovers, researches, scores, and publishes. No team, no editor, no human queue. The site at ideastack.co is the public face of a content engine that produces:

• Deep-dive reports. Long-form research on a single business idea, with market sizing, competitor analysis, keyword data, community signals, GTM thinking, an execution plan, and the actual prompts you would feed to an AI agent to start building it.
• Blog posts and topic hubs. Auto-generated commentary, news, and roundups, organised into SEO topic hubs with proper schema, related-post linking, and recency-aware curation.
• An email newsletter. Free to sign up to, sends the latest researched picks straight to your inbox.

The unifying claim is simple: every published idea has been vetted before you see it. Anything that scores below the threshold never makes it to the homepage.

The Pipeline

Three chained agents do the work end-to-end:

• idea-scout watches keyword gaps, competitor launches, and community pain signals to surface candidate ideas. It produces a shortlist every day.
• research-idea takes the top three candidates and runs each through a full IdeaBrowser-grade investigation — scoring, keyword research, community pain analysis, competitor quadrant, frameworks, GTM, and a concrete execution plan with builder prompts. UK-focused by default.
• publish-report converts the research into the site's report format, generates the missing assets (industry trend chart, competitor quadrant, a story image that matches the mood of the pitch), wires it into the navigation, builds, and deploys.

Anything that scores 7.0 or higher publishes automatically. Below that and it never sees the light of day. I review the output after the fact, not before.

The Hard Parts

Building a system that publishes without you is a different discipline from building one that drafts for you. A few of the problems worth flagging:

• Quality gates without a human reviewer. A score threshold is the headline gate, but the system also has dedupe checks, draft-status guards, and post-publish smoke checks. If the live URL doesn't 200 inside the deploy window, the pipeline self-heals by flipping the status and re-checking. The cost of a single bad report on a live site is too high to skip.
• Image generation that doesn't drift. Story images had a habit of generating sad, stressed-looking founders for ideas that were genuinely exciting. Prompts now anchor on the turning point — determination, discovery, empowerment — rather than the problem state.
• Atomic deploys. Background agents are notoriously bad at remembering to commit images alongside the data file that references them. Every publish step now stages files explicitly by name, runs git status as an assertion, and refuses to push if anything is missing.
• SEO architecture. Auto-generated content that doesn't get found may as well not exist. Every report ships with proper Article schema, every topic hub uses CollectionPage + BreadcrumbList, related posts are scored on tag overlap with recency tiebreak, and there's a Person schema on the about page so authorship gets attributed.

Why It's Here

To be honest about it: IdeaStack is not a money-spinner. It is a free publication that exists because I wanted it to. But it is the cleanest possible demonstration of what I actually do.

Most agencies can show you a website. Most automation consultants can show you a Zapier flow. IdeaStack is the answer to a different question: what does it look like when an entire content business runs itself? Discovery, research, writing, illustration, publishing, distribution, and SEO — all of it on autopilot, every single day.

If you've got a workflow that feels like it should run itself but doesn't, this is the kind of system I build. The shape changes — your version might be sales reports, customer onboarding, supplier comms, or internal research — but the principle holds: pipelines beat people for predictable, repeatable work.

Impact

One person, zero ongoing operational time. A live site that produces fresh, well-researched, well-illustrated long-form content every day, completely on its own. Most importantly, it is proof: I don't just build polished websites, I build the engines that fill them.