Context & challenge
Locèlle is a curated marketplace for design-led vacation homes, booked directly with their owners. I founded it and designed it: the brand, the website, the booking flow and the email series. Without spending anything on ads, it has driven over $20k in direct bookings and draws about 3 new owner inquiries a month.
Every home on Locèlle goes through the same path: find it, decide it belongs, reach out to the owner, interview them, write the page and the story, publish, then look after the travelers who ask about it. As a team of one, I was doing every step myself. So I approached it the way I would approach growing a design team: define the roles, write clear briefs, agree where the hand-offs happen and decide which calls stay with me.
What an agent actually is
None of these agents is a program someone coded. Each one is Claude with three things:
- A brief. Written instructions: what to look for, the rules to follow and where to stop. The same every run.
- A few apps. The tools it may read from or write to, named one by one. It can reach nothing else.
- A clock. When it wakes. All seven run between 7:36 and 8:04 in the morning, Berlin time, and any of them can be run on request.
Each run starts fresh, with no memory of the last. That is why the most important part of the system is not an agent at all.
One shared record
Everything lives in one Airtable base, the Locèlle Pipeline: homes, owners, content, inquiries and agent notes. Every agent starts by reading it and ends by writing to it. A home's stage is the hand-off: Scored, Approved for outreach, Contacted, In conversation, Interview booked, Page drafted, Live. Scout files a home at Scored. Envoy waits for Approved for outreach. Scribe waits for Interview booked. Each step starts exactly where the last one stopped.
Meet the team
Scout · finds homes, Mondays
Finds five design-led homes a week that already take bookings on their own site, and scores each one on five criteria from 1 to 5, a score out of 25. It reads the web and the List your property form, and leaves each home in Airtable with its evidence and a recommendation.
Envoy · outreach, weekdays
Once I approve a home, Envoy drafts a first email about that one house and up to two follow-ups as Gmail drafts, and sorts the replies. I press send.
Archivist · interview guides, weekdays
When an owner call appears on my calendar, Archivist researches the home and the people behind it and prepares a guide with the questions worth asking.
Scribe · pages and stories, every morning
After the interview, Scribe turns the Otter transcript into two things: the property page, written in the eight sections of my master prompt and built in Webflow as an unpublished draft with booking links and host details, and a Journal story of about 1,200 words built on the owner's own words. So far it has written pages for the Treeframe Cabin, The Sea Containers and Neversink Retreat.
Porter · inquiries, twice a day
Logs every traveler inquiry against its home and flags any that has waited more than a day for an answer.
Herald · social, Mondays
Drafts three home posts in Metricool for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Almanac · ideas, Mondays
Brings seasonal ideas for Journal pieces travelers will search for, like Catskills ski cabins or A-frame rentals.
The Editor
Checks every piece of writing against the Locèlle voice before I see it: editorial, warm and specific, with architecture, light and craft first, and no sales language.
The agents prepare. I decide.
The work that takes hours is done before I sit down. The work that takes taste, or speaks in my name, stays mine. I choose which homes belong on Locèlle. I send every email in my own name. I run every conversation with an owner. I judge the photographs, which the agents cannot see. I forward each inquiry to its owner. And I sign off every page and post before it goes live.
Four rules are written into every brief:
- Never contact an owner or a traveler.
- Never send an email. Draft it, and I send.
- Never publish. Webflow changes wait for me.
- Never invent a fact. Every claim names its source.
What isn't working yet
Almanac is the one agent not joined to the record. Its ideas reach me as a page, not as rows in Airtable, so no other agent can pick them up and act on them. It is a good reminder that a team only works when the hand-offs do. Next on the list: a Monday scorecard, a weekly page check, a writer for the weekly search piece, Webflow drafts straight from the interview, alt text for gallery photos, and a results report covering traffic, search, social and booking clicks.
What this means for leading design teams
Building Locèlle's agents felt exactly like building a design team. Clear roles. Written briefs. One source of truth. Agreed hand-offs. And a clear line between the work you delegate and the judgment you keep. The tools are new, but the leadership is the same, and the design leaders who learn to set up these systems now will help their human teams spend more time on the work only people can do.