Getting Started
What needs to be true before autopilot can start, and what the final setup step does.
The last step of setup is "Finish setup & start." Here's exactly what needs to be in place before you reach it, and what actually happens when you click it.
Authors and promotional callouts are optional and can be skipped or turned off. You can always come back and add them later.
Clicking it runs a short chain. HarperFlow creates your project, picks (or falls back to) keyword and competitor seeds from your profile for discovery, drafts your initial topic clusters, and saves your onboarding profile and collection mapping together. Once this finishes, your workspace moves from "being set up" to "running," ready for you to write, though autopilot itself stays off until you switch it on.
You're immediately asked whether to turn on autopilot, write a single test article first, or just look around; see Run your blog on autopilot. Whichever you pick, nothing ever publishes silently: every article still gets a scheduled publish slot, and you're emailed a summary before anything goes out, a window to review and pull anything you don't want before it becomes live on your site.
Note: If "Finish setup & start" fails partway through, a network hiccup, for example, it's safe to click it again. HarperFlow remembers the project it already created during that attempt and won't create a duplicate; it just resumes from where the chain stopped.
