Solutions · First-time founders
Your first company, with a full operating company around you.
You have not run a business before. The Engine surrounds your first one with what a funded founder has on day one: a manager that plans in the open and asks before it acts, a legal department that drafts, a sales floor that finds customers, and a memory that keeps what you learn. Every step shows its price before it runs, a failed run is refunded in full, and nothing irreversible runs without your yes.
01 — What changes on day one
By the end of the first morning, the company exists and has a plan.
Three workflows, in the order you will meet them, each naming the surface it runs on and what it costs.
01
Set the company up
The setup survey asks for your business name, website, what you sell and a short description, then creates your brand and seeds Company Memory; your first objective goes on the Strategic Objectives board. The Setup & Onboarding boards give you a kanban per department, and the Agent Setup Kit lets your own Claude or ChatGPT drive the setup over MCP. Founders in the Preview programme begin with Genesis instead.
02
Approve your first plan
Say what you want in plain words on Strategic Objectives. The manager drafts the plan as a flow chart — research, create, schedule, do the work, track results, your decision — every step bound to a real action with its credit estimate. A drafted plan costs 15 credits; one of the 8 ready-made playbooks costs nothing. Approve, edit, or decline with a reason it will remember.
03
Draft the paperwork, find the first customers
Order a Mutual NDA or your Terms of Service from the Legal Department — 250 credits a draft, governing jurisdiction required, for your lawyer to review. Then brief the Lead Generator with who you sell to and where: 8 credits per lead found, charged only for leads found; a field that cannot be found stays blank.
02 — How it runs
A manager that plans in the open and asks before it acts.
Decisions are labelled by how reversible they are — easily undone, hard to undo, permanent — and permanent is always your call. Safe steps fire on approval; anything that contacts the outside world or spends beyond its envelope waits at its gate until you click. The manager starts on the lowest rung of the trust ladder, Watching, and earns its way up through graded decisions; demotion is automatic. Pause everything halts it within one tick.
Chat is free; real work compiles into a plan with a total estimate that waits for your Go. Every Monday the manager writes you a short pack — what happened, what it did, what it learned, and at most one question. If you never answer, your standing rules cover the silence.
| Level | Rung | What it may do |
|---|---|---|
| L0 | Watching | Shadow mode. It reads, remembers and proposes nothing. |
| L1 | Suggesting | Plans and proposals land in the decision queue; nothing runs until you say go. |
| L2 | Acting within budget | Safe steps run inside the envelope; money and irreversible steps still wait for a click. |
| L3 | Fully trusted | Expanded autonomy, earned through graded decisions and Brier calibration — demotion is automatic. |
The Legal Department
26 document types in 6 groups — contracts & commercial, people & ip, policies & compliance, corporate & capital, disputes & notices, custom — from a mutual NDA and a statement of work to terms of service, an advisor agreement, a SAFE and a shareholder agreement. You name the governing jurisdiction; the draft is written from your Company Memory. A fact it does not have becomes a bracketed blank, never an invention, and “Points to confirm with counsel” flags what needs a lawyer. Every draft carries a non-removable disclaimer. The Engine never signs, files or sends.
The Lead Generator and the CRM
Describe the area in plain English and the pre-flight resolves it to real cities and shows the estimate before any spend. Each lead carries its citations, a 0–100 score with the reason, and its own cost. Qualified leads land in the CRM, and an outreach campaign writes to a whole folder from your own mailbox — never from ours — once you activate it.
03 — The departments you get
The departments a first company never has.
Two are built but not yet switched on for every workspace; they carry the Preview mark.
Genesis
PreviewAct 0 of the Academy: a guided founding conversation in six stages — self-inventory, opportunity map, selection and stress test, name and brand, scaffold plan, handoff. It ranks concepts by fit to you rather than by glamour, names the assumptions most likely to be wrong and the cheapest test that could kill the idea, and ends by compiling one plan that you approve with a single Go, every step and cost visible first. It never invents numbers and never promises revenue.
Founder’s Ascension
Preview13 quests across 6 acts — Genesis, The Engine, The Proof, The Launch, The Machine, The Throne — from business model and unit economics through product–market fit, sales, recruiting, AI-automated operations, partnerships, raising capital, advisors and planning your exit. Each quest runs learn → apply, in your real business, checked against real tables → prove → earn. 1,140 credits are earnable across the curriculum, and each act issues a publicly verifiable certificate.
Legal Department, Lead Generator and CRM
26 document types at 250 credits a draft; prospects at 8 credits per lead found, filed in folders, scored with a reason, converted into a CRM with deals by stage.
Social Media Poster
Write the prompt once and it drafts for the platforms you pick — 12 for drafting and scheduling — on a real cadence of weekdays, clock times and your timezone. “Publish without asking me” is off by default; drafts wait for you to mark them ready.
Executive Daily Briefing and Brand Radar
A grounded daily briefing for 10 credits a refresh, and your name watched across 14 source types; replies are drafted, never auto-sent.
Company Memory
14 floors from Market Demand to Theory of Mind. Every report you order feeds it, every action is remembered, a nightly consolidation turns failures into lessons, and the whole mind exports as a portable Mind File.
04 — Governance
See the price before it runs. Get it back if it fails.
Enforced in the ledger and the action registry, not promised in a prompt.
Price first, refund on failure
Every metered action shows its estimate before you click. A run reserves it, settles at the actual cost and releases the rest; a failed run refunds in full; an overrun is absorbed by the platform. Chat, plan compilation and the manager’s own thinking cost nothing.
Your yes, for anything permanent
Safe steps run. Anything that contacts the outside world, spends beyond an envelope or cannot be undone waits for a click. The server decides the class; nothing can skip the ceremony by omission.
Your company, your memory
Your workspace is isolated by row-level security, every job carries an AI receipt in cents, and the memory exports as a checksummed Mind File you can take with you.
Price shown before every metered run. Reserve, settle, release. Failed runs refund in full. Overruns are absorbed by the platform, never charged.
05 — What it costs
A first month, priced from the sheet.
Core is $149 a month for 1,500 credits — a plausible first month for a founder with one idea, one contract and a first list of prospects.
| Item | Where it runs | Credits each | Quantity | Credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One research report, full depth | Market Demand & Customer Analysis | 800 | 1 | 800 |
| First list of prospects | Lead Generator · per lead found | 8 | 25 | 200 |
| One legal draft | Terms of Service | 250 | 1 | 250 |
| Plans drafted by the manager | Strategic Objectives | 15 | 10 | 150 |
| Daily briefing refreshes | Executive Daily Briefing | 10 | 10 | 100 |
| Month, total | 1,500 | |||
| Core plan | $149 a month · 1 credit = 10¢ CAD | 1,500 | ||
| Core covers it exactly. | 0 |
Packs of 500 for $45, 2,000 for $159, 8,000 for $549 top the plan up, and 1 credit is 10¢ CAD. Plans, packs and the larger tiers are on the pricing page. Founders in the Preview programme can also earn credits back through the curriculum. Preview
Where next
Other doors into the same harness.
Related
First-time small business owners
Leads by geography, a chatbot and classifieds drafts for a local service, shop or store.
Related
Business owners
A research department and an ops floor for the company you run.
Related
Partner programme · Communities
Incubators, cohorts and chambers that run the harness for their members.
Next step
Found it on a real workspace.
A private demo is a real workspace, provisioned with credits and an access password. Bring the idea; the manager drafts the first plan.