Lesson 1: The Zero-Input Premise

Creating a campaign has exactly one required decision: which angle.

There is no blank-form step. You pick a strategy and the campaign arrives written — a name, a theme, an audience, a call to action, dates and a content mix, all editable, none of them asked for. That is a design constraint, not a convenience: the primary user of campaigns is a single-location business owner who will abandon an eight-field form and will not abandon one click.

The dialog is two steps:

Angle — one recommendation, alternates present but secondary.
Draft — the generated campaign, entirely editable, nothing required.

Some behaviours worth knowing because they save you money and rework:

The step advances the moment you pick the angle, not when generation finishes. The draft's own layout stands in while it is being written, so the fields land where your eye already is.
Going back to step 1 keeps the draft in memory. If you want to compare two angles and return to the first, you do not pay for a second generation and you do not lose the edits you already made.
A failure never closes the dialog and never clears the draft. A failure during generation returns you to the picker with the angle still selected and the previous draft intact.

Lesson 2: Written, Derived, Yours

Three different things happen to the fields on a new campaign, and the difference matters because only one of them involves a model.

Written by the model — name, theme, audience, CTA text, content mix.

These are generated in one call, not six. That is deliberate. The fields have to agree with each other: the name refers to the theme, the CTA follows from the audience, the mix follows from the angle. Six parallel calls cannot see each other's output, so they produce a brief whose parts do not match — which is precisely the incoherence people read as "the AI doesn't understand my business."

You also get two alternative names beside the chosen one, so picking a different title is a click rather than a regeneration. They are never saved and are dropped on a reroll.

Derived, without a model — the start date, the end date, and the CTA URL when your Business DNA already carries a website.

These are arithmetic and lookups, and they are reported separately from the written fields so "we drafted this" never takes credit for a date.

Yours to supply — the CTA URL when there is no website on file.

A language model asked for a URL produces a plausible link that may not resolve, and that link ships on a real published post. So it is not asked for. Dates are excluded for the same reason: a model has no basis for a date.

Lesson 3: The Four Context Tiers

The brief has to be written from something. The honest problem is that the richest source is the one most people do not have — most workspaces have never filled in Business DNA, and the businesses campaigns serve best are often the least likely to have completed it.

So context resolution degrades rather than fails. Four tiers, best first, and every tier is additive rather than exclusive:

Workspace Brief — the compiled "workspace brain": distilled voice feedback plus Business DNA, already written to be injected into prompts. If it exists and is active, nothing else is needed.
Business DNA — the raw brand facts: overview, origin story, city, testimonials, years in business.
Voice profile + industry — the voice's tone and rules plus your industry. Thin, but enough to avoid generic output.
Observed — what your connected accounts and recently published posts reveal. Needs no setup at all and is available to any workspace that has ever published.

The angle's own instructions are the fifth input and are always present, which is the floor: even a workspace with nothing configured has a stance to write from.

A brief generated on thin context is more general, never more specific. It will not fabricate "family-owned since 1997" to fill space, and Bolta names how much context it had rather than quietly producing something mediocre. If your briefs read as generic, the fix is not a better prompt — it is Business DNA, or attaching a source (Module 10).

Lesson 4: Editing, Rerolling, and Two Refusals

Everything in the draft is editable inline, and nothing is required. You can change the name and leave the mix, change the mix and leave the CTA, or accept the whole thing.

You can also reroll a single field rather than regenerating the campaign. Use this when one field missed — usually the name, occasionally the audience — and the rest is right. A single-field reroll drops the alternative names.

Two things the brief will never do, in any tier, on any angle:

It never invents a fact about your business. Not a founding year, not a location, not a testimonial, not a number. With thin context it gets more general. A fabricated fact is worse than a plain sentence because you may not catch it before it ships.

It never invents urgency. "Only 3 spots left" is a claim about the world and Bolta has no way to know it. If your Offer & Promotion campaign should carry a deadline, put the real deadline in the context notes and it will be used.

A practical creation sequence

Pick the angle. Take the recommendation unless you have a reason not to.
Read the theme first, not the name. The theme is what the content will actually be about; a wrong theme means a wrong campaign no matter how good the title is.
Add context notes if the campaign is about a specific thing — a launch, an event, a promotion with a real end date.
Set the accounts and the duration.
Fix the mix last, once you know how many weeks you are running (Module 7 — the mix is per week, not per campaign).

Lesson 5: Steering the Brief Without Typing a Form

Zero-input creation does not mean zero influence. There are four places to put information, and they have very different reach.

Where	Reach	Use it for
Business DNA	Every campaign, every week, forever	Who you are, what you sell, where
Voice profile	Every campaign and routine	How you sound
Context notes	This campaign, every week	The specific thing this campaign is about
Attached source	This campaign's brief	A page describing the thing

The mistake is putting durable facts in context notes. If "we have been going since 2009 and we are the only clinic in the county with X" is true of your business generally, it belongs in Business DNA, where it improves everything. Context notes are for what is true of this campaign.

What a good context note looks like

Bad — restates the angle:

Take a problem/solution approach and be helpful and engaging.

Bad — a wall of background:

Our company was founded in… (four paragraphs)

Good — specific, dated, actionable:

Launching the new booking system on the 14th. Lead with the time saved — most clients spend 10 minutes on the phone to book. Do not mention pricing. Offer ends the 30th.

That note gives the brief a subject, a date, a lead, an exclusion and a real deadline. Every one of those reaches every week.

When to regenerate versus edit

The theme is wrong → regenerate. The theme is upstream of everything.
The name is wrong → pick an alternative, or reroll that field alone.
The audience is close → edit it. Faster than a reroll.
The mix is wrong → just edit it. It is a plan, not prose.
Everything is slightly off → your context is thin. Fix the context and regenerate; rerolling on the same context gives you a different flavour of the same generality.

What to take away

One decision is required: the angle. Everything else arrives written.
One model call, not six, so the fields agree with each other.
Dates and links are derived or yours — never guessed.
Thin context produces a general brief, not a fabricated one. Business DNA is the single highest-leverage thing you can fill in.

The Brief — Zero-Input Creation