Getting started

This walkthrough takes about five minutes. At the end you will have a workspace, a project with a working board, and a task moving across it.

1. Create your account

   Go to go.dotby.app and sign up with your work email or with Google.

   The first workspace is created for you. A workspace is your company: it holds your people, your projects, and your billing. Most teams need exactly one.

2. Create your first project

   Press G then P to jump to Projects, then create one.

   A project is a container of work with its own board, its own statuses, and its own members — a product, a client, a launch. Give it a name and a short key (like WEB), because every task in it will be numbered from that key: WEB-1, WEB-2, and so on. That number is permanent, and it is how people refer to work in chat and in commits.

   Every new project starts with five columns:

   Status	What it means
   Backlog	Someday. Not committed to yet.
   Todo	Committed, not started. New tasks land here.
   In Progress	Somebody is working on it right now.
   Done	Finished.
   Canceled	Dropped on purpose — not finished, not forgotten.

   You can rename them, recolor them, reorder them, or add your own later.

3. Add a task

   Press C anywhere to open the quick-create composer. Type a title and press Enter.

   That is the whole flow. You do not change page, and you do not lose what you were looking at. If you have a list of work already written down somewhere, paste it in — dotby splits a multi-line paste into one task per line.

   A task can hold much more than a title: a rich description with images and files, sub-tasks, labels, a priority, an assignee, an estimate, a due date, and a full comment thread. Add those when you need them, not before.

4. Move it across the board

   Drag the card to In Progress, or hover it and press S to pick a status from the keyboard.

   Those hover letters work on any task, in any list, without opening it — A for assignee, P for priority, L for labels. See Keyboard shortcuts for the full set.

5. Invite your team

   Open Members from the sidebar and invite people by email.

   Teammates get access to the whole workspace. If you want to bring in a client or a contractor instead, invite them as a guest: guests only ever see the specific projects you add them to. See Invite your team.

Learn one key

If you only remember one shortcut, make it ⌘K (or CtrlK). The command palette searches every task, project, page, and person in the workspace, and runs most actions without you hunting for a button. Press ? at any time to see every shortcut that is currently available to you.

Where to go next

Read these in order and you will have covered the first week:

• Core concepts — the vocabulary, in one page.
• Projects and views — board, list, and timeline, and how to save the view your team works in every day.
• Write anything — the editor you meet in every description, comment, message, and page.
• Statuses and workflow — make the columns say what your team actually says.
• Filters and search — find one thing, or narrow everything.
• Plan a sprint — when you are ready to work in fixed time boxes.

Stuck on something? Troubleshooting lists the things that actually go wrong.