Getting started with Ballad

Ballad is the marketing co-founder for founders who don't have a marketing team. It learns your business, plans what to publish, writes it in your voice, publishes it, measures what happened, and changes the plan accordingly.

Setting it up takes about ten minutes, and there is nothing to install. You answer three questions, then work through a short walkthrough for each kind of marketing you want it to run. Each walkthrough ends with your first piece written and waiting for you.

What you'll need

• A Google account to sign in with.
• Your website address, if you have one. Ballad reads it to draft your positioning, and you can skip it.
• About ten minutes. You can stop after any step; what you've answered is kept.

You don't need your social accounts, your email tool or your repository yet. Those come up inside the walkthrough for the thing that needs them, and every one of them can be added later.

1. Point Ballad at your site

The first screen asks for your website. Ballad reads the pages it can find — your home page, product pages, docs — and uses them to draft everything in the next step.

No site yet? Choose I don't have a site yet and give the company name instead. You'll answer three short questions in the next step rather than correcting a draft.

2. Check the positioning

Ballad comes back with three things:

It drafts	What it's for
In one sentence	The one-liner you'd say out loud. Every post, launch and bio is written from it.
Positioning	Who you serve, what you do for them, and why you and not the alternative.
Who it's for	The segments you sell to, comma-separated.

Read it properly. This is the single input that shapes everything Ballad writes later, and the draft is the part founders most often want to sharpen. Edit any field, or open The answers behind it and change the three answers, then redraft.

It doesn't have to be perfect. Ballad keeps a read on your business that updates as it learns, and proposes changes to your positioning when the people actually signing up stop matching it.

3. Choose what Ballad should do

The last question is What should Ballad do for you? Pick as many as you want:

• Content marketing — articles for your blog, researched and written in your voice, on a schedule you set.
• Social media — posts, threads and image posts for LinkedIn, X and Instagram, drafted for you to approve.
• Newsletter and lifecycle email — a regular newsletter to your list, and the automatic emails a new subscriber gets.
• Release notes and changelog — what you shipped, turned into release notes people read.

Pick only what you're ready to do. Each one adds a walkthrough to your Inbox, and four walkthroughs on day one is a lot. You can add the others later from Settings → Workspace → What Ballad does here, and the walkthrough appears the same way.

4. Work through the setup in your Inbox

Ballad opens on your Inbox with a pinned Welcome to Ballad section holding one walkthrough per thing you chose. Each is four short steps and ends with Ballad writing your first piece of that kind.

Work them in any order. The section stays pinned at the top until it's empty, and a walkthrough you skip stays available.

Two more appear once you've finished or skipped your first one:

• Tailor your voice — your role, what you write about, and a few things you've actually written. Every draft is matched against them, and a term you correct in review joins the list on its own.
• Design your brand — your logo and colours, used by every image post and article cover. Ballad suggests both from your site; you correct them.

Connections that aren't urgent — the site beacon and Search Console, Slack, your ballad.to page, teammates, agent keys — sit in Still to set up rather than in the list. Open them when you want them.

5. Approve your first piece

At the end of each walkthrough, Ballad writes something: an article, a set of posts, a newsletter issue, a release note. It shows you what it's doing while it works, and drops the result into your Inbox.

Open it and you get the draft on the left and the finished piece in the channel's own frame on the right. Edit anything. Then:

• Approve — it goes out on its slot, or publishes now if that's what you asked for.
• Edit, then approve — your changes become part of what Ballad learns your voice to be.
• Reject — it asks why, in one line. That answer feeds the next plan.

Nothing is published, posted or sent before you say yes.

What the next morning looks like

Ballad drafts overnight. Most mornings your job is the Inbox:

1. Going out today, so nothing surprises you.
2. Drafts to approve — a few yeses, maybe one edit.
3. Decisions — a plan change Ballad wants to make, a thread worth joining, a customer worth asking for a story.

Reaching the bottom is the whole job. Everything else — the calendar filling, the publishing, the measuring, the plan changing — happens without you.

Where everything lives

Tab	What it's for
Inbox	Today's approvals and decisions. The one screen you need daily.
Content	The calendar and every piece, drafted or published.
People	Who signed up, what they did, and which post brought them.
Signals	Traffic, social numbers, search rankings and AI answers, live.
Loop	What Ballad believes about your market, the plan, and what it's changing.

Next

• Read the guide for whatever you turned on: content marketing, social media, newsletter and lifecycle email, or release notes and changelog.
• Add the beacon so Ballad can tell which pieces actually bring people in: Measure what your content does.
• Work in Ballad from Claude: Connect Claude to Ballad.