Most "AI content tools" hand you a blank prompt box and call it onboarding. Heist is different. The setup IS the product. The ten minutes you spend on it is what makes everything that comes after work. Skip it, and you'll get generic ChatGPT output. Do it well, and the Brain will write things you'd be proud to publish without editing.
Here's the whole walkthrough. Ten minutes, end to end. Open app.heistbrain.com and follow along.
Step 1: Sign Up (1 minute)
Free trial. No credit card. Email and a password is all you need. You'll land on the dashboard with an empty Brain and a quiet feed. That's normal — the Brain hasn't been fed anything yet, so there's nothing to remember.
Resist the urge to click straight into Content Studio and start generating. The Brain hasn't earned its keep yet. Set it up first.
Step 2: Brand Profile — The 7 Identity Fields (3 minutes)
Navigate to Brand Intelligence, then the Brand Strategy tab. There are seven fields. They look like a generic form. They are not. Each one feeds a different layer of the Brain.
Brand Name. Not just a label. It's how the Brain refers to you in copy.
Mission Statement. Two or three sentences, in your own voice, about what you exist to do. Don't write a corporate mission. Write the real reason.
Target Audience. Specific. "Small business owners" is useless. "Coaches and consultants with 10K-100K followers who post on LinkedIn and Instagram" is useful. The Brain writes differently for different audiences.
Brand Voice / Tone. Show, don't tell. Instead of "professional but friendly," write three sentences in the voice you want. The Brain learns from samples better than labels.
Products / Offers. What you sell, with prices. The Brain weaves these into content naturally — never spammy, but never absent either.
Call to Action (Primary). What do you want every reader to do? "Book a call." "Download the free guide." "Start a trial." The Brain ends the right posts with this without you asking.
Keywords / Topics. Ten or fifteen terms your audience searches and your content should circle back to. This anchors the Brain so it doesn't drift into adjacent topics that don't serve you.
Step 3: Add Your First Audience Persona (1 minute)
Still in Brand Intelligence, find the Personas section. Add one. Just one to start. Give them a name, an age range, the platforms they live on, the pain they're feeling right now, and the language they use to talk about it.
You can add more personas later. The Brain handles multiple personas gracefully — when you generate, you can target the post at one specific persona, and the voice and references will adjust.
Step 4: Upload Documents to the Knowledge Base (2 minutes)
Open the Knowledge Base tab. This is the Vault for your raw materials. Upload anything that defines your brand:
Your About page. A pricing PDF. A blog post you're proud of. A tone-of-voice doc if you have one. A list of words you avoid. A list of phrases you love. The Brain reads all of it and uses it as reference when generating.
If you don't have docs ready, do this: paste your homepage URL into the URL scanner. It'll pull the content automatically. That alone gives the Brain enough to anchor on.
Step 5: Add a Few Memory Facts (1 minute)
Memory Facts are short, declarative rules about your brand. Things like:
"Always end posts with a question."
"Never use the word 'leverage.'"
"Refer to clients as 'partners,' not 'customers.'"
"Primary CTA links to /book-a-call."
Add five or ten. The Brain treats these as hard constraints — it won't violate them even when generating in bulk. They're how you encode the brand rules that took you years to figure out, in seconds.
Step 6: Your First Generation (2 minutes)
Now go to Content Studio. Pick the platforms you publish to. Enter one idea — just one. A single sentence. "How to know when to fire a client." Set posts-per-platform to one. Hit Generate.
Heist will produce a draft for each platform you selected, formatted for each one's quirks. Read them. Edit anything that doesn't sound right. Then rate the post — thumbs up if it's close to how you'd write it, thumbs down if it missed.
That rating is the first input to the closed loop. The Brain just learned something about you that it didn't know thirty seconds ago.
Step 7: Schedule and Walk Away
Drag the posts you like to the Calendar (the Blueprint). Pick the times you usually post. Hit schedule. Done.
You've now spent about ten minutes. You have a fully populated Brain, a documented brand voice, a knowledge base the system can reference forever, a working content draft, and a scheduled post. The first chunk of work that used to take you a Sunday night just got compressed into a coffee break.
What Happens Over the Next 30 Days
The Brain gets sharper without you doing anything. Every six hours it pulls engagement data. By week two it's noticed which of your posts performed and started weighting future generations toward those patterns.
By week four, the Brain that's writing your drafts is meaningfully different from the Brain you set up on day one. It knows what your audience opens, what they ignore, what they save, what they comment on. It uses that knowledge silently.
You don't have to retrain it. You don't have to maintain it. The loop runs forever.
The Only Way to Mess This Up
One thing only: filling the setup out lazily. The Brain is exactly as smart as the inputs you give it on day one, plus everything it learns from you over time. A one-line voice description and an empty knowledge base produce one-line, generic output. A real voice description and three uploaded docs produce content you can publish without rewriting.
Spend the ten minutes. The next thousand hours are the payoff.