What's the hardest part of content writing?

[mike_Scout]

What’s really getting in the way of writing great content? (I’d love your input)

Hey everyone, Mike here from Cntent. I’m not a copywriter, but I’ve spent the last few years building tools for people who are.

We’re currently developing CASi Scout, a product that helps writers generate smart, relevant content ideas based on breaking news, strategic angles, and their client’s audience and product.

But I don’t want to pitch you. I want to learn from you.

We’ve made some assumptions based on interviews, user testing, and personal experience working with writers. Here’s what we think the real bottlenecks are, but I’d love for you to tell me where we’re wrong, what we’ve missed, or what’s actually going on.

Our key assumptions:
The hardest part isn’t writing, it’s knowing what to write about.
Finding a timely, relevant idea with the right angle takes longer than the actual writing.

Writers are expected to “be the strategist” too.
Clients often ask for content that makes them look authoritative, but give little to no input on what to say or why.

Most AI tools don’t help where it matters.
They offer drafts, but they don’t reduce the mental workload before the writing starts: research, positioning, insight, tone.

Writers are juggling too much.
You’re switching between clients, industries, tones of voice, often with little context or clear direction.

So here’s my question to you:

What do you think is the biggest content creation pain that no one is solving well?
What slows you down most when creating client work?
What tools (if any) are actually helping and where are they falling short?

Any honest feedback, challenge, or insight would be massively appreciated.

Thanks in advance,
Mike

[SARubin]

Hi Mike,
Welcome to the forum, happy to have you join us.

That's quite the project you've got going on here. I wish you all the success in the world.

I have a question though, from a copywriters point of view...

What exactly does it do for me?

We’re currently developing CASi Scout, a product that helps writers generate smart, relevant content ideas based on breaking news, strategic angles, and their client’s audience and product.

Our key assumptions:
The hardest part isn’t writing, it’s knowing what to write about.
Finding a timely, relevant idea with the right angle takes longer than the actual writing.

Writers are expected to “be the strategist” too.
Clients often ask for content that makes them look authoritative, but give little to no input on what to say or why.

Most AI tools don’t help where it matters.
They offer drafts, but they don’t reduce the mental workload before the writing starts: research, positioning, insight, tone.

Writers are juggling too much.
You’re switching between clients, industries, tones of voice, often with little context or clear direction.

Is it a research tool, or a prompt/idea generator? How is it different from other AI tools?

So here’s my question to you:

What do you think is the biggest content creation pain that no one is solving well?

Market research can sometimes be a pain.

What slows you down most when creating client work?

Lack of motivation / lack of ideas. Just getting started is often the hardest part.

What tools (if any) are actually helping and where are they falling short?

Some of better the AI writing tools can help get things started. The catalyst of creativity comes from thinking up a good prompt, and the writing momentum comes from editing the output.

ChatGPT has come a long way in the past couple years, it used to be I had to edit around 80%. Now, with a good prompt, I only need to edit around 20%, on average, to get it to not sound like a robot wrote it.

And then I add my own touches to the copy

Anyway, it feels like you've got quite the cool project you're working on. I envy you that. I haven't done anything interesting in a while.

Please let us know how it goes.

All the best,
Steven

[mike_Scout]

Hey Steven, thanks so much for the warm welcome and your thoughtful questions, this kind of feedback is exactly what I was hoping for.

So what does this tool do for you? It is a research-powered idea generator. It identifies timely, relevant topics tailored specifically to your client's audience and product, and provides strategic angles, so you never have to start writing from scratch again.

Generic idea generators do not offer any insights into what's happening in the market right now, so we wanted to combine breaking news articles into the ideas to make them relevant.

Many copywriters need to focus on keywords too, so we allow our users to combine a keyword, with a target audience and a product or service related to that brand. The news is then sourced and an angle built to explain why this is relevant. All sources are then displayed for additional research and referencing. I guess we are trying to facilitate more thought leadership angles so businesses can response and react to the latest announcements, reports and news from their industry.

You're spot-on about the challenges around motivation and starting from scratch. Scout is built specifically to help with those first crucial steps. We do not offer a finished article, simply a starting point that has enough detail to support the writer.

Unlike most AI tools that primarily help with drafting content, Scout tackles the heavy lifting that comes before you write, market research, finding relevant insights, positioning the angle, so you can jump straight into writing and editing from a place of certainty rather than guesswork.

Most copywriters that we spoke to worked for multiple clients in different industries. They also had to produce multiple pieces of content for different platforms every week. They said it was very difficult to keep up with what was happening in each industry, understand different use cases and segments, so many pieces were well-written but didn't add any value as they were not related to real news.

I appreciate your note about ChatGPT and other tools, prompt engineering definitely goes a long way. Scout’s key difference is that you don’t have to become an expert in prompt-crafting to get meaningful outputs. It gives you strategic, news-driven insights upfront, ensuring your content lands as timely, authoritative, and uniquely tailored to your client’s brand. It can be automated so it will deliver these topic briefs directly to you so you do not have to go hunting for something to write about.

I'd love your thoughts on this. Do you see a tool like Scout helping you overcome that "getting started" barrier you've mentioned?

If so, why exactly?

Thanks again, really grateful for your insights!
Mike