--- id: onboarding title: Your first conversation area: Getting set up order: 30 summary: What Dex asks when you first meet, why each question matters, and what gets built when you finish. --- The first time you run `/setup`, Dex interviews you for about two minutes and then builds your workspace around the answers. Nothing here is a form you can get wrong — it's a conversation, you can be vague, and almost everything can be changed later just by asking. This page explains what Dex asks and why, so none of it feels like a black box. ```terminal Two minutes into /setup * Welcome — I'm Dex. A few questions and I'll build your workspace. * What should I call you? > Maya * What's your role? I'll shape workflows around it. > VP of Customer Success at a ~400-person software company * The part after the @ in your work email? This is how I'll tell colleagues from customers automatically. > firstround.io * Onboarding — saving your profile . email_domain: firstround.io → colleagues Internal, everyone else External ``` ## The questions, in order **Your name.** So Dex knows what to call you. **Your role.** Dex offers a list of thirty-plus roles — product, sales, marketing, engineering, finance, founder, consultant, and so on — plus "my role isn't listed." Your role shapes which workflows Dex suggests and how it frames advice. A sales leader's daily plan cares about deals; a product manager's cares about decisions. **Company size.** A rough band (under 100, 100–1,000, and up). Working at a 40-person startup and a 40,000-person enterprise are different jobs, and Dex calibrates for that. **Your work email domain — the one question that really matters.** Dex asks for the part after the @ in your work email (like `acme.com`). This is required, and here's why: Dex keeps a page for every person you work with, and it uses email domains to tell **colleagues** (same domain → filed under Internal) from **customers, partners, and everyone else** (different domain → External). Get this right and your people pages organize themselves forever. If you genuinely don't have one, you can leave it empty and everyone files as External. **Your calendar (Mac only).** Dex lists the calendars in your Mac's Calendar app and asks which is your work calendar. If the Mac asks for calendar permission and you decline, Dex just skips this — it never blocks setup. You can connect it later. **Your strategic pillars.** Two or three ongoing areas of focus — things like "Product strategy," "Team development," "Revenue growth." Pillars aren't goals with deadlines; they're the standing categories your work falls into. Dex uses them to organize tasks and to notice when your time stops matching your priorities. Rough is fine; you can reshape them anytime by saying "I want to change my pillars." **How you like to be spoken to.** Formality (formal ↔ casual), directness (very direct ↔ supportive), and where you are in your career. This tunes Dex's tone everywhere — planning, reviews, coaching. If you want straight talk with no cushioning, say so here. **Optional rooms.** Three extra areas, all off by default: **Career** (track growth evidence, prep for reviews and promotions), **Companies** (dedicated pages for accounts and organizations), and **Quarter Goals** (quarterly planning on top of weekly). Turning a room off never deletes anything — it just keeps the menu uncluttered until you want it. **Obsidian.** If you use (or are curious about) Obsidian, a free app for browsing linked notes visually, Dex can format your vault for it. Easy to say "later." ## What gets built When you confirm, Dex creates your vault structure in one pass: - The folder skeleton — Inbox, Projects, Areas (with People inside), Resources, Archives. - Your task backlog (`03-Tasks/Tasks.md`) and weekly priorities file. - Your profile (`System/user-profile.yaml`) and pillars (`System/pillars.yaml`) — plain files you can read and edit. - The tool wiring, so Dex's task, calendar, and meeting tools point at your vault. - Any optional rooms you switched on. If you get interrupted mid-way, just run `/setup` again — it resumes where you left off rather than starting over. ## Connecting your tools Right after the structure is built, Dex offers to connect the tools you already use — calendar, [Granola for meetings](meetings.html), Google Workspace, task apps like Todoist or Things. It's smart about the offer: it looks at what's actually installed on your machine and mentioned in your notes, and suggests the two or three connections likely to be worth it. Everything is skippable, and every integration has its own setup command you can run whenever you're ready. The [Integrations](integrations.html) page covers what each one gives you. One thing Dex tells you rather than asks: anonymous usage analytics are on by default to help improve Dex. Turning them off is one sentence — "turn off Dex analytics" — at any time. ## After setup Dex offers a guided first tour, `/getting-started`, which looks at what you connected and shows you something real with your own data — often a surprisingly complete picture of your week. That tour is the start of the [First week with Dex](first-week.html) page. > Everything you told Dex went into two readable files: `System/user-profile.yaml` and `System/pillars.yaml`. Nothing about you is hidden in a database somewhere. That's true of everything Dex ever learns about you. ## When your answers go stale Onboarding is a snapshot, and your job will drift. Once a quarter — or after any big change — flip the script and let Dex re-interview you: ```prompt The profile refresh My role has evolved since we first set up. Interview me again — one question at a time — about what's changed: what I actually spend time on now, what I'm measured on, who matters to my success, and what's stopped mattering. Compare my answers against my current profile and pillars, show me the diffs, and update the files when I confirm. ``` **Make it your own:** answer by voice, and be honest about what stopped mattering — retiring a stale pillar sharpens every future daily plan. There's a whole page of moves like this in [Prompts to steal](prompts-to-steal.html). ```handoff I just read the Dex Guide's onboarding page. Audit my onboarding answers against reality: read my profile and pillars, then compare them with what I've actually captured, planned, and worked on since. Where do my stated answers and my real behavior disagree? Interview me — one question at a time — about just the gaps, and update the files with what we find. ```