Out of the Inbox — The Stoked Dispatch, October 2026

October 12, 2026 | Ricky Chilcott | 14 minutes | 2632 words

Welcome to The Stoked Dispatch.

This month had a theme, and it’s a little ironic for a product built around an inbox: Stoked got out of the inbox. Out into the parking lot where the test ride actually happens. Out into your own database, where your data team has been waiting with a spreadsheet and a look. And out onto your advocates’ own profiles, where they can now tell you which tags fit them instead of waiting for you to guess.

Let’s get into it.

Headline Features

Community Events: The Test Ride Finally Lives in Stoked

Here’s how a test ride used to work. A prospect messages an advocate. They hit it off. They agree to meet Saturday at 10. And then the whole thing leaves Stoked: the address goes into a text, the time goes into someone’s memory, the waiver goes out (hopefully), and on Monday you find out whether it happened when the advocate asks you about their reward. Or doesn’t.

The conversation was always the product. But for a lot of you, the conversation’s whole job is to end with two people standing next to the same bike, sauna, or tiny house. So we built the part that comes after the chat.

Community Events gives your real-world gatherings a home inside Stoked, in two flavors.

Private events, planned inside a conversation. This is the test ride, the shop visit, the “come see it in my garage.”

The advocate (or you, on their behalf) taps Schedule Event right in the conversation, picks the event type, and searches for the place. Find a place ranks results near the advocate first, so “Main Street” means their Main Street, not one in another state.
They pick a start time. The end time fills itself in from the event type’s default length, and the form says plainly which time zone it’s in (the advocate’s, since they’re hosting).
Both sides see the event on the conversation timeline with calendar links. If the event type needs a waiver, the prospect is sent it automatically. Everyone gets reminders 24 hours and 1 hour out.
When the prospect is signed in, their meeting shows up as a pin on your community map, labeled “Test Ride with Phil.” Nobody else sees it, and it disappears once the meeting is over.
Plans change, so either side can cancel too. Reminders stop, and the event card flips to cancelled for everyone.

Then the part I’m proudest of. A couple of hours after the event ends, the advocate gets a text asking whether it happened. One tap says yes. If the event type has a reward attached, that tap creates a pending reward claim in your inbox. You approve it in one click, the advocate’s wallet gets credited, and if you’ve turned on Close conversation when approved for that reward, the conversation closes itself with the close reason you picked. Silently, so nobody gets a weird “this conversation is closed” message.

That’s the whole loop, from “want to try it?” to “advocate paid,” without a single spreadsheet.

Public events, with their own pages. Group rides, demo days, meetups. Publish one with a time, place, and description, and it gets its own page on your community site plus a pin on your map, with a card in a new Upcoming events list beside your advocates. People RSVP with just a name and a phone number or email, verify with a one-time code, and get reminders. Already selling tickets on Eventbrite or Meetup? Add the external link and the page sends people there instead of collecting a second, competing RSVP.

You set it up once under Settings → Event Types: each type can carry a default waiver, a reward, a default length, and its own map pin color, so Test Rides can be green and Group Rides orange. And a new Events report in Analytics shows the funnel: page views, RSVPs, verified attendees, and how many conversations started afterward.

Why your brand cares: the test ride is where a $4,000 purchase gets decided, and until now it was the one part of the journey you couldn’t see. Now you know it was scheduled, you know the waiver was signed, you know it happened, and the advocate who made it happen got rewarded without having to chase you for it. Advocates notice when that part is easy. It’s the difference between someone who hosts one test ride and someone who hosts twelve.

Community Events is rolling out community by community. Reach out to your customer success manager or stoked-help@stokedhq.com to turn it on. Details: Community Events and test ride rewards.

The Stoked API: Your Data, In Your Database

One of you asked whether you could get basically all of your Stoked data into your own database, every day. Fair question. It’s your data.

