Getting Started
with Octopad.

Shortcut worth knowing: once your AI is connected, you can ask it anything in this guide. "What is a work stream?" "How does the tracker page work?" Your AI already knows. This page is the printed backup. Your AI is the live tutor.

1. What Octopad is in 60 seconds

Octopad is your AI's back-office. Your strategy, tasks, plans, decisions, and team know-how live in one place your AI can read, write, and work from.

You work mostly by talking to your AI. It creates tasks, captures decisions, writes pages, and ties work to strategy. The Octopad interface is a control panel where you watch what your AI does and steer when needed. You can click around and build by hand, but the AI is faster and the output is richer.

Why this matters. A normal AI chat has no back-office. Every new conversation starts cold. Octopad gives every session the context your team has already captured, and a place to capture what comes next. Nothing gets re-explained. Nothing gets lost.

2. Set up in minutes

Here is what happens, step by step.

Sign up. Free, no credit card. Head to octopad.app.

Connect your AI. First step of onboarding. Pick the AI you actually use (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, whichever) and follow the prompts to wire it up. This is what lets your AI read and write your workspace. Quick reference for the two most common:

MCP URL: https://mcp.octopad.app/mcp

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "octopad": {
      "url": "https://mcp.octopad.app/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Create your workspace. Second step of onboarding. Name it, pick a few defaults, and you're in.

Open a fresh chat with your AI and say "use octopad." Type it exactly. Your AI loads a briefing from your workspace (core pages, active goals and streams, a recap of recent sessions, the Octopad playbook) and shows up with context in hand. Say it at the start of every fresh chat. Skip it and the AI still tries, but quality drops because it's flying blind.

Tell your AI about your company and your product. In that same chat, share the basics: what you're building, who it's for, where you stand today, what comes next. Your AI turns it into pages, typically a Product Overview and a Company Overview.

Add those pages to your workspace context. Open each page in Octopad and add it to workspace context. From now on, every AI working in this workspace gets that information loaded automatically, every chat. Set it once.

Create your first goal. Something like "Launch our beta by June 30." Your AI sets up a work stream under it (for example, "Marketing Website") and you have a real workspace to work from. From here on out, you're working.

To go deeper, the Learn section inside octopad.app walks through the rest.

3. The three systems your AI leans on

Three systems hold your AI's context. Your AI handles them for you. Knowing what's under the hood helps you get more out of Octopad.

Pages. Long-form documents: Product Overview, Company Overview, Brand Guidelines, strategy notes, research, meeting notes. Anything your AI should be able to pull from later. Every page gets an auto-generated summary, so your AI can skim the index before opening a page in full.

Key Information. Short, atomic items. Four kinds: a fact ("we ship on Fridays"), a decision ("we chose Stripe over Paddle for native payouts"), an open question ("do we need SOC 2 before Q4?"), and a risk ("our top competitor just raised"). Your AI captures these as they come up and pulls the relevant ones back when it picks up a task later.

Build Context. The engine that assembles the right material for each job. When you ask your AI to work on a task, build context loads the task, its dependencies, its linked pages, related key information, and the tracker page for its work stream. Your AI shows up already briefed.

4. How work is organized

Three layers, stacked from biggest to smallest.

Goals. What you're trying to achieve and why. Quarterly or yearly. For example: "Launch our beta by June 30."

Work Streams. How you get there. A stream is a project or an area of work. Two flavors:

• Ongoing streams never close. They cover permanent areas like "Customer Support" or "Content."
• Time-bound streams have a target date and a finish line. They sit under a goal, for example "Marketing Website" under "Launch our beta by June 30."

Every stream gets an auto-generated tracker page. An octobot logs activity as work lands and compresses the day into a clean report overnight. Open the tracker any time to see exactly what moved this week. You never update it by hand.

Tasks. The unit of work. Each task has a Why (the problem), a What (the scope), and a How (the approach, when it's non-obvious). Your AI adds a "Done when" line so you know when it's really finished. Tasks carry priority and impact, can have subtasks, and can depend on other tasks with a one-line rationale, so the order is never mysterious.

Full example. Goal: "Launch our beta by June 30." Work stream: "Marketing Website." Tasks: "Write the homepage copy," "Set up email capture," "Record the demo video," "Publish the site." Dependencies wire the order: write the copy before recording the video, since the video echoes the copy. Your AI picks what to work on next. You can always override.

5. What to do next

Sign up at octopad.app, say "use octopad" in your next chat, and give your AI the basics about your company and a first goal. That's the entire opening move.

octopad.ai is the marketing site. octopad.app is where the product lives, and where the Learn section walks you through everything else once you're in.

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