Signed, Sealed, Delivered — The Stoked Dispatch, June 2026

June 15, 2026 | Ricky Chilcott | 14 minutes | 2650 words

Last month I promised June would put us back on a predictable cadence. It’s June 15, the May Dispatch went out May 13, and I can do that subtraction without a calendar. Growth.

This month had a theme I didn’t plan but can’t un-see: proof. Proof a prospect actually agreed to your waiver, and which version they agreed to. Proof your text reached a real phone instead of vanishing into carrier limbo. Proof of which advocate’s offer earned the click. Stevie Wonder built the filing cabinet for this years ago, so we’ll borrow it. Signed. Sealed. Then delivered.

And then two big ones I’m shipping to a handful of you first: a Shopify integration and an Insights dashboard, both in private beta. More on how to grab a seat below.

Let’s get into it.

Headline Features

Signed: Waivers Grew Up

Here’s the situation a lot of you are in: an advocate invites a prospective buyer to come test-ride a $4,000 e-bike, or visit a yurt up a small mountain cliff. Wonderful for conversion. Slightly less wonderful for liability. So you have them sign a waiver. And until this month, that waiver was about as sophisticated as a sticky note.

This cycle, waivers went from “a thing people fill out” to a legally defensible document that actually holds up in court.

Rich text, and editable after publishing. Waiver agreements now support headings, bold, and lists, so a wall of legal text reads like an actual agreement instead of a ransom note. Existing waivers were auto-converted, and you can edit a published waiver live without taking it offline.
Version history: the part that matters. Edit a published waiver and the version advances on its own. Every signature records the exact text that person agreed to. The submissions table shows who signed which version, with per-version counts. So six months later, when someone asks “what did they actually sign,” you have a precise, timestamped answer instead of a shrug.
Email is now required (and captured). Every signature is tied to a contactable person: prefilled when we have it on file, saved when we don’t. No more anonymous ghost-signings.
Certification is enforced for real. The “I certify…” checkbox is validated in the browser and on the server, so the loophole is closed on both ends.
Both sides find out instantly. When a waiver is signed, the conversation resurfaces in your inbox and fires your configured alerts (email, Slack, Campfire). And the advocate gets a text the moment their prospect finishes (with the prospect’s name, so they know which conversation), and a reply goes straight back to that prospect.
Export the whole paper trail. Submissions export to CSV with every custom field as its own column, the signer’s browser, and the version signed.

Why your brand cares: “We had them sign something” is not a defense. “Here is the exact agreement, the version, the timestamp, and the email on record” is. For anyone running in-person test rides or demos, this turns waivers from a checkbox into infrastructure. And it doesn’t slow down the signing experience for the person on the other end. Available on all plans. KB: Waivers.

Conversation (via SMS, email, or web) is our product. The map, the rewards, the dashboard: all of it exists to make one text from a real owner reach one prospect’s phone. So when a carrier silently drops that text, you don’t just lose a message. You lose the conversation, and you never find out. This month we went after that whole chain. Get consent the right way. Verify the phone. Then prove the message actually arrived.

Sealed: consent that holds up. Carriers are tightening A2P 10DLC enforcement (if you’ve met Twilio error 30896, my condolences). “Consent buried in a paragraph” no longer cuts it. So the send-message form now leads with the message and asks for contact details second. Phone is optional, and the prospect picks SMS or email after they’ve written. There’s a real SMS consent checkbox, not a wall of fine print. You can also set which channels your community uses under Settings → Messaging Channels (SMS, email, and WhatsApp on the way). That way prospects never get offered a channel you don’t run.

Verified: no reachability gaps. Advocates now get the same phone-verification flow prospects have always had. The code field went back to a single box, so your phone’s autofill works. The verification screens explain why you’re being asked, and how to recover if the code doesn’t show. And my favorite: changing your phone or email keeps the old one live until the new one is verified. No more prospects going dark mid-change. We also stopped retrying numbers that already texted STOP, which was polluting logs and helping no one.

