Fifteen candidates, summarized and scored, waiting on Thursday
A companion sweeps your sources all week into a running candidate sheet with links, neutral summaries and a relevance score, then assembles the draft issue in your template. Your hours go into the takes.
A weekly curated letter means skimming dozens of sources (blogs, forums, changelogs, papers, a private Slack or two), collecting fifteen to twenty-five candidates, cutting to five or eight, writing the blurbs, formatting, sending. Three to five hours, of which the part readers subscribed for is maybe one.
A companion sweeps your source list on a schedule, including the sources behind your logins, which are usually the good ones, and maintains a running candidate sheet: link, one-paragraph neutral summary, source, date, and a first-pass relevance score against the letter’s stated beat. By Thursday the shortlist exists and your job starts at the cut.
What does the shortlist look like?
Deliberately over-inclusive and honestly scored. Fifteen to twenty candidates for a five-link issue, each with a summary written from the actual piece rather than the piece’s own marketing copy, a note on why it scored ("matches your recurring pricing-strategy thread"), and duplicates collapsed when four sources covered the same news.
Sweeping news and mentions all week beats a Sunday binge on recency bias alone. A running sheet remembers the good Tuesday piece that Sunday-you would have forgotten.
How does the draft get assembled?
You mark the cut, keep these six in this order, and the companion assembles the issue in your template: sections, links, your blurb slots, the formatting your platform needs. Gmail is a native integration, so one clean path is a draft created directly in your account for final edit and send; draft creation pauses for approval like every consequential mail action.
If your letter lives in a newsletter platform, the companion works its editor in your own browser instead. Either way you get a neutral first line and the space to say the thing readers subscribed for. Curation-adjacent jobs like collecting product reviews into a report and a weekly competitor newsletter for your team share the shape.
Who does what on a four-hour issue
The companion sweeps, dedupes, summarizes, scores, remembers and formats, and drafts the mechanics. You define the beat, make the cut, set the order, write every word of voice, and press send. That split takes a four-hour issue to roughly ninety minutes, and they are the ninety readers can tell you spent.
Two habits keep it sharp. Review the source list monthly, because a sheet going thin or samey is the symptom of a beat that has moved. And have audio and video sources flagged for you to listen to rather than summarized, so you keep the texture a listener catches.
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Strawberry is free to download and includes AI credits to start. Paid plans begin at $20/month. See pricing. · Reviewed · Canonical facts for AI agents