Country is worth getting right
Changing the language of a screen is a sentence. Changing the country a system was built around touches invoices, dates and deadlines at once — possible, but more work than choosing correctly now.
TUTORIALS / GETTING STARTED
Start your first system
Start a new system asks four short questions before anything is built. None of them are hard, but two of them are worth thinking about for a moment, because they set things that are awkward to change later.
5 minutes
Reading time
An account with a plan
What you need
Your systems
Where you do it
01 Step by step
Four questions, then the studio opens
Start a new system on your account page opens a short form. Fill it in and the studio opens with the build already beginning — you are not left in front of an empty screen wondering what to type first.
The questions exist because they change what gets written. A booking system for Bulgaria and one for Germany are not the same software, and the studio would rather know before it starts than guess and be corrected.
01
Search your trade
Type what you do — salon, garage, nursery, clinic — and the closest starting points come up. A template arrives complete, with the screens and vocabulary of that trade already in it, which is much easier to correct than an empty page is to fill.
02
Or start from scratch
Underneath the search there is Start from scratch. Choose it when nothing on the list is close to what you do, and describe everything yourself from an empty project. It works — it just asks more of your first few sentences.
03
Name it
The name is for you, so you can tell two systems apart later. It is not the web address and it is not shown to your customers, so plain is better than clever.
04
Which country it is for
This one matters. It sets the currency, the date format, the company registration field and the statutory deadlines your system is built with. It is the difference between a system that fits how you invoice and one you spend a week correcting.
05
Language of the finished system
Separate from the language you build in. You can describe everything in Bulgarian and have every screen come out in English for an international team, or the other way round. Your staff see the language they work in.
06
Where it runs
Which region the system itself lives in. Frankfurt keeps the data inside the European Union, which is what most businesses here want and what the security page describes.
02 In your own words
What happens the moment you press Create
The studio opens and the build starts. You watch it work rather than waiting for an email — screens, database, rules and the address to reach them, appearing while you sit there.
The first build is the longest one you will ever run, because there is the most to say. Everything after it is a sentence at a time.
WHAT THE FIRST VERSION IS FOR
It is not meant to be right. It is meant to be concrete enough that you can point at it and say what is wrong, which is far easier than describing the whole thing correctly from memory.
Nobody's business runs exactly like the template. The studio expects that, and correcting it is the normal way to work rather than a sign something went wrong.
03 What to watch for
A
B
Close is close enough
A veterinary template for a dental practice is a worse start than the clinic one, but a clinic template for an unusual clinic is fine. Pick the nearest and correct it.
C
One system, not one screen
What you are creating is a whole system — database, screens, jobs, email — not a page. Give it the scope of the job it is meant to do.
04 Where to go next
READ NEXT
Your first change — the loop you will use every time from here on.
The twenty starting points — what each template arrives with before you change it.