Delivered: finally, receipts. Drumroll, please: a Messaging Activity Log under Settings → Diagnostics → Messages. It lists every text we send and every reply we receive, with the carrier’s real delivery status. It’s searchable, filterable, and linked right from inbox cards and prospect profiles. “Did that go through?” is now a five-second question, not a support ticket. Held-for-verification messages now show when they were released to the advocate. So a quick advocate doesn’t look slow because a prospect took three hours to verify. And inbox cards now say “Awaiting Rumi’s Verification,” so you know exactly who you’re waiting on.

Why your brand cares: This is the unglamorous plumbing that keeps real conversations flowing while the carriers make life harder. You stay compliant. Your reach stops leaking. And for the first time, you can see whether your messages are landing. Rolling out across plans. KB: SMS opt-in & the two-step send form, Messaging channels, Messaging Activity Log, and changing contact info for prospects and advocates.

Offers, Plus a Shopify Integration (Private Beta)

Remember the loop I described last month: “you talked to Sarah, here’s your discount”? It’s real now.

Offers (available now) are branded pages an advocate shares once they’ve helped a prospective buyer over the line. The page carries the advocate’s photo and name, a personalized coupon code you can copy, and a Shop Now button. When the prospect opens it or clicks through, a marker shows up right in the conversation timeline. You and the advocate both see “opened your offer” and “clicked Shop,” inline with the rest of the history. Finished with an offer? Deactivate it, or delete it. The whole thing makes “here’s 15% off because you talked to a real owner” feel personal, not transactional.

And here’s the part I’m genuinely excited about: the Shopify integration, now in private beta. Connect your store and Stoked does three things. It mints a unique discount code per advocate (patterned, with the advocate’s name baked in). It points the Shop Now button at /discount/CODE, so the discount auto-applies at checkout on your own storefront. And the big one: order attribution, so you can finally see which advocate’s code drove the sale. You can connect over OAuth, or paste custom-app credentials while our Shopify App Store listing is in review.

This is live with a small group right now, and I want a few more brands to put it through its paces before it goes wide. If you run Shopify and want in early, reach out to your customer success manager and they’ll personally set you up. KB: Offers, Shopify integration.

Insights: Measurement, Now in Private Beta

“Measurable ROI” has been the promise since day one. This month we formalized tracking it a little more:

Available now, under Settings → Reports:

Reply Speed Report. Ranks your advocates by how fast they respond, speediest to slowest. You can weight first-reply against follow-up, and exclude each advocate’s night-time hours in their own time zone, so nobody’s penalized for sleeping. We also shipped a fairness fix. The clock now starts when a held message is released to the advocate, not when the prospect first typed it. So a slow phone verification can’t drag down a fast responder. Find your MVPs. Find who needs a nudge.
Location Report. Flags advocates whose private mailing address and public map pin have drifted apart beyond a threshold you set. Missing-coordinate advocates float to the top. Translation: it keeps your community map honest, so a shopper looking for “someone near me” gets routed to someone near them.

In private beta: a fuller Insights dashboard. It covers traffic, search, a prospect funnel, engagement, and revenue attribution. The funnel now has a “started messaging” step, so the middle isn’t a black box. There are also new data-collection controls under Settings → Analytics. Dial first-party tracking up or down by category. I’m rolling the dashboard out to a few communities at a time, so I can tune it against real data before everyone gets it.

Why your brand cares: start with the two reports that are live: they need zero setup and answer real questions today. And if you want an early look at your full numbers, reach out to your customer success manager and they’ll flip the dashboard on for you. KB: Reply Speed Report, Location Report, Analytics & data-collection controls.

Quick Hits

Admins who manage more than one community now get an Account Hub. Log in once and hop between portals in a tap, with a login link right on the marketing site. No more juggling a password per brand.

What’s New, in-app, plus a feedback button

Two new ways to stay in the loop without leaving the portal. A What’s New feed surfaces the latest features, with unread badges. An in-app feedback widget lets you fire off a bug, an idea, or a screenshot (or just some love) from wherever you are. Yes, some of this very Dispatch came from things people sent through it.

Advocate URL slugs, now with templates and logic

Design the format of your advocates’ profile URLs with merge variables: name, city, state, neighborhood, country. Use Liquid conditionals for smart fallbacks, like neighborhood if we have it, otherwise city. Drifted slugs get a one-click repair, with proper 301 redirects so old links keep working.

