From signed up to searching: your first hour with ManuFind
A step-by-step walkthrough of onboarding — what you'll fill out, what happens while your environment spins up, and what to do the moment you're in.
You've signed, you're ready, and you want your team searching their own documents today. Here's exactly what happens between "welcome aboard" and your first answered question — step by step, the way we walk every new customer through it.
Before you start
Keep three things handy: the welcome email we sent you (it contains your sign-in username and a temporary password), the list of people you want on the platform, and a handful of real documents — five or ten PDFs, drawings or spreadsheets you actually use. Real files make the first hour click in a way a sample library never will.
Step 1 — Sign in and open the onboarding form
Follow the link in your welcome email and sign in with the credentials inside. You'll set a password of your own, then land in a short guided form. It takes most customers under ten minutes.
Step 2 — Confirm your plan
Pick the plan you've decided on — Starter for a small team getting its library under control, Pro (our most popular) for teams that want integrations and heavier AI use, or Enterprise for advanced security, API and MCP access, and custom scale. Not sure? Choose the closest fit — plans can change later without redoing any of this.
Step 3 — Tell us about your company
Name, industry, size, and the language your team works in — ManuFind is fully bilingual, so English and Spanish are both first-class. This is also where your organization's space gets its name, and where you can upload your company logo (optional) — it brands your workspace and the documents ManuFind generates for you. Skip it for now and add it later in settings if you prefer.
Step 4 — Add your team (optional)
If you're ready, list the people who need access and the role each one should have: admins who manage settings and users, managers who organize the library, and members who search, ask and create. Roles matter more here than in most tools, because ManuFind's AI respects them — people (and their AI answers) only ever see what their role allows. This step is entirely optional, though: plenty of customers start solo and invite the team once they've had a look around. You can add or change people any time after launch.
Step 5 — Anything else, then submit
The last step is a free-text box: integrations you want connected (Confluence, Google Drive, OneDrive…), file cabinets you'd like our bulk scanning service to digitize, anything unusual about your documents. Then hit submit.
Step 6 — Your environment spins up (30–45 minutes)
This is the part where you get coffee. ManuFind doesn't drop you into a shared sandbox — submitting kicks off automated provisioning of your own isolated environment: dedicated, security-walled storage and database, your plan's features enabled, your team's accounts created with the roles you chose. Building that properly takes about 30 to 45 minutes. You don't need to wait at the screen — we email you the moment it's ready.
Step 7 — First sign-in, first documents
The "you're live" email has your link, your tenant ID, and — so you're never hunting for them — the same sign-in credentials from your welcome email. You sign in to your new environment with that same email and password; no new accounts to invent. Once you're in, take the short tour and drag in that handful of real documents. Watch them process: every file is read automatically — even scans and photos of paper turn into searchable text — then classified and tagged for you. Within a few minutes, search for something you know is in one of them — then ask a question about it in plain language and click the citation in the answer. That moment is the product.
Your first week
From there: connect your document sources so the library fills itself, invite stragglers, ship us the paper archive if you have one, and — if you're technical — mint an API key and point your favorite AI assistant at ManuFind over MCP. Most teams are answering real questions from their own documents on day one.
Questions at any step? Reply to any onboarding email or contact us — a real person answers. Ready to start? Request a demo and we'll get you your welcome email.