Quick start — your first brief in 5 minutes.
No video to watch, no demo to schedule, no setup wizard with seventeen screens. Drop your URL, paste a few voice samples, connect one channel. Tomorrow morning your first brief lands at 7am.
This guide gets you from "never heard of ScoutRival" to "first brief in inbox" in five minutes. Total. No buts.
Step 1 · Create your account
Head to scoutrival.com/signup. Three ways to create an account:
- Continue with Google — fastest, no password
- Continue with LinkedIn — best if you want founder-account tracking pre-connected
- Email + password — old-school, totally fine
You'll land in onboarding after email verification. Onboarding has exactly three screens — you can do them with a coffee.
Free plan doesn't need a credit card. You can run the full onboarding before deciding whether to upgrade.
Step 2 · Connect your business
The next screen asks for one thing: your business URL. Paste it. We use it to (a) understand what you do, (b) seed competitor discovery, and (c) fingerprint your brand voice from your existing content.
Paste your URL
Something like https://squareko.com. We crawl the homepage + a few key pages (about, services, blog) to seed the voice profile.
Paste 2-3 sample posts (optional, recommended)
If you have existing LinkedIn or blog posts you're proud of, paste them. The voice fingerprint gets sharper. Skip this and we'll learn from your site alone — still works, just slightly more generic.
Pick your primary goal
Lead-gen · retention · authority · awareness. This biases the verdict scoring toward signals that matter for your goal.
Step 3 · Review your competitors
Within 90 seconds you'll see 8–12 auto-discovered competitors. These aren't "similar companies from a stale database" — they're real, current, public-web competitors mined fresh.
Edit the list. Remove anyone irrelevant. Add anyone we missed (paste their URL). You can have up to 3 on Free, 10 on Operator, 30 on Agency Pro.
// example shape { "competitors": [ { "name": "Acme Co.", "url": "https://acme.com", "sources": ["website", "linkedin", "x", "founder"], "impact_weight": 1.0 } ] }
Step 4 · Connect at least one channel
This is where ScoutRival ships from. You only need one to start — most users add LinkedIn first.
- LinkedIn — one-click OAuth, post drafts queue here
- X / Twitter — same flow, threads supported
- Buffer — for everything else (IG, FB, TikTok, 14 more)
- WordPress / Squarespace / Webflow — blog posts publish or save as drafts
Pick the publish mode per channel: auto (publishes without asking), queue (schedules with one-click approve), or draft (saves only, never publishes).
Start with queue mode. After 5-7 successful approvals, you'll trust the voice enough to switch to auto.
Step 5 · Wait until 7am tomorrow
That's it. The daily cron runs at 5am UTC. By 7am local time, your inbox has the first brief: verdict, three signals, drafted post. Open it on your phone with coffee, approve in 60 seconds, get on with your day.
If you don't get a brief, check support — that's a real bug and Walid wants to fix it.
What's next?
- Read Brand voice setup to push voice-match score above 95%
- Read Approving content for the keyboard shortcuts
- Read Adding competitors if your auto-discovered list missed someone obvious