How to plan a month of reels in 12 minutes
Most creators spend Sunday night blocking out the week's content. Three hours pasted into Notion, half-watching competitor accounts, picking topics, drafting hooks, scheduling slots. By Wednesday, the plan is already drifting.
There's a better way. Same workflow, but every step that doesn't require your point of view gets automated. The four things only you can do — pick competitors, set a tone, approve topics, hit publish — are the only four things you do. Everything else is the agent.
Here's the workflow, minute by minute.
#Minutes 0 to 3 — Drop 3 competitor handles
Sign in, head to Regent Insight. The first input the agent needs: three creators whose audience overlaps with yours.
The trap: people pick the biggest creators in their space. Don't. The top 1% of creators have audiences that don't engage like normal audiences — they're celebrities. Their patterns are skewed by name recognition.
What works:
- One creator 1–2 years ahead of you. Someone whose stage you want to be at next year. Their patterns are achievable.
- One creator at your current size. Someone you're competing with right now. Their working posts are the closest signal you have.
- One creator in an adjacent niche. Not your niche exactly — an audience overlap. This is where the cross-pollination ideas come from.
Type three handles. Hit save. Regent's agent goes off and starts watching them.
By the time you've made coffee, the first analysis is back. Hook patterns, peak posting windows, topic clusters they're winning on, topic gaps they're missing.
#Minutes 3 to 6 — Review the auto-generated calendar
Open Regent Calendar. You'll see the next four weeks laid out — usually one topic per day, sometimes two, with each topic showing:
- Topic title — what the reel will be about
- 3 hook variants — different angles on the same topic
- Inspired by tag — which competitor's pattern Regent borrowed from
- Suggested platform — sometimes the same topic is better as a TikTok than an Instagram reel, agent decides
- Scheduled time — set to your audience's peak window on that platform
Scroll. Don't try to edit yet. Just read.
You'll notice the agent picked topics that match your three competitors' winning posts, plus topics from the gaps — areas your competitors aren't covering well that have audience demand. Those gaps are the highest-leverage slots in the calendar.
If a topic doesn't fit your voice, click regenerate. New variants land in seconds.
If a hook doesn't land, swap it for one of the other two variants.
If a slot needs to be rewritten manually, click into it and edit. Your edits get learned — the next batch leans toward your tone.
For most creators, 80% of slots get approved without edits. The other 20% get swapped or regenerated.
#Minutes 6 to 9 — Upload your face and voice (one time, forever)
If this is your first time, you'll see Regent Avatar and Regent Voice Engine prompts in the sidebar. Both take less than 3 minutes.
Avatar — one photo. Front-facing, eyes open, decent light. Window light works. Phone selfie works. One photo. Hit upload. The agent trains your avatar in under 5 minutes.
Voice — 15 seconds. Open the recorder, read the prompt the agent shows you (a paragraph about anything — what you had for breakfast, the weather, why you started posting). Hit submit. Under 90 seconds, your voice is cloned at 95%+ accuracy.
Optional bonus: record 30 more seconds in different tones — laughing, excited, deadpan. Boosts the agent's emotional range when rendering reels for different topics.
You do this once. Every reel from now on uses this avatar and voice. You never have to film again. You never have to clone again.
#Minutes 9 to 12 — Set publishing windows and approve
Back in the calendar, every approved slot has a default publishing time. The default is Regent's best guess — the peak window from your competitors' top-performing posts on the same platform.
You can override per slot, or set platform-wide defaults:
- Instagram: 8:30 PM your local time (typical default)
- TikTok: 7:00 PM (slightly earlier — TikTok's algorithm pushes harder in the early evening)
- YouTube Shorts: 5:30 PM (commute window)
- X: morning, usually 9:00 AM
- LinkedIn: lunch on Tuesday and Thursday for B2B audiences
The defaults are sane. Override only if you have specific data on your audience.
Final step: review the calendar one more time, hit Approve Week. (Or Approve Month if you trust the agent enough — most beta users move to monthly approval within 2 weeks.)
The agent starts rendering. By the time you close the tab, the first reel is already in the publishing queue for tomorrow.
#What happens after you close the tab
You don't have to think about it again. The agent:
- Renders each reel in your face and voice (4K, vertical, captioned in your tone)
- Schedules to each platform at the peak window
- Auto-retries if a platform's API rate-limits
- Sends you a Slack/email summary at the end of the week: what posted, what got the most engagement, what to adjust
If a reel underperforms, the agent notes which pattern it used and weights away from it next week. The calendar gets smarter with each cycle.
#What this replaces
The 6–10 hours a week you used to spend on:
- Watching competitor reels and taking notes
- Planning topics
- Drafting hook variants
- Filming yourself (lighting, takes, room setup)
- Editing in CapCut / Premiere
- Auto-captioning
- Exporting in the right format per platform
- Manually uploading to 5 different platforms
- Setting scheduling windows in 3 different tools
- Cross-referencing analytics across platforms
That whole stack collapses into 12 minutes of approval per week.
#When this doesn't work
A few honest caveats.
If you have no point of view. Regent extracts patterns. It doesn't invent strategy. If you don't know what you stand for or who you're for, the agent will faithfully reproduce content that has no opinion. Pick competitors carefully and edit aggressively early on.
If you want filmed content. Regent does AI-generated reels with your face and voice. If your brand depends on actual footage of you in real environments — vlogs, travel content, lifestyle — you'll still need to film some. Use Regent for the talking-head 70% of your output, film the rest.
If you're posting to platforms Regent doesn't yet support. Pinterest, Snapchat, Threads. We'll add them, but they're not in v1.
For everything else — talking-head reels across IG, TikTok, YouTube Shorts, X, LinkedIn — the 12-minute workflow ships your full posting calendar without you opening a single editor.
Apply for the Creator Beta — start the 12-minute workflow today, ship your first reel before tomorrow's commute.
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