Application forms grew up

A pile of application-form upgrades. Toggle whether address and photo are required, and set a photo minimum. Add yes/no checkbox fields. Pre-fill name, email, and phone for prospects who are already signed in. Keep uploaded photos through validation errors, with a proper country-code phone picker. Send a customizable “You’re approved” email. And create a custom field straight from an application question, without bouncing between pages.

Activity, surfaced in the inbox

System events (signed waivers, SMS opt-outs, blocks) now render as timeline markers instead of inline messages. Many bubble up onto the inbox card with a badge. Now, you can spot what happened to a conversation without opening it.

Active hours, respected

Set your community’s active hours once (default 8am–10pm in each advocate’s time zone). Reminders that would’ve fired in the middle of the night get scheduled for the next reasonable window instead. The Reply Speed Report honors the same hours.

Rich-text email templates

Email body templates now support bold, italics, links, lists, and emoji. The formatting toolbar has discoverable tooltips. And you can send yourself a test email to see how it lands in Gmail before you turn it on.

Prospects can manage themselves

Prospects can now view and edit their own name, email, and phone on the community site. You can search prospects by email address. And SMS opt-out keywords (STOP, UNSUBSCRIBE, and friends) get caught before they ever reach an advocate. SMS pauses; web chat keeps working.

Map & embed touch-ups

Embeds gained a full-bleed option to break out of narrow page columns. New data-location and data-zoom settings pre-seed the starting view. Off-map advocates wear an “Off map” badge in search. And stale pin coordinates clear themselves when an address fails to geocode, so you never get a confidently-wrong location.

Wallet & reward niceties

Unit names now match the number (“1 point,” “5 points,” like a literate piece of software). CSV exports include raw numeric columns for sorting and summing. And reward claim limits gained per-conversation and lifetime options.

Admin housekeeping

Custom deactivation reasons you control, with the system clutter hidden. Sign-in returns you to the page you were headed to, instead of dumping you home. And we added honeypot + rate limiting on public join and message forms to keep the bots out.

Under the Hood

A busy month down in the boiler room. The headline: we shrank the JavaScript bundle that loads on every page by 88%, from 1.1 MB down to 184 KB gzipped. So the whole app feels quicker on first load, especially on a phone on a bad connection. Beyond that, a batch of behind-the-scenes work made just about every request a little faster. And admin actions are now audit-logged, so there’s a clear record of who changed what.

Same goal as ever: make it faster, and make the failures visible. To us before they reach you, and to you when they do.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Seven months of Dispatches now. Where we’ve been:

In November, a dashboard that tells you something. In December, one inbox to rule them all. In January, a community site people can actually find. In February, the power tools. In March, rewards, waivers, and canned responses. In May, handbooks, filtering, and guardrails. And this month: proof, in three acts.

Last Dispatch I floated a list of June work, so let’s run the honest scorecard. Shipped: Offers, and then a whole Shopify integration on top. Louder signal on SMS delivery (that’s the Activity Log). The canned-response polish. And community-controlled deactivation reasons. Still cooking: wallet redemption requests and featured advocates on the map. They slipped. They’re next. I’d rather tell you that than quietly pretend the list was shorter.

So, what’s ahead:

Graduating the betas. Shopify and the Insights dashboard go from “reply for access” to “it’s just there” once they’ve survived contact with more of you.
A public Shopify app. Our App Store listing is in review; once it’s approved, connecting your store is a few clicks instead of pasting credentials.
GDPR groundwork. Privacy and data-protection work so brands with EU customers are covered.
Wallet redemption: advocates request, you issue or deny, points turn into actual rewards without anyone leaving the platform.
Featured advocates on the map, for when you want one or two to surface first.
WhatsApp as a real channel: the groundwork is already in (configurable channels, per-person preference). Production is likely a couple of months out. It’s cheaper than SMS almost everywhere and dominant outside the US, which matters more every month.
Louder SMS-failure alerts for admins, building on the new Activity Log.

Want early access to a beta, or have feedback (or just want to commiserate about shipping cadence)? Reply here, hit the in-app feedback button, or email stoked-help@stokedhq.com.

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