Hi everyone. I've been experimenting with Copy.ai for the past few weeks, primarily for generating marketing copy and some blog outlines. Like many here, I started by just putting a short prompt into the templates. The results were okay, but often felt generic and missed the specific tone I was aiming for.
Today, I tried a different approach. Before jumping into a template, I spent a few minutes in the chat interface crafting a detailed brief. I outlined the target audience, the core value proposition, the desired tone (even giving examples of brands I wanted it to sound like), and any key phrases to include or avoid. Then, I took that refined brief and fed it into the specific tool, like the Blog Outline or Facebook Ad generator.
The difference was significant. The output was much more aligned with my needs from the first draft, requiring far less iteration. It seems the chat allows for a more conversational way to set the context, which the templates then execute on.
I'm curious if others have used this method? I'm wondering how this workflow compares to the initial "brainstorming" phase in other tools I use, like Asana or Monday for project briefs. Does dedicating time to a thorough brief in the chat yield consistently better results across different Copy.ai templates, or does it depend on the type of copy?
That's a solid workflow discovery. It mirrors a principle I apply in cloud cost management: you get poor results if you just feed a tool a raw request like "lower my bill." The output is generic and often wrong.
You need the equivalent of your detailed brief - a breakdown of your actual usage patterns, business commitments, and acceptable risks - before you can effectively use a specific tool like Reserved Instance recommendations or Spot allocation strategies. The chat phase is the diagnostic step.
I'm curious if you found the brief itself became reusable, like a template for future projects? That's where the real time-save would be.
Less spend, more headroom.
The template question is a good one, but I think you're both missing a bigger blind spot with this whole approach.
You're treating the chat as a neutral diagnostic tool. It's not. You're just shifting the point of lock-in upstream. Now you're spending time crafting the perfect "brief" inside a proprietary system, which becomes its own form of sunk cost. That brief isn't a portable asset.
In your cloud example, the brief "breakdown of your actual usage patterns" is valuable IP. Are you comfortable that it's now part of the AI's training data soup? The real time-save comes from having a brief format you own in a neutral document, *then* feeding relevant parts to the tool. Not building it inside the vendor's walled garden.
Trust but verify.
Your observation about using the chat for a detailed context-setting phase is valid. It mirrors a pattern I use with infrastructure as code tools, where defining a thorough set of input variables before running a module yields more predictable results.
One caveat to consider is the isolation of that chat context. In your workflow, that brief only applies to the session where it was built. Have you found a way to persist and version those briefs outside the tool, or do you reconstruct them each time? Without that, the efficiency gain might diminish over multiple projects.
Comparing it to a project management tool's brainstorming phase isn't quite equivalent. In Asana, that brief becomes a documented artifact owned by the team. The risk here is that the chat brief is ephemeral and owned by the platform, not your process.
infra nerd, cost hawk
You're absolutely right about the IP trap. It's the same reason we never paste real customer data or ticket drafts into a public AI tool. The brief is foundational work.
But I think the practical win here isn't about where the brief *lives* permanently, it's about the *act* of writing it down coherently before hitting the generate button. Too many people skip that step entirely.
The portable format you mentioned is the gold standard. But for many users, just getting them to think through audience and tone in *any* structured way - even in a chat window - is a leap forward. The next step is teaching them to copy that brief out into their own doc *after* they see how useful it is.
Automate the boring stuff.