CaretA weekly content workflow for a one-person marketing team
Thursday, 4 PM. Engineering shipped two features this week and you found out from the changelog. The founder asks in the channel whether there's a post going out about them. There isn't. There's a doc called "content ideas" with 31 bullets in it, and the newest one is from August.
If you're the whole marketing team, you probably have enough ideas and can write fine. Content just has no fixed slot in your week, so it loses to whatever is on fire. And when you finally do write in a hurry, or ask an AI to, it comes out sounding like every other startup post.
What fixes this is a small system: the same inputs, the same days, the same checks, every week.
The week, day by day
The whole system fits in a table. Times are what it takes once the habit is set; the first two weeks run longer.
| Day | Job | Input | Output | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Collect | Changelog, merged PRs, support threads, sales call notes | A list of 5-10 things that happened, one line each | 20 min |
| Tuesday | Pick | Monday's list | One story for the week, with the customer moment it answers | 15 min |
| Wednesday | Draft | The story, the voice file | One long piece (blog or newsletter) and 3-4 short posts cut from it | 90 min |
| Thursday | Cut and check | The drafts | Final versions, facts checked, visuals briefed | 45 min |
| Friday | Publish and measure | Final versions | Posts out, links tracked, last week's numbers logged | 30 min |
That's about three and a half hours. The point is the fixed days. If Wednesday's draft slips, Thursday still happens with whatever exists.
Monday: collect from where the work already is
Don't brainstorm. Pull from four places, because that's where the real material lives:
- What shipped. Merged pull requests and the changelog. Each one is a possible "you can now..." post.
- What customers asked. Support threads and sales notes. A question asked twice is a post.
- What broke. Outages, bugs, a launch that went sideways. People read these posts.
- What you learned. A number that moved, an experiment that failed.
Write each as one line. Ten lines is plenty.
Tuesday: start from the customer's moment
This is the step most of us skip, and it's the one that matters most. We learned it the hard way. Our early video ideas were built on our own wins: we fixed our SEO in a day, here's our launch day. My reaction was that they were too generic. The ideas that landed started from a buyer's painful moment instead: the morning you find failed card payments nobody chased, or the security questionnaire that eats a week.
So for each candidate, write the moment it answers: who, when, what's going wrong. Pick the one where that sentence is easiest to write.
Wednesday: one long piece, then cut it down
Write one long thing and cut short posts from it. Going the other way, writing five unrelated posts, takes longer and says less.
A long piece of 800-1,500 words gives you:
- 3-4 short posts, each built around one paragraph of it
- a newsletter section
- one image or chart worth making
The voice file: how not to sound like AI
Whether you write with AI or alone, keep a one-page voice file and check every draft against it. Ours has four parts:
| Part | What goes in it | Example line |
|---|---|---|
| Words we never use | Stock words and openers that make copy sound generated | "In today's fast-paced world", plus your own list |
| How we sound | Sentence length, person, contractions | "We" for our own experience. Short and long sentences mixed. |
| Facts that must be checked | Anything that changes: pricing, what's shipped | "Ask engineering what users pay today before any price line." |
| Two samples | Two pieces you're proud of | Pasted in full |
The samples do more work than the rules. Rules tell a writer, human or bot, what to avoid. Samples show what to aim for.
An example: one shipped feature, one week
The details here are invented to show the steps.
Monday's list had seven lines. One read: "Shipped: the weekly report can now be exported to Excel."
Tuesday's pick. The moment: "It's Monday 9:00 and the founder is copying numbers from a dashboard into a sheet by hand." That beat the feature line because a reader can picture it.
Wednesday's ask to the drafting bot: "Write a 900-word post from the thread above. Open on the Monday-morning copy-paste moment. Use the voice file. Two short LinkedIn posts cut from it."
What came back. A draft that opened with "In today's data-driven world". It also claimed the export "works with every tool", which nobody had said.
What the marketer changed. Deleted the opener and started on the moment instead. Cut "every tool" and replaced it with the one format that shipped. Rewrote the ending, which summed up the post in a single punchline, so it ended on the setup step.
What got approved. The blog post and one of the two short posts. The other short post was a weaker copy of the first, so it was dropped.
How we do it at our company
Our marketing runs on a marketer bot, with me approving. It drafts from what the team shipped, keeps the blog moving, and runs a weekly check of how AI answer engines describe us. Every post that goes out under my name waits for my yes.
How to set it up in Caret
- Sign up at app.caretbot.com. Team starts with a 7-day trial.
- Create a marketer bot. Paste your voice file into its job, including the banned words and the two samples.
- Add it to the thread where the team posts what shipped. Threads are bridged to Slack both ways, so it can read your existing channel.
- Give it a Monday schedule for the collect step.
- Connect only the accounts it should draft for. It asks for an admin's approval before it posts anything.
- When you need an image, have it hand off to your designer bot by @handle in the same thread.
- Once a week runs cleanly, ask it to save the routine as a skill.
Example asks:
- "every monday 09:00 list what shipped last week from this thread, one line each, and mark the two with the clearest customer moment"
- "write a 900 word blog draft from the story we picked, open on the customer moment, follow the voice file"
- "ask the designer bot for a cover image for this post, same look as last week"
Monday's list, 7 lines from last week. #3: Shipped: the weekly report can now be exported to Excel. Clearest customer moment of the seven.
go with #3
Draft is up. 900 words, opens on the founder copying numbers into a sheet at 9:00 on Monday, plus one short LinkedIn post cut from it.
Post to LinkedIn
ApproveDenyApproved.
An example thread, shortened.
FAQ
How much content can one marketer produce in a week? With a fixed weekly routine, one long piece and three or four short posts cut from it is realistic in about three and a half hours. Consistency beats volume: one good post every week does more than five rushed ones in a single week.
How do I make AI-written content not sound like AI? Give the writer a voice file with banned words, how you sound, and two real samples. Start every piece from a specific customer moment. Then cut every sentence you wouldn't say out loud, and check every fact with whoever owns it.
What should a one-person marketing team measure? Clicks and signups from each post, using a separate link per channel. Impressions tell you a post was shown, not that anyone acted on it.
For the bot side of this, read what Caret does for marketers. Put a bot on it: start your 7-day trial or download the Mac app.