It’s easier to edit a draft than to stare at a blank page. It’s better to generate a draft that requires very little editing. This week we look at data on how quickly we can create content with less time spent on editing.

Let’s dive in.

If you are anything like me, you want to conquer your goals and do a victory lap as quickly as possible. Patience is for suckers. Except - sadly - your vision of what is reasonable often doesn’t match the real world.

A mentor once counseled me that ‘everything takes twice as long as you think it should.’ Sigh, no one said that wisdom would agree with you. In the age of AI, it’s easy to set crazy, unrealistic timelines for product development, revenue generation, and business growth. Reality is different. When you see an ‘overnight success’ that generated $300m in revenue in 30 days, the journalist usually didn’t tell you that the company invested 3 years into growth before becoming an overnight success. I suppose they hit a word limit and had to trim part of the story.

The next time you ask CorZen to generate a plan for your success, you will be asked how quickly you want to achieve your plan. If your preferred timeline is too aggressive, CorZen will caution you that more time is recommended. You decide if you want to go for it anyway. After studying the results of 87 project plans in which founders overrode the recommended timeline, I can tell you this is not a good idea. 56% of the founders scrapped the initial plan and used the recommended plan because going faster did not produce better results.

For fastest results, I personally choose ‘ASAP’ as the timeline. This seems to be the right balance between ‘I want it now’ and ‘I want high quality.’ The actual amount of time is gated by how quickly you complete the work. If you use agents, you can complete a 9-week plan in 4 weeks. If you procrastinate, those 9 weeks can turn into 16 weeks. You still decide how long it takes in real life.

Takeaway: Plan for the quality of results you need, not the timeline you want.

Humans make decisions emotionally, then justify them with (sometimes quasi) logic and facts. Scientific studies have proven that people with damage to brain regions that process emotions have difficulty making decisions. Yet we are inconsistent on the type of content we want when making a decision.

Your life just got a little easier because the Build Case Study Agent in CorZen now asks you for your intended audience. It calibrates the content to meet the needs of your B2B, B2C, or Scientific/Technical audience.

A B2B audience wants entertainment and reassurance that they are making a good decision. For a B2B audience, the content will be in your Brand voice with a bit more emotion in the story arc. This keeps their attention and makes them look forward to reading more content from you.

A B2C audience wants you to get to the point, demonstrate ROI, and yet still be interesting. For a B2C audience, the content will be in your Brand voice but use emotion strategically to enhance key points in your story. The content will be a blend of facts and emotions to appeal to our human need for emotion yet still provide enough data to justify their decision.

A Scientific or Technical audience wants people to think they use facts - and only facts - to make decisions. They do not want to be seen as swayed by emotional content yet they still need some subtle emotion in order to make a decision. For a Technical or Scientific audience, the content will use the teachings of Hamid Ghanadan, author of Persuading Scientists: Marketing to the World's Most Skeptical Audience. His research and proven frameworks have been turned into a skill within CorZen that runs automatically when you select Scientific or Technical audience for your content. The skill drafts your content in a manner that is scientifically proven to resonate with this audience. It’s like having Mr. Ghanadan as your personal Writer.

Takeaway: CorZen now calibrates the tone and emotional content of case studies based on your intended audience. This means there is less editing you need to do prior to releasing the content.

This is why smart companies are realizing that software subscriptions are much better for growth than trying to build everything themselves.