The answer used to be “sure, download these six CSVs.” Which works, technically, the same way a bucket technically works as a boat.

So now there’s the Stoked API: a read-only API built for exactly that. Your developer (or the contractor who runs your warehouse, or that one very motivated ops person) can pull everything once, then fetch only what changed since the last run. A nightly sync is a few requests instead of an afternoon of downloads.

Here’s what it covers today:

Conversations, with every message, the AI summary, prospect and advocate sentiment, how the conversation was resolved, and the advocate’s first reply time. A merged timeline also includes the moments between messages (waiver signed, prospect blocked, SMS opt-out) so you can rebuild a transcript in order.
Advocates and prospects, including tags, custom fields, and each advocate’s reward wallet balances.
Signed waivers, with the agreement exactly as signed and every answer, linked to the conversation, advocate, and prospect. No more matching a waiver to its test ride by hand.
The Message Log, so delivery failures can feed your own alerts.
The Reply Speed report, so advocate responsiveness can sit next to your other numbers.

Access runs through a new Settings → API Keys screen. Create one key per integration, name it, and choose exactly what it can read. Every permission starts off, and personal data is its own separate switch, so a key feeding a revenue dashboard never sees a single phone number. You can change a key’s permissions without breaking the integration using it, and revoke it instantly if it ever ends up somewhere it shouldn’t. If you used the old Analytics API key, it lives on this screen now too.

The documentation is public, and once you’ve created a key, every code sample fills it in for you so your developer can copy, paste, and see real data in about a minute. The key never leaves their browser.

Why your brand cares: your advocate program shouldn’t be an island. When conversations, waivers, and rewards land in the same place as your orders and your customer records, you can finally answer questions like “do people who talk to an owner buy more?” with your own numbers. And it’s a promise we’ve always meant: your data is yours, and you can take all of it with you anytime. We’d rather keep you because Stoked is good. KB: Stoked API documentation.

Tags Grew Up (and Your Advocates Can Help)

Tags are how you tell advocates apart: which model they own, which city they’re in, whether they’re a dealer, whether they do test rides. Most of you have a lot of them. Some of you have a lot of them. One long flat list of tags is roughly as navigable as a junk drawer.

So this month, tags got structure.

Tag groups. Tags now live in groups (Model, Region, Type, whatever fits your brand) on Settings → Tags. A new Manage Groups page lets you add, rename, and reorder groups, and every tag gets a group picker. Tag names got shorter as a result: a tag called “q45” inside the Model group, instead of “model/q45.”
Recommended counts. Give a group an optional recommended minimum and maximum (“every advocate should have exactly one Model tag”) and the group’s page tells you how many people fall outside it. It’s guidance, so nothing ever gets blocked.
Advocates can suggest their own tags. Turn on Advocates can suggest for any tag, and advocates get a Suggest changes link on their profile. Each suggestion lands in a new Tag suggestions card in your inbox, where you approve, dismiss, or approve all. Nothing changes without you.
Applicants pick tags while they apply. A new Tags question on your advocate application lets applicants choose from a tag group (“Which model do you own?”), and you accept or dismiss each choice when you review. Available on Pro and Enterprise.
AI tag suggestions, if you want them. A new switch under Settings → AI Assistance lets AI suggest tags for each application, with a short reason next to each one. It’s off by default, it only suggests tags you’ve marked as fair game, and it never sees the applicant’s name, contact details, address, or photo. You accept or dismiss every suggestion.

Why your brand cares: tags are what make the match work. A prospect asking about the cargo model wants a cargo owner, ideally one nearby who does test rides. That match is only as good as your tags, and your tags are only as good as the time you had to keep them current. Which, let’s be honest, was not a lot. Now the people who know best (your advocates) can keep their own profiles accurate, and you stay the one who says yes. KB: Tag Groups, Advocate Tag Suggestions, and Tag Questions.

