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Getting Started

Your first ten minutes in BuildOS — sign up, capture a project, and see how the pieces fit together.

Updated 2026-04-17T00:00:00.000Z 3 min read

BuildOS is a thinking environment for people making complex things. You talk through messy work — a book, a launch, a channel, a build — and it becomes a project with memory. No forms. No blank templates. No stitching notes, docs, tasks, and chat threads back together by hand.

This page gets you to your first project in about ten minutes.

What actually happens

  1. Sign up. Email or Google. A 14-day trial starts immediately.
  2. Tell BuildOS what matters. Onboarding asks what you’re trying to accomplish, what’s at stake, and where you want to hear from it. Keep it honest — it tunes the voice you get back.
  3. Talk through a project. Open the chat or the capture surface and describe the work in plain language. Voice or text. Don’t structure it.
  4. Review what BuildOS built. A project, a context document, tasks, and sometimes a plan — all linked, all editable.
  5. Connect Google Calendar. Optional but recommended. Turns tasks into schedulable time blocks and lets the agent see your availability.

After that, BuildOS settles into a rhythm: dump the messy version between sessions, check the daily brief, and use the agent to un-stick whatever stalled.

Think in projects

A project is the root. Goals, milestones, plans, tasks, documents, risks, events, and people live inside it. Even loose ideas — “I want to start writing again” — are worth framing as a project on day one. The project is what remembers across sessions.

A first session worth giving the product

The richer your first capture, the richer the project memory. Good first sessions usually include:

  • The outcome you’re after. One honest sentence.
  • Where you are now. What’s working, what isn’t.
  • Rough shape. Phases or chapters, even if they shift later.
  • Blockers. Time, skills, decisions, people.
  • Constraints and resources. Deadlines, tools, collaborators.

Fragmentary is fine. Contradictions are fine. BuildOS resolves what it can and asks before guessing.

Where to go next

If you already have an account, onboarding is the place to revisit intent and notification preferences.

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