One piece of entrepreneurial advice I picked up in Silicon Valley has stuck with me: Build something that solves a problem you have. It’s an idea that became my guiding principle as I set out on what I’ve been calling my “summer of building”—a run of months spent turning app concepts into working tools. It’s another step I’m taking as I move off the sidelines and make things I hope people actually find useful, and it builds on the momentum I found with ClawBeat a few months back.
Today, I’m introducing the first tool to come out of that effort: OnCue. This app transforms websites into a live newsroom, starting with those powered by WordPress. But it’s more than a standard liveblog plugin—in addition to posting directly from the CMS, you can also contribute from Slack, Telegram, Signal, SMS, and other messaging apps. OnCue is designed for independent creators, journalists, marketing teams, and event professionals.
The idea came to me at Microsoft Build in San Francisco this June. Mingling with the press corps, I was reminded of the outlets that regularly run live blogs for events like this. During the keynote, I found myself wedged into a seating area with little room to maneuver—and a handful of devices to juggle. I longed for a better way to share my thoughts, especially since I didn’t have time to write detailed stories. I could have fired them off on Twitter, Threads, Bluesky, or LinkedIn, but that would hand my readership to someone else’s platform instead of my own site. OnCue lets me drive traffic to my blog while giving me the flexibility of posting text and media from my phone in seconds.
The choice of a WordPress-based build came down to two things. First, reach: it powers 43 percent of the internet and holds more than 60 percent of the content management system market—if you’re going to meet content teams where they already are, this is where they are. Second, familiarity: I’ve built and customized my own themes on it, and I’ve filed stories through it as a journalist at The Next Web, VentureBeat, and GeekWire. I know firsthand how content creators actually use it.
That familiarity shaped the features, too. Years of covering events taught me what people in that position actually need—and I started there. Take embargoes: WordPress already handles scheduled posts, so OnCue builds on top of that. Assign a tag to follow along with a start date to pull from, and the plugin pulls every matching story to the top of the feed. So, when your embargoed pieces go live during an event, they surface automatically as related coverage, turning the liveblog into a hub for everything you’ve published about the event, not just the play-by-play.
OnCue is built with the plumbing already in place for the tools content teams actually use. The connections are there; which ones you switch on is up to you. No specific stack is prescribed. The plugin can connect with Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Microsoft Teams, Google Chat, and SMS via Twilio. A guide is available to provide integration support to administrators.
That extends to the AI too: OnCue runs on “bring your own key” (BYOK), meaning administrators plug in an API key from whichever provider they trust—OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or others—and pick the model that fits their newsroom. And all of it stays private. Your data and access never come back to me, and I don’t use them to train models or build my own products.
I’ve also started exploring how to extend OnCue beyond WordPress to work with other CMSes, such as Ghost or static HTML sites. Stay tuned for those updates.
Connecting your preferred AI model enables OnCue to pin a live TL;DR to the top of your event’s feed, refreshing as new updates land. Every line is drawn strictly from what’s been posted and cites the entry it came from—no hallucinations, no drift. You keep the final say: admins and authors can edit any highlight at any time.
To help further your coverage’s reach, OnCue supports the AT Protocol. Switch it on, and you can choose which event post gets shared to Bluesky—each one threaded to the last, so readers get a clean, followable play-by-play with a link back to the full OnCue feed. And the thread holds together even if you post other things to Bluesky in between; event updates stay connected no matter what else lands on your timeline.
Personally, it’s remarkable to see OnCue reach this point. For years, I sat on ideas for apps I wanted to build, only for the technical barrier to stop me from starting. Vibecoding changed that, clearing the obstacles that had always been in the way. With that gone, I could begin to think holistically: not just about what features to build, but about the whole experience—why a creator would reach for OnCue and which integrations would actually help them. It’s the same systems thinking that shaped my building of ClawBeat. The difference, though, is scale: ClawBeat is a website. OnCue may have the potential to be a tool millions of people use to run a service of their own.
OnCue is in private beta today. If you’d like to put it through its paces, send me a message—I’m looking for a small group of early testers to help shape where it goes next. Alternatively, if you have suggestions on features or integrations you’d like to see added, I’m all ears. My aim is to make it available in the WordPress plugin directory before long.
