How Draftly shipped content twice as fast by eliminating bottlenecks in their production workflow

Great content was sitting in limbo

Draftly's internal marketing team runs on content. Blog posts, case studies, social campaigns, email sequences — the output is constant. But so was the backlog. Pieces were getting written on time and then sitting in review queues for days. Approvals required chasing. Feedback came back in the wrong channels. Published dates kept slipping.

"We had a production problem disguised as a capacity problem. We didn't need more writers — we needed a better system." — Tom Whitfield, CEO, Draftly

Where content went to wait

At every stage, content was waiting on a human to pass it along. The writing was the fast part. Everything around it was the bottleneck.

What they built with Violet

Draftly mapped their entire content production process and automated every handoff. The moment a piece moves from one stage to the next in their project management tool, Violet handles everything that comes after.

trigger:
  type: linear.status_changed
  from: "in-progress"
  to: "ready-for-review"
actions:
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#content-review"
    message: "📝 {{content.title}} is ready for review. Assigned to {{reviewer.name}}."
  - type: linear.assign
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    owner: "{{reviewer.id}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: "{{reviewer.email}}"
    template: "review-request"
    data: "{{content.details}}"
  - type: linear.set_due_date
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    due: "+2 business days"

trigger:
  type: linear.status_changed
  from: "in-progress"
  to: "ready-for-review"
actions:
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#content-review"
    message: "📝 {{content.title}} is ready for review. Assigned to {{reviewer.name}}."
  - type: linear.assign
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    owner: "{{reviewer.id}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: "{{reviewer.email}}"
    template: "review-request"
    data: "{{content.details}}"
  - type: linear.set_due_date
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    due: "+2 business days"

trigger:
  type: linear.status_changed
  from: "in-progress"
  to: "ready-for-review"
actions:
  - type: slack.send_message
    channel: "#content-review"
    message: "📝 {{content.title}} is ready for review. Assigned to {{reviewer.name}}."
  - type: linear.assign
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    owner: "{{reviewer.id}}"
  - type: email.send
    to: "{{reviewer.email}}"
    template: "review-request"
    data: "{{content.details}}"
  - type: linear.set_due_date
    issue: "{{content.id}}"
    due: "+2 business days"

A matching workflow handles the approved → publish → distribute sequence, automatically uploading to their CMS and triggering distribution emails the moment a piece is approved.

The results after 60 days

"We doubled output without adding a single person. The work was always there — it was just stuck in the system. Violet unstuck it." — Tom Whitfield, CEO, Draftly

What they automated next

After content production, Draftly automated their social distribution workflow — automatically scheduling posts across LinkedIn, Twitter, and their newsletter the moment a piece is published, using metadata from the content brief to generate platform-specific copy.

What's next for Draftly

Draftly is currently building a content performance workflow that pulls engagement data one week after publish and automatically routes high-performing pieces to their repurposing queue for the social and email team.

"Our team used to talk about their backlog constantly. Now they talk about what they're working on next. That's a completely different energy." — Tom Whitfield, CEO, Draftly