Your First Day on the Pipeline

This tutorial gets you working in the lead pipeline using a real demo with 20 prepared leads. You’ll log in, read what the board is telling you, take action on a breached lead, and watch the system record it. Plan on 15 minutes.

By the end you will know:

How the 8-column Kanban maps to a lead’s life
What the temperature chip, SLA banner, and flag chips on a card mean
How a contact attempt moves a lead from one column to the next
The difference between an event written by Scribe (the system) and an event you logged yourself

Before you start

Open the demo in your browser:

https://app.demo.homestar.ink/admin/leads/board

Click the Admin demo login button on the sign-in page. You’ll land on the lead pipeline. The data is synthetic — anything you click, log, or change here doesn’t touch a real client. Treat this as your sandbox; come back any time.

Pipeline board showing 5 of 8 columns — NEW, CONTACTING, QUALIFIED, COMMITTED, IN CONTRACT — with stage counts in the headers, demo leads visible including Lawrence Pickett with a Do Not Contact chip and an SLA-breached red border, Marcus Williams in QUALIFIED with a HOT badge, Ethan Brooks in CONTACTING with an Unsubscribed chip. Header reads "20 leads across 8 stages."

Read the board first, then act

The board has 8 columns left to right, in the order leads naturally move through:

Column	What it means in plain terms
NEW	Inquiry just arrived. No one has tried to reach them yet.
CONTACTING	First outreach made. Waiting on a response.
QUALIFIED	Motivated and ready to look at homes — searching, touring, or close to writing.
COMMITTED	Buyer’s agreement signed. They’ve chosen to work with you.
IN_CONTRACT	Offer accepted; transaction in escrow.
CLOSED	Deal funded. Keys handed over.
ARCHIVED	Went quiet long enough to set aside. Not deleted — they can come back.
TRASHED	Bad data — bogus number, junk email, duplicate. Also not deleted — fix the contact info and the lead re-enters NEW.

Look at one card before you click anything. A card shows you four things at a glance:

Name + headline — who the lead is and what they want
Temperature chip — Hot, Warm, or Cold based on how engaged they’ve been
SLA indicator — for leads in NEW, a colored border tells you whether the 5-minute response window is still safe (green), running (amber), or already breached (red)
Flag chips — DNC, Unsubscribed, Do-Not-Email, etc. These are communication preferences you need to respect

That’s the daily glance. The cards tell you where to spend your next ten minutes without opening a single one.

Step 1 — find a lead that needs you right now

Scroll the NEW column. You’re looking for Lawrence Pickett.

Lawrence’s card stands out for three reasons. Take a moment with each before clicking:

Red border — his SLA window has already elapsed. The clock started when his inquiry hit the system; nobody has logged contact since.
DO NOT CONTACT chip — there’s an active dnc flag on the record. Whoever takes action on Lawrence needs to know this before they dial.
Cold or Warm temperature chip — he hasn’t been on the site engaging with listings recently, so his score is low.

Click the card to open the detail page.

Lawrence Pickett detail page showing the contact information, the "Please remove me from all contact lists" message, the Lifecycle card at the bottom with NEW + COLD badges, the SLA breached banner reading "No contact yet — 50d 12h elapsed, target 5m," and a FLAGS row with a Do Not Contact chip

The detail page has a Lifecycle card at the top: the SLA banner (showing the breach time), the active flag chips, and a chronological Timeline of every event that’s happened to this lead. Lawrence’s timeline likely has one entry — his inquiry submission.

Step 2 — log a contact attempt

In a real workflow you’d resolve the DNC question first. For this tutorial, assume you’ve cleared it (Lawrence reset the flag himself last week and a teammate forgot to update the record). You’re going to log a phone outreach.

On the detail page, find the Log activity action (in the lead actions panel).
Choose Phone call.
Add a short note: “Left voicemail, mentioned the inquiry on the West End property.”
Save.

Two things should happen:

Lawrence’s card moves from the NEW column to CONTACTING.
A new row appears at the top of the timeline.

Step 3 — read the timeline you just changed

Look at the timeline now. You should see something like this:

─ Just now ─────────────────────────────────────
  You — Phone call logged
  "Left voicemail, mentioned the inquiry on the West End property."

─ Just now ─────────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — State change: NEW → CONTACTING
  triggered by: contact_attempted

─ Earlier ──────────────────────────────────────
  Scribe — Lead created
  source: contact_form

Two actors appear in the timeline: you (named) and Scribe.

Scribe is the system. When an event was triggered automatically — a state transition, a temperature recalculation, a flag set by a webhook — Scribe is the attributed actor. Your name is attributed to anything you did by hand. If you can’t remember whether something was an automatic side-effect or a deliberate action, the timeline tells you which by who wrote it.

This separation matters because the timeline is the canonical history of the lead. The current column on the board is a projection of that history. If the board ever surprises you (“why is this lead here?”), the timeline answers it.

Step 4 — look at a hot lead

Scroll the QUALIFIED column and find Marcus Williams. His card has a Hot temperature chip with a high number next to it.

Open his detail page. The timeline is longer than Lawrence’s — favorites saved, multiple property views, a tour request, a logged showing. Each of those is a signal the temperature scorer picked up. The score is high because Marcus is acting like someone close to writing an offer.

State and temperature are independent. Marcus is in QUALIFIED (a state — he’s pre-approved and shopping) and he’s Hot (a temperature — he’s engaging heavily right now). Another lead could be in QUALIFIED and Cold; their behavior would tell you they’ve stalled and need re-engagement, not another tour invite.

See the why state and temperature are separate explanation for the longer version of this argument.

Step 5 — respect a flag

Go back to the board and find Ethan Brooks in CONTACTING. His card has an Unsubscribed chip — but no DNC chip.

Composition matters here. unsubscribed means email marketing is off. It does not mean you can’t call him, text him, or send a personal one-off email about a property he asked about. dnc is the all-channels-off flag. If Ethan had both, all automated outreach would be off and personal contact would need a logged reason.

Open Ethan’s detail page and look at the Flags panel. The active flag, who set it, when. If Ethan calls and tells you he’s resubscribed, you’d clear the flag — the timeline preserves both the original set and the clear, so the audit trail is intact.

For the full table of flags and what each blocks, see communication flags reference.

What you’ve done

You’ve used the three pieces of vocabulary the rest of the docs assume you know:

State — where a lead is in the buying process (one of 8 canonical columns)
Temperature — how engaged they are right now (Cold / Warm / Hot, computed from behavior)
Flags — communication preferences (DNC, Unsubscribed, channel-specific blocks)

You’ve also seen the timeline + Scribe pattern: every change is logged with an actor, and “the system did it” is a first-class answer.

Where to go next

If you want to…	Read…
Look up exactly which transitions are valid	State machine card
Understand why a particular lead is Hot or Cold	Temperature signals
Know exactly what each flag blocks	Communication flags
Read the longer argument for the two-axis design	Why state and temperature are separate

Come back to the demo any time. Lawrence, Marcus, and Ethan are persistent — the seed script re-creates them when the dataset is refreshed. Treat the demo URL as a permanent practice sandbox.