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, your tasks, your plans, your decisions, and your team's know-how, all in one shared brain your AI can read, write, and work from.
You work mostly by talking to your AI. It creates tasks, captures decisions, writes pages, ties work to strategy. The Octopad interface is a control panel where you see what your AI does and steer when needed. You can click around and build things by hand, but the AI is the faster path and produces richer output for the same effort.
Why this matters. A normal AI chat has no back-office. Every new conversation starts cold. Octopad gives every session a shared brain with everything your team has captured, and a structured place to capture what comes next. Nothing gets re-explained. Nothing gets lost.
2 — Set up in minutes
Four moves. Roughly five minutes.
Sign up. Free, no credit card. Head to
octopad.app.
Follow the onboarding. It walks you through connecting your AI and setting up your workspace. Come back here when it's done.
Open a fresh chat with your AI and say "use octopad." Type it exactly. Your AI loads a briefing from your workspace (your core pages, your active goals and streams, a recap of recent sessions, and the Octopad playbook) and is ready to work with context already in hand. Say it at the start of every fresh chat. If you forget, your AI will still try, but the quality drops because it's flying blind.
Tell your AI about your company, your product, and where you're headed. In that same chat, share the basics: what you're building, who it's for, where you are right now, and what you want to do next. Your AI turns what you share into pages inside Octopad (typically a Product Overview and a Company Overview) and sets up a first goal with a work stream under it. For example, a goal like "Launch our beta by June 30" with a "Marketing Website" stream underneath.
That's enough to have a real workspace. From this point on, any chat that starts with "use octopad" picks up with all of this already loaded.
3 — The three systems your AI leans on
Your AI's context in Octopad sits in three systems, working together. Your AI handles them for you. Knowing what's under the hood helps you get more out of the product.
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 any 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. One of our octobots logs activity as work lands and compresses the day's progress into a clean report overnight, so you can open the tracker any time and see exactly what moved in the stream 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 the task is really finished. Tasks have priority, impact, can have subtasks, and can depend on other tasks with a one-line rationale so the order is never mysterious.
A full example. Goal: "Launch our beta by June 30." Work stream: "Marketing Website." Tasks inside: "Write the homepage copy," "Set up email capture," "Record the demo video," "Publish the site." Dependencies wire the order ("Write the homepage copy" before "Record the demo video," since the video echoes the copy). Your AI picks what to work on next and 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 full in-product guide
will walk you through everything else once you're in.