Getting Started

Get up and running with HeyCMO in under 5 minutes. This guide walks you through account setup, API key generation, and connecting HeyCMO to your AI tools via MCP.

1. Create Your Account

Sign up at heycmo.ai to create your account and receive your API key.

2. Get Your API Key

After signup, you'll receive an API key with the prefix hcmo_live_. This key authenticates all API requests and MCP connections.

# Your API key looks like this:
hcmo_live_a1b2c3d4e5f6...

Store this key securely — it's hashed with SHA-256 on our end and cannot be retrieved after initial generation.

3. Connect via MCP

HeyCMO uses the Model Context Protocol (MCP) over SSE (Server-Sent Events). Connect it to Claude Desktop, Cursor, or any MCP-compatible client.

Claude Desktop

Add this to your Claude Desktop MCP configuration (claude_desktop_config.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "heycmo": {
      "url": "https://heycmo.ai/mcp/sse?token=hcmo_live_YOUR_API_KEY"
    }
  }
}

Cursor

Add this to your Cursor MCP settings (.cursor/mcp.json):

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "heycmo": {
      "url": "https://heycmo.ai/mcp/sse?token=hcmo_live_YOUR_API_KEY"
    }
  }
}

Replace hcmo_live_YOUR_API_KEY with your actual API key.

CLI

The official CLI prints the snippet for you and stores your key under ~/.heycmo/config.json (0600 perms):

npm install -g @heycmo/cli

heycmo auth login        # paste your hcmo_live_… key when prompted
heycmo mcp config        # prints the snippet above with your key embedded
heycmo scan https://example.com
heycmo content list

The CLI is zero-dep, works on Node 18+, and is open source under packages/cli/ in the repo.

Discover HeyCMO programmatically

If you're an AI agent (or wiring one), HeyCMO publishes the standard agent-discovery files. Hit any of these to discover our API surface without parsing HTML:

The homepage also emits RFC 8288 Link: response headers pointing at the sitemap, OpenAPI spec, api-catalog, agent.json, MCP server card, and the markdown alternate. See For AI agents for the full retry strategy and discovery checklist.

4. Run the Brand Interview

Your first step after connecting is the brand interview — HeyCMO's onboarding flow that builds a complete brand profile for all agents to reference.

In Claude Desktop or Cursor, ask HeyCMO:

Run a brand interview for my company

Or use the one-click URL onboarding:

Onboard my brand from https://yourwebsite.com

The brand interview asks about your product, audience, voice, and competitors. The resulting brand profile is stored in working memory and referenced by every agent for every decision.

5. Start Using HeyCMO

Once your brand profile is set up, you can use any of HeyCMO's 70+ MCP tools. Here are some common starting points:

Research Trending Topics

Run research for today

The research pipeline discovers content ideas, SEO quick wins, and trending topics through multi-source research — and emits real-time progress notifications as it works.

Create Content

Create content from the research ideas

This triggers the content creation workflow — blog articles, social posts, and email content with eval scoring. Content is presented for your approval before publishing.

Ask the CMO

Ask the CMO: What's the best channel strategy for a B2B SaaS launch?

Get strategic marketing advice from the CMO agent, informed by your brand context.

Generate Visual Content

Generate a carousel about "5 Tips for Better Email Open Rates"

Create branded carousels, static images, and short-form reels with Canva-competitive quality.

Next Steps

• Quickstart — copy-pasteable curl/Node/Python
• For AI agents — discovery, auth, retries
• Explore all 10 agents and their capabilities
• Understand the tools powering the agents
• Learn about workflows for automation
• Read the API reference for complete endpoint documentation
• HeyCMO vs alternatives