Set up your first client portal in ten minutes

This is the ten-minute version of getting your workspace from "just signed up" to "first client invited."

1. Buy a slot pack (1 minute)

After signing up, you land on /app with 0 / 0 slots. Click the slot pill in the top of the sidebar, or visit /pricing. Pick the pack that matches your near-term client volume:

• 3 clients · €15 (testing the workflow)
• 10 clients · €35 (freelancer scale)
• 25 clients · €75 (small studio or boutique firm)
• 50, 100, or unlimited-for-a-year for larger practices

Slot packs are one-off purchases. No subscription. You can mix-and-match (a 25-slot pack today, a 10-slot top-up next year).

2. Run the four-question configurator (3 minutes)

The workspace overview prompts you to set up your portal scaffold. The four questions are:

1. What service do you sell? Plain English. "Brand identity design for Series A startups", "UK self-assessment tax for sole traders", "Commercial law for mid-market Italian companies."
2. Who is your typical client? "Marketing leads at consumer brands", "Landlords with under 5 properties", "CEOs of SMEs in transactions under €5M."
3. What deliverables do you share? Be specific. "Logo concepts, brand guideline PDF, source files." Not "design work."
4. What approvals do you need? "Concept selection at week 2", "Strategy memo before major decision", "Sign-off on final return."

The configurator uses Claude Haiku (via Kie.ai) to generate a portal scaffold tuned for your vertical: folder structure, welcome message, message templates, FAQ. You can edit any of it. Most owners spend 5-15 minutes refining the scaffold before going live.

3. Set your branding (2 minutes)

In Settings → Branding, add:

• Workspace name (shows in the client's portal header)
• Accent colour (your brand colour, used for CTAs and links)
• Logo (PNG or SVG, used in the portal sidebar and emails)

Optional add-ons:

• Custom branding pack (€10 one-off) lets you customise per-client portals individually (each client gets their own logo and accent colour, useful for white-label agency work).
• Custom domain (€20 one-off) so the portal URL becomes portal.yourfirm.com instead of clientnest365.com/c/<slug>.

4. Add your first client (1 minute)

Go to /app/clients and click + Add client. Two fields:

• Client name (the business name or contact name)
• Primary email (where the magic-link invite is sent)

Tick Send magic-link invite now, then click Create. The client receives an email from noreply@clientnest365.com (or your custom-domain sender if configured). The email is templated with your workspace name and the welcome message you wrote in step 2.

5. Verify the client experience (3 minutes)

Open the magic-link email in your own inbox (or a private window) and click through. You see your portal exactly as the client will:

• The header carries your branding
• The sidebar shows the four sections (Overview, Files, Approvals, Messages, Invoices, AI helper)
• The welcome card carries the message you wrote
• The activity feed is empty (no events yet)

The first thing to test: drop a file in Files, then refresh the agency side. The file appears in your /app/files panel within seconds. That's the realtime channel working.

What to do next

• Add 2-3 message templates in Settings → Templates so common conversations don't get typed from scratch each time.
• Configure a webhook (Settings → Webhooks) to fire invoice.paid to Slack so you get an internal notification when a client pays.
• Read the onboarding article for the per-client checklist that gets used after this initial setup.

Total time from sign-up to first invite sent: about ten minutes if you have your logo file ready, fifteen if you're inventing the welcome copy on the spot. You can come back and refine anytime; nothing here is permanent.