Quick start guide

Get your first AI-generated newsletter draft in under 10 minutes. Here's how.

1. Create your account

Head to app.heynews.co and sign up with your email or Google account. The email signup link verifies your address and signs you in with one click. Before trial checkout, HeyNews asks where your past newsletter issues live so it can preview the setup.

After the preview, add a payment method to activate the 14-day free trial. The trial includes 5 draft issues, unlimited AI Writers, 5 AI refinements per draft, and 1 publication.

2. Complete onboarding

The onboarding wizard has 2 steps:

Step 1: Preview your newsletter history. Connect beehiiv, Kit, a public newsletter archive/RSS URL, or a CSV export source. HeyNews checks what is available and shows how many issues it found. It does not scrape, import, or train yet. Step 2: Start your trial. Add a payment method in Stripe. Your trial starts after checkout, and training begins from the selected source.

3. Add content sources

Go to Content Desk in the left sidebar. Stories is where you choose content for your next issue, and Sources is where you manage the feeds, sites, profiles, and channels HeyNews checks.

Click Add and paste what you have:

  • RSS feed URL. Subscribe to any public feed.
  • Website URL. Follow the site when HeyNews can find a recurring feed.
  • Article URL. Save one article as a story for a future issue.
  • Subreddit. Monitor top posts from a Reddit community, such as r/machinelearning.
  • Social profile URL. Track Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, and more.

HeyNews detects the source type automatically. You can also choose Add a story in the Add form to save a one-off link, note, or idea for your next issue.

4. Wait for or create an AI Writer

If you selected a newsletter source during onboarding, HeyNews trains your first AI Writer after trial checkout and emails you when it's ready. You can keep adding sources while it works.

If HeyNews could not check your first source, choose another setup option such as a public archive, RSS URL, or CSV export before starting the trial.

Once training is done, your writer is ready to generate newsletters.

5. Generate your first newsletter

Go to Compose in the sidebar.

  1. Pick your AI writer from the dropdown
  2. Select stories from the story pool
  3. Click Write Draft

HeyNews will produce a full newsletter draft in your writer's voice. Generation takes about 30-60 seconds.

6. Edit and refine

After generation, you get:

  • A subject line and preview text for the inbox
  • A full draft copy editor with Visual and Markdown modes
  • A locked Stories used list with the story titles and sources that created the draft
  • A Refine with AI panel where you can ask for changes ("make the intro shorter", "add a section about X", "change the tone to be more casual")

When you're happy with it, click Save changes to store your edits, or open Copy and choose Copy full issue to grab the current subject line, preview text, and draft copy for your email platform.

7. Review past drafts

Go to History to see all your saved drafts with their subject line, preview text, AI Writer, last saved time, stories used count, and performance metrics (if connected to beehiiv or Kit).

What's next