Before you begin
You need two things. A Plainpaper account (every new account starts on a 7-day free trial, no credit card required) and an AI agent. We'll use Claude here (a paid Claude plan), but any agent that supports MCP connections works.
Create your account and workspace
Sign up at app.plainpaper.io. Your first workspace is created for you. Think of it as the home for one brand. Boards, brand guidelines, and agent connections all live inside it. If you run more than one brand, each one gets its own workspace, fully separate.
Create a board from a playbook
Click New board and choose the template browser instead of a blank canvas. Pick Ecommerce Campaign. The preview shows you exactly what you'll get: six phases (Research → Audience → Strategy → Create → Launch → Measure) with starter cards already in place, including a campaign brief to fill in.
The template does more than draw columns. It teaches your agent the campaign process, which card types belong where, and how each deliverable should be structured.
Connect Claude
Two routes, depending on where you use Claude:
- claude.ai (the website): add Plainpaper from Claude's connector directory. In Settings → Connectors → Browse connectors, search "Plainpaper", click Connect, and sign in once. Full walkthrough here.
- Claude Desktop or Claude Code: open Plainpaper's Agents page, mint an agent token, and paste it into your client along with the endpoint below. The Connect Claude page covers each client click by click.
https://app.plainpaper.io/mcp
Test the connection
Ask Claude to check in. If the connection works, it will name your workspace.
Check my Plainpaper connection. Which workspace are you connected to, and which boards can you see?
Set your guidelines optional
Before the first real job, consider teaching your agent your brand: tone of voice, colors, do/don't rules. It takes ten minutes, your agent can do most of it by analyzing your website, and it decides whether copy comes out in your voice or in ChatGPT's. Follow Set guidelines for a workspace, or skip ahead and come back to it later.
Give your agent its first real job
Now brief it the way you'd brief a colleague. Swap in your own product, goal, and offer; the shape of the prompt is what matters.
Open my board "Summer sale" in Plainpaper and read it first. Then start the campaign: research what makes a summer sale work for an online bookstore, draft our primary audience as its own card, and fill in the campaign brief with this input: - Goal: €10k revenue in the last week of August - Offer: 20% off summer reading bundles - Channels: email and Instagram Put each piece on the board as its own card, in the right phase, and keep every card's summary to one line.
Watch the board assemble
Keep the board open while Claude works. Cards appear, connect, and fill in live, with no refresh needed. A presence chip names your agent, and a labeled cursor moves to whatever it's touching, so you can always tell which card your agent is working on right now.
Review a card and steer
Click any card to open it: the full content, where it came from, the sources it cites, and its version history. Want something changed? Right-click the card and Add comment. Comments are your standing instructions, and your agent picks them up next time it works on the board:
Check the open comments on my "Summer sale" board in Plainpaper, make the changes they ask for, and resolve each comment when you're done.
Where to go next
- Set guidelines for your workspace, so every draft comes out in your brand's voice, not ChatGPT-ese.
- Set up your first campaign: the full tutorial, from brief to an approved, ready-to-send email.
- Approvals & control: what your agent may do on its own, and what always waits for your click.
Nothing has shipped. Everything your agent just made is a draft on a board. Plainpaper never sends emails or publishes ads. Your agent hands off approved work through each platform's own connection, and only when you say so.