Your first hour
Take the 5-minute tour on demo data, or spend 20 minutes wiring in your PSA and letting DarkBird mine your catalog.
A brand-new organization with no projects sees a two-path chooser. Neither path is a dead end — you can do the tour first and come back to the full setup later.
Quick Tour (5 minutes)
Loads a complete demo managed service provider — clients, install cards, projects with delivery history, categories, phases and products — and drops you straight into the seeded Brightwater Credit Union — new Easton branch project on its Estimate tab, with the scoping interview panel open. Nothing is connected and nothing is real; it exists so you can see a finished estimate and click around a working library before deciding whether any of this fits your business.
Remove it whenever you like from Settings → Sample Data. Sample records are tagged, so removal deletes exactly the demo data and leaves anything you built untouched.
Integrated Experience (~20 minutes)
The Get integrated button opens a four-step wizard: Welcome → Connect PSA → Starter Cards → Done.
- Connect PSA
A fully guided connection for HaloPSA or ConnectWise, with every credential step embedded inline — you do not need to open the setup guide in another tab. You can skip this and connect later from Settings → Integrations. For HaloPSA, a successful connection is immediately followed by the ticket-type/status mapping described in the HaloPSA connect guide (Step 4) — right here in the wizard, not just in Settings.
- Starter Cards
DarkBird reads your PSA product catalog, groups it by similarity, and proposes Install Cards from what it finds — up to 40. Accept or skip each one individually. Accepted cards land in your library tagged needs-review, and show an amber "Needs review" badge in the Library list so you know which ones the AI wrote rather than you.
- Done
You land with a working starter library built from your own catalog rather than a blank slate. From here, Create your first project opens the New Project dialog directly (pre-selecting the PSA you just connected as the source) — or Go to dashboard if you'd rather explore first.
The starter cards are a genuine starting point, not a finished library — they are built from product names alone, with no knowledge of how long your team actually takes. Treat every one as a draft: open it, fix the hours against reality, then clear the needs-review tag.
What signup already did for you
Signup asked which vertical you are in — Managed IT / MSP, AV Integration, Security / Access Control, Low-Voltage / Structured Cabling, Fire & Life Safety, Residential AV / Smart Home, Building Automation / Controls, Event & Venue AV, Managed Security (MSSP), In-Building Wireless / DAS & ERRCS, Multi-Site Rollout (Retail & Hospitality), or Telecom & Carrier Services — and seeded a starter set of categories, a five-phase phase set, resources with placeholder rates, and units of measure to match. That is real, editable data, not demo data: it has no sample tag and will not be removed with the sample data. Change the placeholder rates to your actual numbers before you quote anything.
Want a deeper library than the wizard builds? The Concierge service has a senior estimator pressure-test your AI-built library and calibrate it against your real project history. See the Concierge page on the marketing site.