Start with your portfolio, not your settings
When you sign up, the only thing Aliqo asks for is your name and a portfolio URL slug. That's deliberate — the fastest way to get value out of the product is to have a public page to point people to, even before you've added a single client. Add a case study or two once you're in; a portfolio with even one well-written project is worth more than an empty one with a polished layout.
Add your first client and project
From the dashboard, a client is just a name, an email, and optionally a company — the kind of thing you already have written down somewhere else. A project sits under a client and moves through six stages: lead, proposal sent, active, delivered, paid, closed. You don't need to backfill your entire client history on day one; add the clients you're actively working with now, and let new ones come in through your portfolio's contact form or your own manual entry going forward.
Send a proposal and let the agent watch it
When you mark a proposal as sent, that's the moment the follow-up agent starts paying attention. It doesn't do anything immediately — it waits. If five days pass with no update on that proposal, or an invoice goes past its due date, the daily check notices and drafts a follow-up for you, sitting in your Inbox instead of your to-do list.
If a client replies directly in your own inbox instead of through Aliqo, there's a one-click "Mark client replied" action on the proposal — it resets the clock so the agent doesn't draft an unnecessary nudge.
What to do the first time a draft shows up
The first draft that lands in your Inbox is worth reading closely, not just approving. It's written in a generic, professional voice to start — edit it into your own before you send the first few, the same way you'd edit a template. Every draft is editable right in the Inbox, and nothing sends until you click Approve & send. If a draft doesn't fit the moment, Reject costs you nothing; the agent will reassess next time something changes.
What you can safely ignore for now
You don't need to touch Invoices until you've actually delivered something. The one thing worth doing on day one, though, is running your portfolio through the GEO Checker in the sidebar — it takes ten seconds and tells you exactly what to fix before you start sending your slug to anyone. Everything else in the product is built to stay out of your way until you actually need it.