Your intention profile

Setup asks a handful of questions once, on one page on a laptop and as five steps on a phone. It is not a formality, it is the anchor the coach uses for the rest of the product.

• Your name, if you want to give one, and the name of your organisation if you are the only person in it so far.
• Your topics: the few things you want to be known for. At least one, at most eight, because a coach measuring you against twelve topics is measuring nothing.
• Your goals: what posting is actually for.
• Your audience: who you’re talking to.
• Your rhythm: how many posts a week you want to show up for. You pick this; it is a commitment, not a vanity number. Setup does not ask which days, and the app spreads them for you until you say otherwise.

You also accept the terms here, with the text one link away. Afterwards, on the welcome screen, you can give your coach a name, or take the one it suggests.

If somebody set up your organisation before you arrived, the topics, audience and pace may already be filled in, marked as your organisation’s suggestion. They are suggestions: change any of them, and nothing anywhere is told off about it.

Two things setup deliberately leaves out. Why this matters to you is a real question and too big a one for a signup form, so it waits for you on the Training plan, as a box you write in your own words. Once it is written, the coach keeps it in view in every conversation you have, and reflects it back when you go quiet. And which days you post is on the Training plan too, where the number and the days have to agree: pick a day for every post in your week, or none at all and let the app choose.

What makes a good mission

Your mission is the sentence that decides what you post about for the next year. It sits above your topics and explains them: why those subjects, for those people, to what end.

A good one has three things in it:

• Who it is for. More precise than “people”. “Team leads”, “first-time managers”, “agency owners”.
• What they get from you, naming the two or three subjects you keep coming back to. Those subjects are your content pillars.
• What is different for them because they read you.

Real ones look like this:

A newsletter on managing up, executive communication, and standing out as a high performer.

Simple tips that help camera owners get more out of the camera they already own.

I help small business owners find their writing voice, so they can sell without sounding like everybody else.

Four questions to check it against

1. Does it name who it is for? A mission that names nobody is a belief. It is the commonest thing missing: in one study of two thousand company purpose statements, half named no one at all.
2. Could it carry fifty posts? Three to five subjects, ten posts each. One thing that annoyed you last month is not a subject.
3. Could ten other people with your job title have written it? If they could, it describes the job and not you. The fix is your own angle on it, not more words.
4. Would anyone miss it if you stopped? If not, nothing in it is yours yet.

What a mission is not

• A complaint. “So people stop coasting” says what other people should do differently and offers them nothing. Complaints are useful evidence, because nobody complains about something they do not care about, but the mission is what you are committed to underneath it.
• A motto. “To show people what the last ten percent looks like” is a fine thing to believe. It names nobody, promises nothing, and you cannot write fifty posts from it.
• A list of topics. Change the subject and a mission survives. A topic does not.
• Purpose-statement filler. Empower, impact, potential, growth, community, authentic, meaningful, unlock, inspire, elevate, make a difference, thought leader. Take those words out of your sentence. If nothing is left, it was made of them.

The question that sharpens it fastest

What does everybody in your field believe about this that you think is wrong?

An angle is what makes reading you worth somebody’s time. Without one you have a job description, and there are a lot of those.

You can change your mission whenever you like, and most people rewrite it once they have posted for a few weeks and can see what they actually keep returning to.

Changing it later

Everything is editable under Training plan. That is the one place the profile changes after setup, so there’s one obvious source of truth. Two things sit outside it on purpose: your coach’s name, which you can change in settings, and pausing your pace, which is on Homebase, in the week it is pausing.

Why the coach asks for so little

It only remembers your intentions. It keeps no voice profile and does not learn to imitate you across sessions, deliberately.

One thing to know precisely: when you spend a cheat, that one call reads a few of your published posts so the post it writes sounds like you. Nothing is stored from that reading, and it happens only when you ask for a cheat. There is no model of your style sitting anywhere.