---
title: Start guide
description: What Ali is, what the first fifteen minutes look like, and the order to do things in so the workspace is useful on day one.
sidebar:
  label: Overview
  icon: layers
---

Ali keeps your clients, projects, tasks, documents and hours on a single base, and puts an assistant on top of it. That assistant is **Lia**. Because everything lives in one place, she can answer "what is overdue in Studio this week?" from your real work instead of from whatever somebody remembered to paste into a chat.

That is the whole idea, and it has one consequence worth knowing up front: Ali gets better the more of your work actually lands in it. The setup below is ordered around that.

## The first fifteen minutes

1. **Create your account**

    Sign in with Google, GitHub or a code we email you. There is no password to invent. It takes a minute, and it is covered in [Create your account](/start-guide/account).

2. **Set up the workspace**

    Name yourself, name the company, and pick a URL. Ali walks you through it once and never asks again. See [Set up your workspace](/start-guide/workspace).

3. **Invite the people you work with**

    A workspace with one person in it is a to-do list. Invitations go out by email and hold a seat until they are accepted.

4. **Ask Lia something real**

    Not "hello". Ask the question you would otherwise ask a person: what needs me today, which project is at risk, draft this week's update for a client.

## What you land on

After setup, Ali opens on the home screen: a greeting, a box to ask Lia something, four prompts worth stealing, and your recent conversations underneath.

![The Ali home screen, with the composer, the example prompts and recent chats](/images/start-guide/home.webp)

Everything else hangs off the sidebar, and [Find your way around](/start-guide/basics) walks through it. The short version: **Overview** is what needs you today, **Workspace** is where the work lives, **Settings** is the plumbing.

## Where to go next

**[Create your account](/start-guide/account)**

The three ways in, the six-digit code, and what to do with an invitation link.

**[Set up your workspace](/start-guide/workspace)**

The seven setup steps, which ones you can skip, the trial, and inviting your team.

**[Find your way around](/start-guide/basics)**

The sidebar, the search palette, the account menu, and where each section leads.

**[Integrations](/integrations)**

Put Lia in Slack, GitHub or Discord, and turn your meetings into documents.

Once the basics are in place, the three things that make Ali worth the setup are the [knowledge base](/knowledge-base), which teaches Lia what is inside your files, the [agents](/agents), which do a job on a schedule without being asked, and [MCP](/mcp), which lets Claude or Cursor reach the same workspace from your editor.