Quick Hits

AI Assistance, on your terms

Last month we introduced AI summaries and suggested Quick Replies. This month you get the off switch. A new Settings → AI Assistance page has a separate switch for each, and both stay on unless you change them. Turning summaries off also permanently deletes the ones already written, so “off” really means off. Automated safety screening of messages stays on regardless, and the page says so. KB: AI Assistance.

Your handbook, actually agreed to

Under Settings → Library → Handbook, the new Advocate agreement setting asks every active advocate to review and agree to your handbook at their next login. You get a shareable link to drop in an email, a list of who hasn’t agreed yet, and the option to ask for re-agreement when you make a big change (typo fixes don’t interrupt anyone). Each agreement saves a copy of the handbook exactly as that advocate saw it. Available on plans that include waivers. KB: Advocate agreement. Need a handbook first? We wrote up what to put in one.

Link straight to the right owners

The map embed on your site now reads a few stoked_ settings from the page’s URL. Put an “Ask an owner of this model” link on every product page that opens your map already filtered to that model, or centered on one advocate, or zoomed into a city. One “Find an owner” page, linked from everywhere. KB: Driving the Embed From Your Page URL.

The map follows your mouse

On your community map (and the version embedded on your site), hovering an advocate’s card now glides the map to them and enlarges their pin. Visitors can see where someone is without hunting for a dot.

One kind of thing at a time

The inbox has a new Show menu next to Sort. Just conversations, just applications, just reward requests, each with a count. The choice sticks in the URL, so you can bookmark “reward requests” for whoever handles payouts. KB: The Activity Inbox.

Reply Speed shows everyone

The Reply Speed report used to show your fastest and slowest 20 advocates, which left everyone in the middle wondering how they were doing. Now it lists every advocate in one sortable table, adds an All time period, and exports to CSV in whatever order you sorted. KB: Reply Speed Report.

A Message Log with fewer blanks

Texts that advocates and prospects sent in were reaching their conversations but weren’t showing up in the Message Log. They do now, and the missing ones since June have been added back. When a text fails, the log explains why in plain language (“Phone could not be reached”) instead of a provider error code. Older imported texts now show whether they were actually delivered, and the whole log exports to CSV. KB: Messaging Activity Log.

Emails that survive Outlook

Every email Stoked sends now shares one layout that keeps its shape in Outlook (a famously hard place to keep your shape), switches to a readable dark palette in dark mode, and shows the actual message in the inbox preview line. Your custom wording is untouched.

Under the Hood

The most important fix this month is one you probably never saw. When a new prospect sends their first message, they confirm their phone or email with a short code. Some privacy-focused browsers, Safari included, could forget who the prospect was in the minute between sending that code and typing it in. When that happened, a correct code sent them back to your homepage, and their message never reached the advocate. That’s fixed: a correct code now sends the message every time, whatever the browser.

Smaller fixes rode along. Conversation exports “with messages” no longer come back blank, and bulk exports include closed conversations instead of quietly leaving them out. Saving your handbook no longer fails for communities that don’t take advocate applications. And Cmd+Enter (or Ctrl+Enter on Windows) sends your message every time, instead of only after a page reload.

Fewer prospects lost at the door. That’s the job.

Looking Back, Looking Forward

Nine Dispatches now, from a dashboard that tells you something last November to Stoked starting to pay attention in September. And this month: Stoked got out of the inbox.

The pieces we’ve built over the past year (the map, the inbox, waivers, rewards, the summaries) all lived on a screen. This month they started reaching the places the screen doesn’t: the parking lot where the test ride happens, the warehouse where your numbers live, and your advocates’ own sense of who they are. That’s what an operating system for brand advocacy should do. Not just host the conversation, but follow it wherever it goes next.

More is coming, aimed at the same thing. As promised last month, I’m not telling you what it is until it ships.

Have feedback, or a test ride story you think I’d like? Reply here, hit the in-app feedback button, or email stoked-help@stokedhq.com.

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