Live event coverage has a value problem. The fastest way to publish is through social media, but that means the platforms receive the audience, leaving the producer with nothing in return. Every live post to X, Threads, or Bluesky is traffic that never reaches the content creator’s site.
Covering these events in person adds its own friction. Creators are balancing laptops, cameras, recorders, and phones while wedged into cramped press seating. There’s juggling and a lot of praying that the delicate workflow setup is stable enough for timely posts.
What if content creators could liveblog through their favorite messaging app right on their phone?
OnCue streamlines live event coverage for journalists, marketers, communicators, and creators. This app embeds an event feed onto any WordPress-powered site. WordPress was a deliberate choice, not a default. The open-source CMS powers over 43 percent of the web; it’s the platform of choice for media outlets and independent publishers, and its plugin architecture meant I could extend the CMS rather than build a publishing system from scratch. If the whole point is keeping coverage on a site you own, it makes sense to build where those sites already live. Whether it’s reporting on product launches, running AMAs, or anything else, OnCue turns viewers into participants instead of a comment count on someone else’s platform.
Creators don’t have to publish from WordPress at all. OnCue accepts posts from Slack, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Microsoft Teams, and Google Chat. Once a creator connects a channel, anything they post there publishes to the live feed in real time.
Administrators retain full control over their stack. OnCue’s Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) approach means they connect only the messaging apps they want and plug in whichever AI model (Google Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, or self-hosted/Ollama) they prefer, using their own credentials.
The idea for OnCue took shape at Microsoft Build in 2026. Squeezed into press seating before the keynote, I ran through the math of the morning: file articles, record audio, and photograph the executives on stage, all with barely enough room to open a laptop. I settled for the recorder and the camera, and even that was a struggle. Build wasn’t unique. Every conference press row works this way, and it’s not limited to journalists either. The fix was sitting in my pocket the whole time: why can’t creators publish from the chat apps already on their phones?
OnCue was built in collaboration with Anthropic’s Claude, with me as the product lead. I brought the problem, constraints, and every decision: what to build, what to rule out, how it should work, and why. Claude produced the spec documents, UI design, and code against that direction. Nothing shipped without my review and sign-off. The process mirrors how I’ve always worked: defining the story before a single word is written. Here, the story was the product.
What began as frustration in a keynote row is now a working plugin: messaging apps in, WordPress as the record, everything owned by the publisher. Every architectural decision in OnCue, from BYOK to self-hosting to refusing to replace the CMS, serves the same idea—live coverage shouldn’t rent its audience from a platform. Read more about OnCue in this blog post, or visit oncue.thelettertwo.com for more information and learn how you can download OnCue to put that idea to work on your own site.
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