Onboarding Checklist

When you first sign in to Hot Metal, the Dashboard displays a Getting Started checklist at the top of the page. This checklist walks you through the complete journey from creating your first publication to publishing your first post. A progress bar shows how many steps you’ve completed, and each step unlocks the next.

The six steps

1. Create your first publication

Your first publication is created through the Publication Wizard, a guided setup flow that walks you through naming your publication, describing its focus, and configuring the basics. Once this step is complete, it’s automatically checked off in the checklist.

A publication is the foundation of everything in Hot Metal — your ideas, writing sessions, and published posts all belong to a publication.

2. Add topics to your publication

Topics tell the Content Scout what subjects to look for when generating content ideas. Head to your publication’s settings page (the checklist provides a direct Add topics link) and add at least one topic that reflects what your publication covers.

The more specific your topics are, the better the Content Scout’s suggestions will be. For example, “React performance optimization” will generate more targeted ideas than just “React.”

3. Run the Content Scout

Once you have topics set up, it’s time to let the AI go to work. Click the Run now button directly in the checklist to trigger the Content Scout. It will search for trending content and discussions related to your topics and generate a batch of fresh post ideas.

You’ll see a confirmation message when the scout starts running, and new ideas will appear on your Ideas page shortly after.

4. Review an idea

Head over to the Ideas page (the checklist gives you a Go to ideas link) and review one of the ideas the Content Scout generated. You can read through the idea details and either mark it as reviewed or promote it to signal that you want to write about it.

Reviewing ideas helps you curate the best suggestions and keeps your content pipeline focused.

5. Write your first post

Now for the fun part. Click Start writing in the checklist to create your first writing session. This opens the AI writing experience, where you collaborate with an AI writing partner through conversation to draft your post. Describe what you want to write, provide direction, and the AI will help you shape a complete draft.

You can go through multiple draft versions, refining and iterating until you’re happy with the result.

6. Publish your post

The final step is to publish. When your post is ready, use the Publish action to push it live to your blog. This is the finish line — once you’ve published, you’ve completed the entire Getting Started journey.

Progress tracking

The checklist includes a visual progress bar that fills as you complete each step. Next to the checklist title, you’ll see a counter (for example, 3/6) showing how many steps you’ve finished.

Steps are checked off automatically based on your activity — you don’t need to manually mark them as done. The checklist detects when you’ve added topics, when the Content Scout has generated ideas, when you’ve reviewed an idea, and so on.

Completing or dismissing the checklist

When all six steps are complete, the checklist shows a congratulatory “You’re all set!” message with a Dismiss checklist button.

If you’d prefer to explore on your own, you can dismiss the checklist at any time by clicking the close button in the top-right corner. A confirmation dialog will ask if you’re sure, since dismissing the checklist is permanent. Don’t worry — all the features mentioned in the checklist are always accessible from the sidebar navigation.

Once the checklist is dismissed, it’s replaced by Quick Actions on the Dashboard, giving you shortcut buttons to start writing, get new ideas, and create a custom writing style. You can learn more about these in the Dashboard guide.